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AUTHOR "Lotte Troupp"

TITLE "“Hear my soul speak”"

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“Hear my soul speak”

Subjectivity and intersubjectivity
in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Lotte Troupp
Helsinki University

The Tempest is a “mankind” type of play, and Shakespeare’s strategy is to

present fallen man in terms of language. Various aspects of “fallen language”
are encoded in the characterisation and verbal exchanges. The unifying
feature is a notable lack of “caritas”, due to an extreme self-centredness in
the speakers, which Shakespeare displays in scenes of all-round incompre-
hension between many of the persons of the play. Such closed states of mind
I have labelled “subjective”, giving this word a negative connotation. A
regenerative process is marked by a hard-won return to communication
worthy of being called “human” according to Renaissance ideals. I have
labelled such negotiations between characters “intersubjective”. In the play,
the channels of communication are restored by means of various insights,
among them Prospero’s better self-knowledge and Ferdinand’s experiential
discovery of truth. The “language of the soul” flows when such processes are
set in motion; this special language is written into the play and is experi-
enced in many guises within the play and, according to Renaissance rhetori-
cal theory, by the audience as well.

1. Introduction: Language as a dimension of the Fall

1.1 Repairing the ruins of Babel

Underlying The Tempest is an idea of language which one may loosely call a
biblical idea of language, and which was tacitly shared by Shakespeare and his
audience as a number of unquestioned beliefs. In this “mankind” type of play
the audience is to be reminded of language as a dimension of the Fall.1 The issue
was topical in the seventeenth century. Both Shakespeare and John Wilkins, in
Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3:1 (2002), 107–150. issn 1566–5852
© 2002 John Benjamins Publishing Company
108 Lotte Troupp

The Tempest (1611) and An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical
Language (1668) respectively, are seriously concerned with the degeneration of
human communication since the Fall and wish to repair it, and both are
concerned with natural knowledge as representing power over nature. In spite
of the radical changes in the fifty-odd years between these two works, Shake-
speare and Wilkins still share the same view of life in so far as they accept the
Bible as factual. The aim of my comparison is to sharpen our understanding of
the now obsolete contexts of language in the Shakespearean period in general,
and the brief transitional period of Shakespeare’s late Romances in particular.
Wilkins, as a member of the Royal Society, attempted a system for a
universal language to free the world from the “Curse in the Confusion of
Tongues” at Babel. He believes that human beings “agree in the same notion”
but are confused by the variety of expression within a language, to say nothing
of the lack of a common language between peoples. His view of man and
language is contrasted with the “pragmatic” view of language inherent in the
concepts of rhetoric as practised in English Renaissance discourse — “pragmat-
ic” because rhetoric has designs on the hearer and elicits a subjective response.
Transposed to a Christian humanist setting, rhetoric in the Renaissance claimed
to persuade men to virtuous attitudes and action.
The Tempest is an offering by Shakespeare to the audience in the Christian
spirit of his rhetorical art. The play is unusually complex in its structure and
method of interaction with the audience. “Uniquely, The Tempest changes
shape… we have a long way to go in understanding the creative, indeed
‘civilising’, quality of The Tempest, from the court of James until now” (Daniell
1989: 11–12). In terms of genre the play has been described with equal justice as
neo-classical drama, mystery play, romance, morality play, social satire, pastoral
tragicomedy, commedia dell’Arte, masque, or emblematic representation.
As a morality play, albeit in contemporary guise, The Tempest is interwoven
with many other morally conscious genres belonging to the first decade of the
seventeenth century. These include pastoral tragicomedy after Fletcher’s The
Faithful Shepherdess (1609?), the transmission of the Christian tragicomic
theory of Guarini in the Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry (Guarini 1601/
1940), and the idealising masques of Ben Jonson and others, graced with their
personified Virtues and Vices. Feldman (1970: 13) defines at least seventeen
popular plays as “morality-patterned comedies” in the first decade or so. Actors
after the Restoration who remembered this period spoke of the drama as “moral
and instructive”, and gave that as one reason they could not revive the old plays
(Bentley 1941: 692–93). In a fiction the play depicts a fallen world and an
 “Hear my soul speak” 109

approach to its regeneration. The creationist world picture is the unquestioned

matrix for audience and playwright alike. This is unlikely to be overt for the
modern reader, but for Shakespeare’s contemporaries a scattered vocabulary
hints at it throughout the text. Shakespeare’s strategy is to display “fallen”
language in all its variety, and to argue out in detail the processes of the regener-
ation of language as “truth” and “true” communication. In this play the loss of
the common language at Babel implies a loss of spiritual and psychological
contact between human beings, rather than a technical loss of verbal communi-
cation such as Wilkins describes. The repair of this breakdown, too, is spiritual,
as signalled in the Bible by the miracle of the disciples’ speaking in tongues,
which stands for the renewal of human communication through caritas.

1.2 Adam’s lost language and the knowledge of nature

Another aspect of language within the creationist paradigm relates to the
control of nature which Prospero wields in the form of verbal magic, secreted
in his books. Prospero’s magic prefigures exactly the desires of the early
empiricists. The Royal Society was at first hesitant to reject the verbal approach
of cabbalists and others who believed that a recovery of the sacred language of
Eden would key into the knowledge of God’s created nature, but the lack of
results persuaded them to take an empirical line. Yet nobody doubted the
sacred dimension of nature, or that the lost Adamic language contained the
knowledge of the creatures named, their “essence” so to speak, and by implica-
tion the “essence” of nature. This is based on Adam’s naming of the animals in
Genesis 2:18–20. Luther’s insistence on the literal sense of scripture led to the
Renaissance interpretation that Adam had had knowledge of the inward
workings of nature, “founded on the belief that language must somehow
participate in the total harmony of creation” (Aarsleff 1964: 1–2).2 We know
that the empiricists’ choice of the experimental path to man’s knowledge of
nature ultimately bore fruit in terms of power. Yet their understanding of
nature at this stage is not far from that projected in Shakespeare’s play, where
the spirit Ariel controls the elements: this is perforce the Aristotelian “scientific”
view of nature of the period. Wilkins believes he can harness an angel without
difficulty for telegraphic purposes. He does not ask himself how. Prospero’s
magic is no less than the cracking of the verbal code of nature, that code which,
“in the beginning” was The Word (St. John 1: 1–2) and which was therefore
charged with divine mystery and which the Church classed as forbidden
knowledge (Schultz 1955). Until there could be a separation of the conceptual
110 Lotte Troupp

trinity of matter, spirit and language, it was logical to look to language to

provide knowledge of nature.
Both Shakespeare and the empiricists identify the loss of Eden as a loss of
man’s power. But Prospero in the play rejects his power as “rough” magic.
Human beings, Prospero implies, lack the moral stature to use this knowledge
for good ends. According to the play, in a fallen world might is right. Unless
brotherhood and human kindness can be made to prevail, human society will
degenerate ever further in a spiral of revenge. In Timon of Athens, as in The
Tempest, language is linked to man’s degeneration; when “the commonwealth
of Athens is become a forest of beasts” (IV.3.345), the corollary is that total
corruption will bring about total loss of communication, and there is no cure
(in Timon’s mind) but the end of mankind: “Lips, let sour words go by and
language end:/ What is amiss, plague and infection mend” (V.1.218). This is the
tragic view in Shakespeare’s writing of the pre-Christian era. In The Tempest a
moral regeneration can bring about an improvement. This is the real magic.
The action of The Tempest is essentially played out in the minds of men,
collectively and individually. Wilkins, on the other hand, trusts in a benign and
monolithic human “reason” and rejoices in the material advantages he foresees.
But Prospero breaks his magic staff, in favour of humble prayer. Prayer is the
final linguistic event of the play, denoting the true intersubjectivity of audience
and players in the theatre of the world, at once the theatrum mundi of the
Renaissance topos and the typical ending of a morality play.

1.3 Definitions of the terms “subjectivity” and “intersubjectivity”

in The Tempest
I have used the terms “subjectivity” and “intersubjectivity” to refer to Shake-
speare’s characterisation strategies by means of language. These are determined by
the tragicomic plot of the play: mankind since the Fall is displayed in all his
foolishness, hardheartedness and pride, which have blocked access to mutual
human understanding. In this context “subjectivity” is my term for the closed
mind, and has a negative connotation. Tragic disasters, self-inflicted, threaten
the whole of society as well as individuals on their way to damnation. This is
enacted in dissonant scenes of cursing and disjunctive comprehension between
characters. In his definition of his “deafness” to the law in the person of the
Lord Chief Justice, Falstaff distinguishes the “disease of not hearing” from “the
disease of not listening, the malady of not marking” (Henry IV/2, 1.2.116). This
exactly describes the “subjective” state of mind of the fallen world of The Tempest,
 “Hear my soul speak” 111

to which Henry IV/2 is a forerunner in representing a sick society. In The

Tempest everything threatens but nothing is irreparable. In this tragicomedy,
Prospero redeems his fortunes and his society. Two scenes of the golden age —
Gonzalo’s fantasy (II.1.145), and the betrothal masque (IV.1.60–140) — and an
epiphany in the scene of Prospero’s reconciliation with his former enemies
(V.1.205), express a longed-for Edenic dimension, as in Milton’s Hymn on the
Morning of Christ’s Nativity: “Time will run back and fetch the age of gold”.
To the redemptive process in The Tempest I have applied the word “inter-
subjectivity” as a positive term. In The Tempest genuine interaction with others
can take place only through a process of discovery of the self. The lovers correct
hasty attitudes to love with intensely introspective revaluations of themselves
before their love can be considered “true” — Ferdinand defines such truth as a
knowledge of the soul. It is a subjective conviction and it cannot be proved.
This tallies interestingly with the epistemological insights of some of the early
Italian humanist philosophers, including Petrarch, on the inwardness of truth
(Trinkaus 1983: 207–220) .
Prospero too, is forced into hard-won insights. The peripeteia towards a
happy reversal is initiated by Ariel’s moving (i.e. rhetorical) eloquence and
virtù, which inspire in Prospero a moral victory over himself so that he aban-
dons his just revenge in favour of mercy. Ariel’s description of tears of repen-
tence falling like rain among his former enemies arouses Prospero’s self-
identification with the rest of mankind and persuades him to abandon his
revenge. Thereby Prospero achieves a reconciliation with his former attackers,
regains his dukedom and provides for his daughter’s marriage.

1.4 Caliban
Caliban escapes contextualisation. Offspring of a witch and the devil, he lacks
a human moral identification — he is a psychopath in our terminology. He is
experienced as the outsider in various ways by different groups. Prospero and
Miranda find him anti-social, whereas Stephano and Trinculo find him an apt
drinking companion, a “puppy-headed monster” to whom they are conde-
scending, though subtly inveigled into rape and murder by him, the Vice of the
morality play. For the audience he is the touchstone of the play. Every character
invites comparison with Caliban.
Caliban is Shakespeare’s masterpiece in the linguistic characterisation of the
subjective mind. Shakespeare has the problem of displaying Caliban’s aberra-
tion through language without displaying linguistic incompetence, for that is
112 Lotte Troupp

not where the aberration lies. Two linguistic strategies create a sense of differ-
ence: Shakespeare distinguishes what, since Saussure, we have called langue and
parole: Caliban involuntarily perverts the perfect language model he has learnt
thoroughly, as Miranda avers. The second strategy is to deprive some of the
words he uses of their normal human connotation. In both cases, his relation to
language is made to stem from his nature, not his knowledge. Caliban arouses
horror in various ways, but also pity and protectiveness, and he finds pleasure
in his natural pursuits on the island. Part of nature, part of creation, in his own
world he has found a language of naming, and a language of wonder for what
he does not understand.

2. Language as “form”, language as “mind”, language as “knowledge”

2.1 Language as “form”

As men do generally agree in the same Principle of Reason, so do they likewise
agree in the same internal Notion or Apprehension of things… so that if men
should generally consent upon the same way or manner of Expression, as they
do agree in the same Notion, we should then be freed from that Curse in the
Confusion of Tongues, with all the unhappy consequences of it (Wilkins
1668/1968: 20).

In this account by John Wilkins of the aims of his book, the moral interpreta-
tion of Babel is absent. It is a technical separation of human beings which
troubles him, rather than an alienation. The concept of language implied in the
quotation is that language is separate from “mind”: mind is named variously
“Reason”, “internal notion”, “apprehension of things”, “notion” — these are
abstract terms which to him seem objectified and homogeneous by common
consent, while language is an ill-fitting dress which he will tailor to fit. Such a
view considers language to be a matter of outer “form” for inner substance.
This contrasts with a view of language as inseparable from “mind”, which might
be expressed in modern terms in the words of Firth: “meaning in language is a
complex of contextual relations” (Waswo 1987: 13 and 13n). The “real universal
character” would “not signify words but things and notions, and consequently
might be legible by any Nation in their own Tongue” (Wilkins 1668/1968: 13).
“This language would be a substitute for the lost Adamic language… it would
express all man’s knowledge in a methodical, rationally ordered fashion that
mirrored the fabric of nature” (Aarsleff 1982: 260–1).
 “Hear my soul speak” 113

In his book Wilkins constructs word lists with infinite labour, aiming to
standardise meanings and to give a symbolic sign to each “notion” — a kind of
thesaurus, whose symbols would then be taken up by other languages. Much
admired, the book was eventually quietly forgotten by the Society, for (inevita-
bly) it could not have been learnt or applied. It was not “rationally constructed”
according to John Ray, Wilkins’s helper and friend, who complained that the
botanical tables he contributed had to follow the author’s prescribed system
rather than following “the lead of nature” (Aarsleff 1982: 263). Nevertheless,
Wilkins’s two agendas — better world-wide communication, and better
precision in language for the transmission of the empiricists’ investigation of
nature — have since been fulfilled in many ways: in our day mathematics,
chemical formulae, and music are indeed international symbolic languages;
Esperanto as an artificial language still has its adherents; empire builders have
at different times forced their languages upon their numerous subjects and have
no doubt played their questionable part in repairing the ruins of Babel.

2.2 Language as “mind”

In contrast, an empirical approach to language is alien to the sixteenth and
earlier seventeenth centuries, where all concerns of life are still moralised within
the current dominant Christian/humanist concepts, including language. Thus
in his tragicomic romance Shakespeare envisages, like Wilkins, a world freed
from the unhappy consequences of the Fall, and he, too, thinks of language as
denoting the fallen condition of man, but in terms of moral degeneration of
man and society. In The Tempest, Shakespeare uses a concept of fallen language
to characterise the persons of the play morally, through speech that “gives them
away”, or, equally, projects their virtues. The involuntary expression of a
person’s individual mind in language was axiomatic, supported by Matthew
12:34 and Luke 6:45. Primaudaye’s comments on this subject in The French
Academie (1618) sum up the beliefs upon which the linguistic characterisation
of The Tempest is based:
Voices framed into wordes are signes and significations of the whole soule and
minde… namely of the fantasie and imagination, of reason and judgment, of
understanding and memory, of wil and affections. Wherefore it is an easie
matter to judge by his speach how all these parts are affected, namely, whether
they be sound, or have any defect in them… so that whosoever hath not a ripe
and stayed reason, nor temperate and settled senses, he cannot have his wordes
114 Lotte Troupp

set in good order (p. 379)… if there should be discord between the heart, the
tongue and the speech, the harmony could not be good, especially before God
the Judge of most secret thoughts (p. 380).

Language markers are for the most part obvious, for instance Caliban’s cursing,
which he says he cannot help though punished for it. It is foregrounded in The
Tempest by being shocking in itself and an echo to a previous round of cursing
by the courtiers; it is obvious that anger is “a defect in them” and Caliban, and
“the harmony is not good”, and gives notice to the audience that moral judge-
ments are active. Miranda’s frequent tears are the language marker for her “very
virtue of compassion” (not only words but all communication counts as
language, since elocutio included body language, and the speaker’s whole ethos
was part of rhetoric). The audience would know how to interpret this and the
other “moral idiolects” of the play, as one might call them, being well trained in
the seven sins, cardinal virtues, sins of the tongue and other earlier aids to
confession that still had currency. As the new learning was christianised and
moralised, Lechner notes that in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries (e.g. in textbooks, instruction manuals, commonplace books) “the
praise of virtue and the vituperation of vice is virtually an obsession” (Lechner
1962: 209). In contrast, Thomas Sprat sums up the vices of “the previous age”
in his History of the Royal Society. He castigates “the great a-do…about the
Christian Faith”, and rejects “the rubbish of the Antients”, while rhetoric, “that
superfluity of talking… ought to be banish’d” (Sprat 1667/1966: 111). This was
the backlash to the values of the Renaissance grown monstrous, but the earlier
Renaissance, the period of Shakespeare’s education and working life, is the
golden age of language — an internalised consciousness of the Classical world
and its off-shoot, rhetoric, are precisely what give depth and range to Shake-
speare’s texts.
Shakespeare’s training in rhetoric was, essentially, a training in the prag-
matic application of language. Shakespeare was taught to produce text, and the
effect on the hearer was to be paramount:
Rhetorique is that Faculty, by which wee understand what will serve our turne,
concerning any subject, to winne beliefe in the hearer. Of those things that
beget beleefe; some require not the helpe of Art; as Witnesses, Evidences, and
the like, which wee invent not but make use of; and some require Art, and are
invented by us. The beleefe, that proceedes from our invention, comes partly
from the behaviour of the speaker; partly from the passions of the hearer: but
especially from the proofes of what we alledge (A Briefe 1637: II.10,93).
 “Hear my soul speak” 115

Rhetoric taught how to determine one’s aims and how to achieve them within
the five categories of text production and delivery: inventio, dispositio, elocutio,
memoria, pronuntiatio (discovery/finding of subject matter, arrangement, style,
memory and delivery. There were, of course, many other rhetorical ways of
organising creative or analytic tasks). All five of them are in fact implied in
Shakespeare’s praise of Ariel’s harpy speech:
Prospero: Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou
Performed, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring.
Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated
In what thou hadst to say… (III.3.83).

At the least Ariel was responsible for memory and delivery, and Prospero for
discovery; which of them was responsible for arrangement and style is a moot
point.
A glance at some of the teaching materials of the system given by Baldwin
(Baldwin 1944) and Trousdale (Trousdale 1982) show the stress laid on the
many choices of approach that can be made to any subject; on the flexibility
that language offers in the manner of expression; and on “richness”, the copia
of Erasmus’s school textbook, De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia (1512),
which was reprinted throughout the sixteenth century. Baldwin outlines the
curriculum of the grammar school. This education was a bi-lingual and bi-
cultural method of teaching Latin, in which Classical texts were freely translat-
ed, imitated and also integrated into the reigning Christian culture. Exercises
abounded for the training in text production and delivery in speech which the
Renaissance rhetorical systems prescribed.3 Quintilian seems to be a guide both
for the tone and the emotional thrust of The Tempest. An “intermediate style”,
in keeping with the tragicomic tone — or Quintilian’s ethos — pervades the
play. A poetic of tears threads through the play, fulfilling, in muted and credible
ways, different aspects of the persuasive function by means of tears. Ariel, as
advocate and actor, makes Prospero weep and relent, like Quintilian’s weeping
judge.4 Ariel was inherently on the side of the good, as created nature was
bound to be. But Shakespeare frequently writes rhetorical persuasions to evil, as
in The Tempest Antonio’s persuasion of Sebastian, marked for the audience
with an elevated style.
Further aspects of Shakespeare’s pragmatism in The Tempest concern the
meta-dramatic relationship the playwright sets up with the audience. All drama
is itself a pragmatic enterprise in a triple sense: the personae of the play are in
pragmatic relation to each other, as conceived by the playwright but, as in life,
116 Lotte Troupp

ambiguous; the actors engage themselves freely — i.e. pragmatically — in

relation with each other and with the playwright’s material; and the audience
have come specifically to be manipulated by the stage events in unpredictable
ways. Shakespeare is in full control of these complex relations and affects the
audience by various dramatic and meta-dramatic means. The audience are
treated by the playwright as the courtiers are treated by Prospero: they are
grieved and threatened into spiritual awareness. Tragic and troubling experi-
ences, such as the opening shipwreck scene, and the harpy’s sombre accusation
and threat of retribution by Fate — “the powers, delaying, not forgetting…”
(III.3.73) — reminds the audience of whatever guilt may be lying latent within
them. Only subsequently is it revealed to the audience that, in each case, it was
the spirit, Ariel, who enacted illusions, at Prospero’s behest. The paradigm of
the play is that of regeneration after the Fall. As such, the actors, the playwright
and the audience are all in the same boat — literally, since the shipwreck of the
play is emblematic of mankind: Thus in the fiction, the shipwreck was engi-
neered by the powerful magician, Prospero, to reverse the evils of the past; in
the theatre of the world, theatrum mundi, we are all, in the same manner, in the
hands of an unknown power, that of Providence, as Prospero tells his daughter
Miranda when she asks how they survived their own precarious voyage. The
play’s concentric structure makes the action of Providence — governing nature
and man — the true drama within which all human endeavour is enacted.
Theoretical lessons abound as to the moral power of the drama, and the “truth”
of fiction: In Hamlet’s words, “the play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the King” (Hamlet II.2.600). The epilogue ends with a prayer
spoken by the Prospero actor directly to the audience; this further wipes out the
dividing line between players (and the implied playwright) on the one hand and
the audience on the other. The indivisible wholeness of the play and its commu-
nity is manifest, as well as the moral efficacy of the playwright’s art.

2.3 Language as knowledge of nature

The new colonies shimmer behind the setting of The Tempest, an uninhabited
island whose features are inventoried in the play. The mere naming of so much
flora and fauna hints at paradise. Shakespeare’s play was topical. To many
people at this period the colonies seemed to promise a new Eden, like Marvell’s
“English boat” of settlers in Bermudas (circa 1635): “He makes the Figs our
mouths to meet;/ And throws the Melons at our feet” (Marvell 1952: 13, line
21); Shakespeare took Gonzalo’s fantasy of an Ovidian golden age (The Tempest
 “Hear my soul speak” 117

II.1.145) from Montaigne’s idealising essay Of the Canniballes (Montaigne

1603/1980: I. 216, 220). John Ray’s work for Wilkins’s book had been an
attempt to make an inventory, as it were, of the plants God had created,
presumably in paradise; Linnaeus, and also Darwin as he set out on The Beagle,
still believed in, and hoped to find out, the systems of a creation that was fixed.
Miranda’s words refer the audience to the colonial aspect of the isle: “How
beauteous mankind is! O brave new world/ That has such people in’t”, but
Prospero answers sceptically “’tis new to thee.” (V.1.183). The faces new to
Miranda are all the old villains, whether at home or abroad. Only in a fiction,
within the fiction of the play itself, is a vision of paradise enacted, as a betrothal
masque. Shakespeare’s Prospero rejects his power over nature and throws away
his magic books and breaks his staff, for his coercive power — a kind of atom
bomb, to be buried “deeper than did ever plummet sound” — will never bring
the desired new Eden. Only a moral regeneration could do that. He says farewell
to Ariel, the airy spirit who could “come with a thought”, and who could work
for him in the four elements, obedient to the magical knowledge that Prospero
had spent years acquiring, “transported and rapt in secret studies” (I.2.76). Ariel
could not serve the evil witch Sycorax, who once lived on the island and who
tried to force him, for as a nature-power in God’s creation Ariel is perforce a
moral being — the elements themselves join in the retribution that Ariel
threatens the villains with:
Ariel: …You fools! I and my fellows
Are ministers of Fate — the elements
Of whom your swords are tempered may as well
Wound the loud winds, or with bemocked-at stabs
Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish
One dowl that’s in my plume…
The powers delaying, not forgetting, have
Incensed the seas and shores, yea all the creatures
Against your peace (III.3.60, 73).

So too Cain is punished: “And now art thou cursed from the earth… When
thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength…”
(Genesis 4, 11–12).
When Prospero recognises his own hubris and decides to give up his nature
magic because he has gained and nearly misused forbidden knowledge belong-
ing to God alone, he looks back at the scope of his power (borrowed from
Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses):
118 Lotte Troupp

I have bedimmed
the noontide sun… to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire… Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure (V.1.41).

In Ariel’s function, Shakespeare does not separate a material world of elements

from a moral world of souls. Ariel has performed physical magic but now
performs moral magic, by means of his eloquence. By the sombre, threatening
sermon he delivers in the guise of a harpy he is instrumental in the repentance
of the villains of the play, as well as in prompting Prospero’s merciful change of
heart towards them by his moving account of their “heart-sorrow”. For
eloquent rhetoric was assumed to move people to virtuous action, and that was
its purpose. As “efficacious” language, it was supposed to do — we could say it
had a speech act function, shown here in the words of Sir Philip Sidney: “It is
not gnosis but praxis must be the fruit [of literature]. And how praxis cannot be
without being moved to practise, it is no hard matter to consider” [my empha-
sis] (Sidney 1595/1965: 112). Sidney’s gnosis is the “recognition” in literature —
the enticement and insight it transmits.
For a long time the Royal Society empiricists did not either separate nature
from the divine. The Creator was inherent in his creation, though they thought
(rightly) that the linguistic path should be abandoned and that experimental
evidence would lead them (fairly quickly) into nature’s divine secrets. “We may
well ghess, that the absolute perfection of the True Philosophy is not now far off”
said Thomas Sprat, historian of the Royal Society (Sprat 1667/1966:29). Wilkins
was the first in England fully to formulate a set of principles known as natural
theology, which did in fact split off biblical revelation from knowledge of
nature: “Men might know… by the mere principles of reason, improved by
consideration and experience”,… the natural principles that govern creation.
This was a principle to which all the new scientists were committed (Aarsleff
1982: 240). Yet Wilkins, like Shakespeare, thinks about angels or spirits. Ever
inventive, he expounds physical and code systems for telegraphy (as it were),
such as smoke signals, drums and carrier birds, hoping to invent some speedier
system of human communication:
Amongst all created substances there is not any so swift of motion as angels or
spirits. Because there is not either within their natures, any such indisposition
and reluctancy, or without them in the medium, any such impediment as may
in the least manner retard their courses… if we could but send one of them
 “Hear my soul speak” 119

upon any errrand, there would be no quicker way than this for the dispatch of
business at all distances. That they have been often thus employed, is affirmed
by divers relations… but this way there is little hopes to advantage our enquiry
because it is not so easy to employ a good angel, nor safe dealing with a bad
one (Wilkins 1641/1970: 61–62).

Both Wilkins and Shakespeare relate to the modern world. Wilkins would be
happy in it, the result of the empirical research he advocated. Shakespeare’s
Prospero abjures this power as not safe in the hands of men, foreseeing a world
where mere might is right. The recent Joint Statement of Abolition of Nuclear
Weapons (5.12.1996)5 echoes Prospero’s decision; the thinking in the play’s
fiction 400 years ago still touches the problems of the real world to-day.

3. Subjectivity

“Subjectivity” in this essay relates to a mind enclosed in itself, unable to engage

justly with others, or evaluate events, a mind also frequently alienated from
itself. Pride is the vice which makes monsters of men, and, by destroying reason,
destroys language. This vice is made manifest in the person of Ajax in Shake-
speare’s Troilus and Cressida; the passage is particularly illustrative here as it is
linked to The Tempest by an earlier conceptualisation of a Caliban figure.
Ther: A wonder!
Achil: What?
Ther: Ajax goes up and down the field asking for himself.
Achil: How so?
Ther: He must fight singly to-morrrow with Hector, and is so prophetically
proud of an heroical cudgelling that he raves in saying nothing.
Achil: How can that be?
Ther: Why, ’a stalks up and down like a peacock — a stride and a stand; rumi-
nates like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but her brain to set down
her reckoning… He knows not me. I said ‘Good morrow, Ajax’; and he
replies ‘Thanks, Agamemnon’. What think you of this man that takes me
for the general? He’s grown a very land fish, languageless, a monster
(Troilus and Cressida, III.3.242, 262).

In the demonstration that follows, Thersites acts the part of Ajax and answers
“hum! ha! hum! ha!” to everything. Thersites is asked to take a letter to Ajax and
answers: “Let me bear another to his horse, for that’s the more capable crea-
ture”. Pride is the flaw that has dehumanised Ajax’s reason by contaminating
120 Lotte Troupp

his vision of the world with self. Ajax is inarticulate and deranged with pride
and “raves in saying nothing”. Language is connected to “reason” and therefore
his language disintegrates — Ajax “ruminates” helplessly. Ajax’s pride makes
him too superior to communicate with others: Thersites continues “he profess-
es not answering. Speaking is for beggars” (III.3.267). Ajax’s incomprehension
in confusing Thersites with Agamemnon — the worst with the best — is also
present in Caliban, who calls Prospero “a sot, as I am” (III.2.91) and takes “a
poor drunkard for a god” (V.1.296). Ajax, the “wonder” of a monster, translates
into Caliban as follows: Fish were proverbially dumb as Ajax now is — “lan-
guageless”. A compound of man and fish is by definition a monster, and Ajax
is inwardly monstrous because he has ceased to have human interaction.
Caliban is languageless not technically but socially: his lack of normal empathy
has cut him off from mankind. The whiff of fishiness and the oddness which
makes Stephano and Trinculo refer to him as “a puppy-headed monster”
(II.2.148) and other sorts of monster (thirty-eight times in all) is turned to
comic account: “he smells like a fish, a very ancient and fish-like smell” (II.2.25).
Thus the communal aspect of man is defined as the essential hallmark of
the human. Reason, and with it language, the vector of communication, have a
moral orientation, toward the brotherhood of man. Shakespeare is likely to have
read Montaigne on the subject: “Our intelligence being onely conducted by the
way of the Word: Who so falsifieth the same, betraieth publik society… it is the
interpretour of our soules. If that faile us we enter-know one another no
longer” (Montaigne 1603/1980: II.394). The fact that pride is the vice which
destroys Ajax’s communicative powers is commonplace, and in itself, identifies
the Ajax passage with the kind of linguistic breakdown that occurred at Babel as
a moral one — the audience would make the link between pride and loss of
language that is made in the Bible passage itself (Genesis 11: 6–7).6 In The
Tempest Shakespeare has chosen to depict such minds and relationships as a
sign of the fallen state of man. The process of the play is to define what the
obstructions to a true humanity are, and what man is — the humanist question
par excellence.

3.1 A narrative summary: Whose narrative?

The emblematic shipwreck scene that opens the play provides a wealth of
contexts for the contemporary audience: their popular emblem books moralised
sea voyages, as does the Bible, to say nothing of the reports of the colonisers’
voyages at this time (particularly of the wreck of 1609 on the Bermudas which
<LINK "tro-r6">

“Hear my soul speak” 121

are partly a source for The Tempest). Three emblems immediately suggest
themselves because all three, though contradictory, apply to the play. The first,
an emblem of Geffrey Whitney, a sinking ship, is captioned: “The gallante
Shipp… is swallowed in the wave”, and headed: Res humanae in summo
declinant (Whitney 1586/1969: 11). A second Whitney emblem is captioned
“The shippe… obtaines the wished coaste”; the picture shows a kindly wind
with puffed cheeks filling the sails of a fine galleon. The emblem is headed
constantia comes victoriae (Whitney 1586/ 1969: 137). The third is from The Ship
of Fools and shows a broken boat, and a man in it wearing a fool’s cap and bells
and holding loose ropes. It is called “Of the despysynge of mysfortune”, and is
captioned by a verse:
He is a fole and greatly reprovable
Whiche seyth and felyth suerly in his mynde
That all his dedes are moche infortunable
And where ever he go agaynst hym is the wynde
But in his mysfortune yet is he so blynde
That he is improvydent, abydynge wyllyngly
Despysynge (thoughe he myght) for to fynde remedy
(Barclay 1509/1966: II.249).

The latter emblem closely mirrors the spirit of the opening scene of the play.
The well-dressed company of nobles aboard the ship belie their appearance by
their quarrelling and cursing speech accusing the mariners, who might have
saved them if left to their work. The ship splits and the passengers fall to their
prayers as they sink. The worst has happened. This stage figures the human
condition in a fallen world and there seems to be little hope of salvation for
beings fallen as low as were presented in the dissonant opening scene —
“humanity is wholly in decline”, as the emblem title says. But the emblem of the
happy ship tells an alternative story for The Tempest: In the next scene, with
tears, on an island, the fifteen-year-old Miranda implores her magician father,
Prospero, to calm the storm he has called up by his magic art, and she grieves
for the drowned. He assures her he has brought them safely to the island,
deflecting them from their return to Naples from a wedding in Tunis. He did
this in order to retrieve his fortunes, hoping to return to Milan in the ship while
he can. At the opening of scene 2 the audience, who were shocked and moved
by the shipwreck, realise they have undergone tragic emotions which they must
revise. Relieved and duped at once, they begin their multiple task of identifica-
tion and response; relieved because it is a comedy after all, but the shipwreck
leaves them uneasy.
122 Lotte Troupp

Prospero waylaid the ship because he has waited twelve years for such an
opportunity and he must now succeed, though the passengers (whose ship-
wreck was an illusion, as the audience alone is told) are the very enemies who
set Prospero and his three-year-old daughter adrift in a rotten ship twelve years
before. In this political coup Antonio, Prospero’s brother, stole Prospero’s
dukedom of Milan from him with the aid of Alonso, king of Naples. Alonso’s
brother, Sebastian, and his son Ferdinand — now believed drowned — are also
of the party, as well as the good Gonzalo, “an honest old councillor” who, at the
time of Prospero’s expulsion, had supplied Prospero with his books and other
necessaries in spite of having been in duty bound to help his master with the
eviction. The title of the happy emblem says that “constancy and victory go
hand in hand”: “[I] promise you calm seas, auspicious gales” (V.1.314),
Prospero is able to say at the end, all conflicts ended for the time being and
Ferdinand and Miranda betrothed, as all of them make ready to sail back to
Milan across the “Mediterranean float” (I.2.234).
The Mediterranean Sea is also the moral and literary landscape of Virgil’s
Aeneid, whose threatening Harpy appears in The Tempest (acted by Ariel) to
assert the moral law, as Virgil’s Harpy does, albeit here in Christian doctrinal
terms. The audience are to be deceived a second time into an expenditure of
tragic emotion. The terrible words of the harpy, agent of Fate and retribution,
threatens the lords with “ling’ring perdition” (III.3.77) unless there is “heart’s
sorrow/ And a clear life ensuing” (III.3.81). This describes the “ladder of
repentence”, demanding contrition and amendment. The contrition of the
Neapolitan party takes an extreme form, according to Gonzalo:
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 (III.3.104).

The implication is that they will commit suicide, reacting with a new sin, that of
despair, known as “wanhope” in the mediaeval topos. This demands an act of
faith, which must be coupled with contrition in order to avoid suicidal despair,
since mercy and grace are won by faith. The strong position of the theme of
repentance and faith in Prospero’s epilogue reinforces the centrality of this
theme in the play. Confession of his sin is made by Alonso:
 “Hear my soul speak” 123

Alonso: O, it is monstrous, monstrous!

Methought the billows spoke and told me of it,
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass (III.3.95).

Alonso also makes amends, “Thy dukedom I resign, and do entreat/ Thou
pardon me my wrongs” (V.1.118). These scenes, for an audience deeply trained
in religion, are clearly harrowing. Not until afterwards does the audience know
that Ariel was actor to Prospero’s text. Thus the experiences of the audience are
not the facts of the plot for the characters of the story. The audience are to be
awakened to the dangers facing the souls of men, and they are to be given no
certainties as to the universe we all live in.
Prospero experiences his own moment of despair as the pageant of paradise
enacted in the betrothal masque fades, and he remembers Caliban, just then on
his way to kill him. He stops the entertainment. Ferdinand is dashed and
Prospero answers him:
Prospero: Be cheerful’ sir;
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep (IV.1.147).

Dysphoria, when colour and meaning drain away, is an alienation from the self
which all human beings probably experience sometimes. La vida es sueno, “we
are such stuff as dreams are made on” is the topos which Shakespeare draws on
— life itself is a fiction. He weaves together several types of lament: The speech
directly echoes the words of Spenser’s mutability speech, “High towers, faire
temples, goodly theatres, /Strong walls, rich porches, princelie pallaces”
(Spenser 1912: 472, line 92), which mourn the lost glory of antiquity in The
Ruins of Time. The theatre topos, theatrum mundi, is central to the structure of
the play as a whole. By implication the audience is cast out of the virtual world
of the play into “real” time, just as Ferdinand and Miranda, who are the stage
124 Lotte Troupp

audience to the masque, are cast out from the same enchanting vision of the
golden age. This moment of despair is eventually followed by an act of faith and
contrition in the Prospero actor’s epilogue:
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults (V.1.333).

There is a happy reversal in the play’s action. The peripeteia of the whole play
hinges on a profound pun. At the end of Act 4 Prospero has imprisoned all his
enemies and exults: “At this hour/ Lies at my mercy all mine enemies”
(IV.1.263). At the start of Act 5 the spirit Ariel describes the weeping and
vanquished group of penitents: “… Brimful of sorrow and dismay… His tears
runs down his beard like winter’s drops… if you now beheld them, your affec-
tions/ Would become tender” (V.1.14).
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?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ 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 (V.1.19).

Thus the previous phrase “at my mercy” is reversed, from its meaning of
revenge to its meaning of forgiveness. Prospero’s moment of recognition, the
anagnorisis of the play, is the stroke that cuts the gordian knot of discord, in
the spirit of Sidney’s passage: gnosis becomes praxis — Prospero was moved by
Ariel’s poetry of grief and precisely because of this, he empathises with his
enemies and acts upon this insight: “…with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury
/ Do I take part”. Empathy is the essence of the human as Shakespeare sees it
in this play, previously foregrounded when Miranda’s “compassion” is
described as “the very virtue: O I have suffered/ With those that I saw suffer”
(1.2.5). I take “empathy” and “compassion” to be aspects of the same emotional
 “Hear my soul speak” 125

complex; a contemporary summary of Aristotle on this point suggests self-

identification as the basis (A Briefe: 1637).7 Shakespeare makes Ariel, though
superior to man in power and virtue, “not one of our kind”; he cannot feel the
pain or joy of the human passions (V.1.20). Both the semantics and the
repeated sh-sounds in “affliction”, “relish”, “sharply”, “passion” seem to me to
transmit the human pain that Prospero feels. The whole play, reflexive as it is,
claims by implication that by its poetic power it will move the audience to
virtue in the same way.
This limited account of the play’s inner action omits the charm and
excitement of Ariel the “ayrie spirit” (described so in the first Folio list of
actors), and Caliban, addressed by Prospero as “thou earth”. Both delight in,
and belong to, nature’s elements, and through them, through the play’s music
played by Ariel, and through the haunting poetic of the sea, the audience is truly
brought to an enchanted isle. Ferdinand and Miranda represent the wholly
human dimension of youth and love, and the whole play is energised in very
down-to-earth fashion by the irresistible farce (sinister as it is) enacted by the
helpless trio composed of Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo, drunken butler and
jester. The tragicomic form Shakespeare developed in his late Romances is
perfectly balanced in this comédie humaine.

3.2 The Ship of Fools

“There was Falsehood, Favel [duplicity] and Subtilty…/ Liars, backbiters…
Brawlers… chiders… Walkers by night with great murderers” (Lancashire
1980: 190, lines 364–72, from Hick Scorner, an early Tudor Interlude). Each and
every character arriving in the island brings with him his own milieu, and
interprets this strange new world according to ingrained habits or sins, or fails
to see or react at all. This impenetrable subjectivity precludes sensible interac-
tion. The ship that Prospero draws out of its course and appears to wreck on his
island is the Ship of Fools. Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, and Alonso
king of Naples and his brother Sebastian, both of whom furthered the original
crime against Prospero, are on the ship, which also carries the good councillor
Gonzalo, Adrian, a friendly courtier, and the Boatswain, who handles the ship
in the storm while parrying the accusations of the courtiers, quarrelling even in
the face of death by imminent drowning:
Sebastian: [to boatswain] A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous,
incharitable dog!
Boatswain: Work you, then.
126 Lotte Troupp

Antonio: Hang, cur, hang, you whoreson insolent noisemaker! We are less
afraid to be drowned than thou art. …
Mariners: All lost! To prayers, to prayers! All lost!
Boatswain: What, must our mouths be cold? …
Sebastian: I’m out of patience.
Antonio: We are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards.
This wide-chopped rascal — wouldst thou mightst lie drowning
The washing of ten tides! (I.1.40,51,54)

The play also stages a sinister emblematic tableau of the iron age that the
audience see soon after the lords have settled down on the island: the courtiers
stand arrested with their swords raised, ready to kill their king Alonso and his
councillor, asleep on a bank, in order to take over power. Ariel interrupts them
in the nick of time. What meaning such power could possibly have on an
uninhabited island does not strike them. The courtiers are defined by their
irrelevance and habitual negation, traditionally the galants of the mankind type
of morality play. Their negation is foregrounded by the stychomythia (‘line-talk’,
here used for antithesis) as they arrive on the island. (This is usually staged so
that Adrian and Gonzalo are musing on the nature of the island and do not hear
or interact with the other two, who are standing apart commenting on their
words to each other). Adrian and Gonzalo are aware, and positive, while the
other two undermine their every word:
Adrian: Though this island seem to be desert…
Uninhabitable and almost inaccessible —
Sebastian: Yet —
Adrian: Yet —
Antonio: He could not miss’t.
Adrian: It must needs be of subtle, delicate and tender temperance.
Antonio: Temperance was a delicate wench.
Sebastian: Ay, and a subtle, as he most learnedly delivered.
Adrian: The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.
Sebastian: As if it had lungs, and rotten ones.
Antonio: Or as ’twere perfumed by a fen.
Gonzalo: Here is everything advantageous to life.
Antonio: True, save means to live.
Sebastian: Of that there’s none or little.
Gonzalo: How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green!
Antonio: The ground indeed is tawny (II.1.36,39).

And so on: Antonio and Sebastian engage in “detraction” or “backbiting”, in

what could be called a typical débat between virtues and vices: “To may not
 “Hear my soul speak” 127

togedyr stonde/ But I, Bakbyter, be [th]e thirde” (Eccles 1969: IV.53, from The
Castle of Perseverance). These scenes of the play have with reason been accused
of tediousness, but they are clearly intended to be so since these courtiers are
“nothing” for a short while before more serious mischief takes over, as it
typically does in the morality plays.

3.3 On the beach

Also just off the ship are the butler and jester: streetwise, drunken rascals. In
pragmatic terms, their meeting with Caliban on the beach is a grotesque farce
as they try to contextualise each other. Echoing real travellers tales, Shakespeare
makes Caliban believe Stephano’s claim to be the man in the moon. Caliban is
naive and inexperienced through his isolation. He is ready to worship them
with childlike simplicity and offers to show them all that the island has to offer.
He is introduced to their liquor, which they saved from the ship, and which
Caliban calls “celestial”, and soon “his eyes are set in his head”. The audience is
torn between laughter and pain: the horseplay of the scene is irresistibly comic,
but it is disturbing to see Caliban take the scum of Naples for gods. As for the
Europeans, it is their first meeting with “a native”. Caliban is never given a form
in the text. In turn they believe Caliban to be a fish (“he smells like a fish, not of
the newest…”), an islander, a devil to be feared, (as reported in travellers’ tales),
and finally “a puppy-headed monster”, who becomes their creature — until
they become his. On the stage, he is sometimes acted as a black man to mark the
colonial theme, or mis-shapen as a monster, or the traditional “wild man”, or
he is dressed in the normal European garments that Prospero saved from his
boat twelve years before.
This unlikely trio sets out across the island to learn new evils from each
other. Stephano and Trinculo are foolish and quarrelsome but merry drunks,
and true to their past they are out for gain at all times. They plan to exhibit
Caliban at English fairs for money, “there would this monster make a man”
(II.2.29). The pun on “make” and mention of England is a metadramatic joke
for the English audience. Stephano and Trinculo react favourably to Caliban’s
suggestion that they will go and murder Prospero — “I’ll yield him thee asleep,
/Where thou mayst knock a nail into his head” (III.2.59) — and Stephano will
be king of the island (with Miranda his queen). The servants, like their masters,
want to rule, equally incapable of adjusting their atrophied responses to the fact
that there is none to rule. Their murder plans echo Sebastian’s plan to murder
his King, Alonso, and recall the progression from minor vice to major crime in
128 Lotte Troupp

the morality plays. Here Caliban acts as the Vice, and among the courtiers it is
Antonio who suggests the plan to Sebastian. Each is a cunning initiator of
crime, and dogged in persuasion.

4. Caliban’s language — “distinguished from other mortals”

Against the background of disparate consciousnesses and liquor, Caliban stands

out as a being of a different order. Dryden comments that “the poet has most
judiciously furnished him with a person, a language, and a character, which will
suit him both by Fathers and Mothers side… his language is as hobgoblin as his
person: in all things he is distinguished from other mortals” (Dryden 1984:
240). On the face of it, there is no suggestion in the text that Caliban is linguisti-
cally deprived; on the contrary, Caliban has acquired language in a normal
manner by living from early youth with the wronged Duke of Milan, Prospero,
and his daughter Miranda. “I pitied thee,/ Took pains to make thee speak”,
(I.2.353) Miranda reminds him, educated as she was by Prospero, with “more
profit/ Than other princes can that have more time/ For vainer hours, and
tutors not so careful” (I.2.172). Miranda points out his aberration:
When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race —
Though thou didst learn — had that in’t which good natures
Could not abide to be with (I.2.354).

In other words he could have been part of the group because of their shared
language but he did not share their consciousness. Caliban becomes more and
more socially aberrant as he grows up and is finally cast out when he tries to
rape the adolescent Miranda.
Shakespeare has contrastive intentions for Caliban and Miranda. They share
the same langue, but the distinction is in their parole. Caliban’s lack of human
empathy, and the profound lack of socialisation which results from it, appears
in his speech (see below, 4.1–4.4.) This is contrasted with Miranda’s expression
of the opposing virtue of compassion, and all that belongs to it. Curses for
Caliban and tears for Miranda represent a language that immediately and
distinctively characterises them by a spontaneous expression of their natures
which they cannot suppress. At the same time, Caliban’s cursing and mischief
 “Hear my soul speak” 129

are antisocial, Miranda’s tears and empathy highly social. Virtue and vice are
not, finally, seen as a private state of mind in the individual, but as a function of
social harmony and the common good — virtue and vice appertain to the same
social dimension as does language. It is the corruptions of mankind that
Caliban is drawn to in his social intercourse. Thus when he meets the morally
lax Stephano-Trinculo pair, he is receptive to their brand of destructiveness
through drink, as they are to his incitement to murder and power-seeking. Each
of the three adds to his own vices through the “falsifying” of language. For
example, drunkenness (that destroys reason) is lauded, the killing of Prospero
is unquestioned and unopposed, Caliban’s politic flattery of Stephano sows
discord between friends. Shakespeare takes pains to tell us that Miranda and
Caliban are potentially equal in life experience, each with only vague memories
of an unshared past. Thus, the island, among all its other functions also serves
as a controlled environment in an experimental scheme. Two human beings are
brought up together in isolation from unshared influences. What was the factor
that vitiated Caliban’s chances of integration into his little group? This society,
small as it was, carried, through Prospero’s experience of civilisation, all that
was needful to a human life worthy of the name, as a creature of reason created
by God. In reviewing the disparity in the natures of Caliban and Miranda in this
controlled environment, Shakespeare creates a language for Caliban which is
intended to isolate and define, by its absence, the factor that determines the
essentially human. Shakespeare tells us early on what this factor is:
Prospero: Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort.
The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touched
The very virtue of compassion in thee,
I have… safely ordered (I.2.25).

Compassion makes mankind “kindly” and “kin” to each other, it is the quality
that more than any other promotes Montaigne’s “enter-knowing”. In Christian
thinking compassion is altruistic, and is equally named “pity”, “caritas”,
“charity”, “love”. In word and deed Caliban is defined as congenitally lacking
this power .
In subtle ways Shakespeare alerts the audience to deficiencies in Caliban’s
mind. Caliban speaks the language of the speech community quite normally
(the princely Italian of Milan? English? Shakespeare handles the double lan-
guage identity neatly, e.g. Ferdinand: “my language! Heavens!” (I.2.429) and
Stephano: “where the devil should he learn our language?” (II.2.64)). But
among the elements that personalise Caliban’s language there are several kinds of
130 Lotte Troupp

gap or lack. The langue and parole distinction must be a Renaissance common-
place, given Primaudaye’s passage, above, that there are norms of “good order”
but that an individual’s speech perforce mirrors the individual mind. Shake-
speare builds on this, individualizing Caliban’s mindset by its semantic pecu-
liarities. Saussure can further provide a terminology which can help to define
this.

4.1 “Signification” and “value”

Caliban is unaware of essential connotations normally carried by some of the
words he uses. If the listener were to define his reaction, it would be that Caliban
uses certain words without understanding their usual context or import for the
audience. Saussure makes a useful distinction between “signification” and “value”:
Modern French mouton can have the same signification as English sheep but not
the same value… Speaking of a piece of meat ready to be served at table English
uses mutton not sheep. The difference in value between sheep and mouton is due
to the fact that sheep has beside it a second term while the French word does not.
If words stood for pre-existing concepts, they would all have exact equivalents
in meaning from one language to the next (Waswo 1987:10).

On three occasions Caliban knows the signification but not the value of the
words he uses. This jolts the audience. These clues to Caliban’s mind are by no
means foregrounded, but heard with an undefined discomfort, as Dryden heard
them. By this means Caliban is shown to lack intellect, experience and empathy.
Caliban advises Stephano and Trinculo on the proposed murder of Prospero:
Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command — they all do hate him
As rootedly as I. (III.2.89)

The audience does not find this to be true. Prospero’s stature as a man, a ruler
and a sage are clear, but they are out of Caliban’s ken. He has no reason here to
lie deliberately. Books — which Prospero “prized above his kingdom” and
which “o’er-prized all popular rate” (I.2.92) both for “the liberal arts” and the
“rapt” studies which only adepts could attempt — are thought of as recipe
books for magic tricks by Caliban. Books, the Renaissance audience knows, are
the garnered harvest of human knowledge which will lead human beings back
to their lost virtue and knowledge. As for the spirits, Ariel speaks of affection
 “Hear my soul speak” 131

between him and Prospero even if he does not share in human feeling: Ariel:
“…Do you love me, master? No?/ Prospero: Dearly, my delicate Ariel.”
(IV.1.48). “Sot”, an ignoramus, rebounds as a judgement upon Caliban’s
shallowness (quite apart from the context of a murder plan). Caliban does not
understand the “value” of the words book and Prospero because for him these
words have only a simple, material signification. Language is not neutral, but
attended by emotions, expectations, common insights and a shared culture, and
all these aspects constitute meaning. Thus Caliban is excluded from his com-
munity and we pity his isolation. But the audience does not escape Shake-
speare’s dramatic irony. At the end we realise that Prospero is only narrowly
saved from being a moral sot by Ariel’s intervention. The remark “he’s but a sot
as I am” reverberates as a long-term question: Prospero (and the audience) are
as far from understanding God as Caliban is from understanding Prospero.
Prospero says no less in the epilogue: “… my ending is despair/ Unless I be
relieved by prayer” (V.1.333).

4.2 Lack of life experience

Some of Caliban’s deficiency results from his island isolation and inexperience
of the group that evolved the language, and this lack he shares with Miranda.
Caliban’s second gap between word and concept gives him pause over the
word nonpareil:
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 (III.2.96).

The word nonpareil is there but he cannot claim its meaning. Caliban does well
here, working on the grammar of comparatives to arrive at the grammar of
what he does understand, the comparison of two.

4.3 Lack of empathy

The third gap surfaces in Caliban’s proposed murder of Prospero.
Caliban: Why, as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him
I’ th’ afternoon to sleep. There thou mayst brain him,
132 Lotte Troupp

Having first seized his books; or with a log

Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his weasand with thy knife (III.2.85).

This gap is apparently an irredeemable one. Caliban speculates about the killing
as a technical problem. Shakespeare eliminates both pleasure and pain —
Caliban is emotionally untouched by words which make the audience shudder.
Caliban is a psychopath who can kill and rape because his self-identification
with other human beings is maimed to the extent that he can feel pain and
“stripes” himself but not recognise himself in others. In Antonio conscience has
“been candied o’er” and the effect is the same, but Shakespeare’s judgement
against the latter is more severe — “worse than devils”, though both are equally
dangerous to their society. Caliban’s vision of the killing of Prospero does not
match ours, which is filled with horror as we visualise battering a skull or
cutting a throat. Thus for lack of these three aspects of “reason” (intellect,
experience and empathy), Caliban fails to share the contexts which his words
hold for others, both within the play and for the audience.

4.4 Naming
Nevertheless, Caliban has a world of his own. Shakespeare gives him the
adjective/noun-pair diction that pins down the “typical”, which he frequently
reserves for descriptive narratio: Caliban characterises the marmoset as “nim-
ble”, the filberts as “clustering”, the mole as “blind”.
I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow,
And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts,
Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmozet. I’ll bring thee
To clust’ring filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee
Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me?
(II.2.161)

Naming, and thus defining, the creatures and sensations in his own sphere of
existence includes such fine differentiation as “noises”, “sounds”, and “sweet
airs”, — “Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,/ Sounds, and sweet airs, that
give delight and hurt not” (III.2.133). This puts him in possession of his sensory
world — naming is knowing and knowing is owning: “human knowledge and
human power meet in one”, says Bacon, though by knowledge he means
something almost contrary to mere names (Bacon 1860: 47). By naming,
 “Hear my soul speak” 133

Caliban has pierced the miasma which, Saussure says, is the human condition.
“Without language, thought is a vague uncharted nebula. There are no pre-
existing ideas, and nothing is distinct without language” (Saussure 1983: 9 and
4n). Thus signification alone is not to be despised. Since Miranda had taught
Caliban language: “I endowed thy purposes/ With words that made them
known” (I.2.356), Caliban can make his purposes and his world known, to
Stephano and Trinculo for instance. His purposes, however, show deficient
human understanding since they are to rape Miranda and kill Prospero. Only
the natural world in the wild is Caliban’s own context. The evil of the courtiers
is that of the corrupted will, whereas Caliban’s is due to an incapacity of the “soul
intellectyve”, in mediaeval terminology, which includes innate moral knowledge.
Caliban’s memory is the seat of his language learning. Naming is typical of
the learning that children do; it is also the language of creation in the Book of
Genesis, of the Book of Job, and of several of the Psalms. Caliban specifically
connects his language learning with the naming of creation, recalling the
process by a Bible quotation: “[wouldst] teach me how/ To name the bigger
light and how the less” (I.2.334). In the Book of Moses (Genesis), 1:16, these
words are “And God made two great lights: a great light to rule the day, and a
lesse light to rule the night, and he made starres also”. The audience will
recognise this connection and its childlike pleasure. They might be reminded of
the frontispiece illustration to the Bishop’s Bible of 1588. This typically illus-
trates the Garden of Eden as teeming with every living creature (including a
grasshopper the size of the hedgehog in the picture). “Listing creation” in
picture and word is the natural corollary of a belief in a perfect, unchanging
creation that is complete. It is the language of praise recording man’s simple joy
and awe at being, in the midst of his natural inheritance.

5. Intersubjectivity

Ferdinand and Miranda battle with language to discover what love “means”,
and to make it “true”. Shakespeare’s process here is to take up the conventional
characteristics and language of love, and personalise them until the experience
of love becomes individualised, that is to say “real”. This is necessarily a
subjective experience for the lovers, undertaken à deux. Ferdinand and Miranda
represent the hope of a better future for the Dukedom of Milan, and it is
important for Prospero to define the quality of these two future rulers. They
also stand as a hope for mankind. In The Tempest both the overt theme of
134 Lotte Troupp

language, and the production of language, i.e. the drama text, are attached to
Shakespeare’s search for a definition of man: Ferdinand and Miranda represent
the best of human nature — In general Ferdinand’s fortitude and experience
are characterised, while Miranda’s “very virtue of compassion” (I.2.27) is the
play’s central aspect of “the good”. Both Ferdinand and Miranda are able to
undergo the process of learning which their wooing imposes upon them.
Shakespeare alerts the audience to listen more strenuously than first
appearances warrant. Although on the face of it Miranda and Ferdinand seem
to be a thoroughly conventional pair who fall in love in the traditional fairy-tale
manner — “At the first sight/ They have changed eyes” (I.2.441), and Ferdi-
nand proposes marriage then and there: “O, if a virgin,/ And your affection not
gone forth, I’ll make you/ The Queen of Naples” (I.2.448) — Shakespeare gives
notice of greater complication than that: their speedy wooing and betrothal is
deliberately interrupted by Miranda’s father.
Prospero: (aside)
They are both in either’s powers; but this swift business
I must uneasy make lest too light winning
Make the prize light (I.2.451).

Their easy assumption of love needs maturing in the imagination, until it truly
issues from the soul, to use Shakespeare’s word. Thereupon Ferdinand is
subdued with the aid of Prospero’s magic and forced to carry logs as a slave —
the very activity which Caliban rebels against but must perform. Thus the
firmness of the couple’s commitment is to be strengthened by difficulty, and
advanced gradually by their developing self-knowledge.

5.1 Intersubjectivity and self-discovery

Ferdinand’s and Miranda’s previous experience informs the subjective self
which each brings to the encounter. Neither could possibly understand the
other’s consciousness. Ferdinand’s previous experience is of the court. The
“harmonious tongues” of women and the “bondage” of love provides a subtext
of conventionalised unhappy love, while Miranda has lived a wholly isolated
existence, from the age of three to fifteen, her only human companions being
her father and the aberrant Caliban. Though as isolated and rural as Words-
worth’s Lucy, she has been educated by her scholarly royal father, who loved
learning above his task of rule (thereby inviting the political coup which
caused the expulsion from his dukedom). The experience of these two is thus
 “Hear my soul speak” 135

diametrically opposed. Curiosity about the other would therefore be expected.

Surprisingly, “the meanings that unfold” (Deetz 1982: 6)8 are not in the first
place related to the identification of the other person but to a discovery of the
self, though each is the sounding board for the other. As outlined by Deetz,
“subjectivity is intersubjectivity… the nature of [such] dialogue is to open that
which is out of reach and beyond comprehension” (Deetz 1982: 6).
Four problems of meaning are presented in the process of their self-
discovery. The first is an epistemological problem of knowing truth. Ferdinand
argues out the contrast between the love he declares to Miranda — “hear my
soul speak” (III.1.63) — and that which he mistakenly took to be love in his
previous amourous adventures at court. How was the latter false? How is the
former true? The second problem is one of ideation. In what light is he to react
to his captivity and log-bearing, ostensibly imposed on him because Prospero
took him for a spy, and which dishonours him as a prince, but which is referred
to by Prospero (aside, to the audience) as the classic love trial? The third and
fourth problems are Miranda’s. She movingly interrogates her isolation and
blankness. In this she is like Caliban, who cannot, logically, know what nonpa-
reil means because he only knows two women. Nor does she have experience or
images to fill the words she uses about women or men. Her social deprivation
leaves her without female models particularly, and female conversations to
identify what her feelings of love and desire are called. The culture of her father
was, of course, transmitted to her; we first meet him telling her his tale — the
unresolved obsessions of memory and exile (Shakespeare’s excellent opening
exposition). But hers is only a virtual knowledge at best. The special issue is that
she must discover herself as a woman on her own terms.

5.2 Cultural and linguistic codes of the language of love

The negotiation of love between Ferdinand and Miranda in the scenes devoted
to their wooing is placed in the context of a pastoral débat between the aspects
of the courtly and the rural. For this interaction they share the highly idiosyn-
cratic common cultural and linguistic literary code of the court. Sinfield
outlines the concurrent conventions of Ovidian lust, romantic frustration, and
Protestant marriage, and analyzes the inability of most Renaissance writers to
reconcile them (Sinfield 1983: 49–80). In a highly concentrated account of his
court experience, Ferdinand summarises many of these conventions:
136 Lotte Troupp

Full many a lady

I have eyed with best regard, and many a time
Th’ harmony of their tongues hath into bondage
Brought my too diligent ear (III.1.39).

In the case of Ferdinand, the number of women is heavily stressed: “full many
a lady”, “many a time”, “for several virtues… several women” (III.1.39–43).
This is Ovidian. The “too diligent ear” (III.1.42), however, implies guilt of some
kind, with possibly an injunction to seek marriage instead of flirtations. The
court ladies that Ferdinand found wanting are of a lesser calibre not only
because they did not wholly please Ferdinand, but because the “harmony of
their tongues” implies insincere intentions through the love rhetoric of courtly
badinage. At any rate there were many of them, so Ferdinand’s sincerity must
also be questioned, since it seems he could not resist flirtation. There are
anomalies here, not further pursued by Shakespeare. Ferdinand seems to be the
almost passive recipient of advances, yet it is he who appears to be leafing
through a vast supply of ladies all rejected as flawed.
This contrasts with the romantic conventions. These are composed of many
literary streams. Several generations of Petrarchan imitators had spread through
Europe the paradoxes of unsatisfied love, the religious language of faith, service
and even martyrdom, and the platonic image of ideal beauty or virtue worthy
of such devotion. These attitudes figure in sonnets, madrigals, lute songs and
musical entertainments throughout the Renaissance period. This conflates with
the unhappy shepherds of the pastoral, and the ideas of melancholy as a sickness
of unbalanced humours and madness. On the female side Dido is a model for
distraught love, and there was a brief vogue in the 1590s, according to Hallett
Smith, for Complaint poems representing women, of which Shakespeare’s A
Lover’s Complaint is one (in Shakespeare, Evans 1974: 1781). The romantic
stance is ambiguous as to whether sexual consummation is desirable or possible
for the male, since marriage is not usually at issue and unchastity defiles the
lady, whether a “cruel she” or a modest maiden.
In The Tempest Prospero formally offers Miranda’s hand in marriage: In
Protestant marriage sexuality was at last given a status which was neither lust
nor frustration from the man’s point of view, and equality between the sexes
was intended (Sinfield 1983: 62). In fact, however, Sinfield points out that
freedom of choice of a marriage partner for the woman was cancelled by the
father’s rights over her (Sinfield 1983: 70). To this might be added the inequality
in experience: chastity for the woman, but experience for the man, a marked
feature of Shakespeare’s text here.
 “Hear my soul speak” 137

Then as my gift, and thine own acquisition

Worthily purchased, take my daughter. But
If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be ministered,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow (IV.1.13).

Ferdinand promises “his honour will never melt into lust”. Yet as they settle
down to watch the betrothal masque which Prospero creates for them with his
magic, — “some vanity of my art” — a moment’s petting is obviously written
into the stage performance, since Ferdinand is warned to behave better:
Look thou be true; do not give dalliance
Too much the rein. The strongest oaths are straw
To th’ fire i’ th’ blood. Be more abstemious,
or else goodnight your vow (IV.1.51).

The codes and vocabulary of these three conventions interweave the under-
standing of both Ferdinand and Miranda. The latter “sighs” for love in the
Petrarchan or pastoral manner and has to struggle with “coyness” like a
designing court lady pretending youth and innocence (III.1.81). Ferdinand’s
reference to Miranda as “every creature’s best” is a shorthand evocation of
Petrarchan platonism. His whole manner of wooing is that of the idealising and
humbly serving lover. Perforce Miranda must be content with the first suitable
man she ever meets considering there are no others. “Poor worm, thou art
infected” (III.1.31) Prospero says, in the idiom of the sick passion of unbal-
anced humours. In his wooing speech Ferdinand cites previous experience of
the language of love, recalling the rhetoric of persuasion which won him, but
which led to “bondage” as opposed to the “equal bonds” of love.

5.3 False and true love

By this means Ferdinand now has the insight to judge comparatively between
partial and complete love. The speech which declares this is an effusion of
discovery, a veritable aria. The phonetic play of chiasmus in “Admired Miran-
da” gives rhetorical notice of a deliberate sense of occasion, as explained by
contemporary sixteenth century rhetoricians: “Exclamation,” says Fraunce, “is
an excellent instrument to stir up diverse affections, sometimes wonder and
imagination”, while Hoskins says “exclamation is not lawful but in extremity of
emotion” (Sonnino 1968: 88).
138 Lotte Troupp

Ferdinand: Admired Miranda,

Indeed the top of admiration, worth
What’s dearest in the world! Full many a lady
I have eyed with best regard, and many a time
Th’ harmony of their tongues hath into bondage
Brought my too diligent ear. For several virtues
Have I liked several women, never any
With so full soul but some defect in her
Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed,
And put it to the foil. But you, O you,
So perfect and so peerless, are created
Of every creature’s best (III.1.37).

“Bondage” bespeaks the whole conventionalised gamut of the paradoxically

desired humiliations, either Petrarchan or sexual, as in Shakespeare’s Dark Lady
sonnets where the abject lover speaks:
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,
Who leaves unsway’d the likeness of a man,
Thy proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch to be
(Sonnet 141).

Ferdinand’s growth of experience follows that of Donne’s lover in The Good

Morrow. We are not told whether Ferdinand had sexual relations with his court
ladies, but before true love enjoins marriage, Donne’s lover of many ladies says
with bravado: “If ever any beauty I did see, / Which I desir’d, and got, ’twas but
a dream of thee” (Donne 1933: 7, 6–7 ). There is some such bravado in Ferdi-
nand’s “full many” ladies. The “harmony of their tongues” seems to take a
backward glance at A Lover’s Complaint, with Ferdinand cast in the role of the
lady. There the lady yielded to persuasion:
To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep,
He had the dialect and different skill,
Catching all passions in his craft of will…
There my white stole of chastity I daff’d… (lines 124, 297).
The lady was devalued, whereas a male could afford experiment. Both Donne
and Milton express the knowledge of true love as waking from a dream into
reality. Ferdinand parallels Donne’s “And now good morrow to our waking
Souls” (ibid. line 8) — he has never liked any woman “with so full soul”
(III.1.44). Milton’s Comus (Milton 1941), influenced as it partly is by The
Tempest, makes the same distinction between a sleeping and a waking soul:
 “Hear my soul speak” 139

I have often heard

My mother Circe with the Sirens three…
Who as they sung, would take the prison’d soul,
And lap it in Elysium…
Yet they in pleasing slumber lull’d the sense,
And in sweet madness rob’d it of it self,
But such a sacred, and home-felt delight,
Such sober certainty of waking bliss
I never heard till now (line 252).

The contrasts here also apply to Ferdinand; “sweet madness” is set against
“sober home-felt delight”, “pleasing slumber” becomes “waking bliss”. In The
Tempest the new freedom of the formerly “prison’d soul” is paradoxically
expressed as a willing slavery:
Ferdinand: 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.
Miranda: Do you love me? (III.1.64)

Miranda is cast here as the receiving ear, and her comprehension is equal to his
meaning. Miranda “redescribes” Ferdinand’s images as love. Redescription is
evaluated by Davidson:
Meaning and belief play interlocking and complementary roles in the interpre-
tation of speech… we interpret a bit of linguistic behaviour when we say what
a speaker’s words mean on an occasion of use. The task may be seen as one of
redescription. It is an aspect of the speaker’s competence at understanding
what is said (Davidson 1984: 141).

Miranda understands that the idiosyncratic court parlance of “service”, “slave”,

“your patient log-man” means love. The “competence” named by Davidson is
linguistically the familiarity with the courtly idiom of love. Experientially,
Miranda wishes to believe him, for as Donne says, love is service, and this is
what Ferdinand so eloquently offers: “All discourses, all that is spoken to or
from the soul, is all full of chaste love, and of the love of chastity… love is nothing
but a desire, that they whom we love should be happy” (Donne 1953–62: I.240).

5.3.1 Hear my soul speak — truth in language

“Spoken to or from the soul” — this is the crux of Ferdinand’s discovery of
meaning:
140 Lotte Troupp

Ferdinand: Hear my soul speak:

The very instant that I saw you did
My heart fly to your service…
Miranda: Do you love me?
Ferdinand: O heaven, O earth, bear witness…
If I speak true; if hollowly, invert
What best is boded me to mischief (III.1.63,67,70).

The if emphasises the subjective nature of experiential meaning for the speaker,
while the recipient can never prove “truth”. Trust or belief is a risk and an act
of will, as the lady in A Lover’s Complaint found out to her cost. Hollow words
might be described as a kind of double-speak, well illustrated by Claudius’
prayer in Hamlet: “My words rise up to heaven, my thoughts remain below”.
Ferdinand recognises the existence of hollow speech like that of the court ladies,
thus defining his “true” language of the soul by this comparison.
The filling of language with experience is at the heart of all debates about
truth in language. Italian Renaissance writers are quoted on this subject by
Trinkaus (Trinkaus 1983). Among others, Petrarch feels he has put his finger on
the essence of meaning in the context of an attack on scholastic dialectic:
although “a host of little pinpricks play upon the surface of your mind, nothing
yet has penetrated the center”. But after being present at a deathbed, he
concludes that experience, not words alone, produces understanding that “sinks
deeply into the soul” (211).9

5.3.2 Love’s service: physical slavery transformed into metaphysical freedom

Ferdinand and Miranda’s wooing scene follows directly upon Caliban’s
drunken song of joy when he believes he has escaped Prospero and has offered
his services to the featherbrained butler and jester in return for their “celestial”
liquor: “’Ban, ’Ban, Ca-Caliban/ Has a new master — get a new man./ Freedom,
high-day! high-day, freedom!” (II.2.179). The juxtaposition is grotesquely apt
since Ferdinand too is now a captive sentenced to hard labour, and his wooing
is placed in the context of his log-bearing. It is the attitudes shown in their
words that will mark the difference between Ferdinand and Caliban, since their
circumstances are similar. By their mere words Ferdinand and Miranda
transform the log-bearing from slavery to service, from bondage to freedom.
The action is the same, the connotation reversed. Ferdinand sits on a log
musing on his situation:
There be some sports are painful, and their labour
Delight in them sets off; some kinds of baseness
 “Hear my soul speak” 141

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 (III.1.1).

This passage is a close imitation of a passage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

demonstrating the cardinal virtue of fortitude (Aristotle 1926: III.ix.§1–4).
Briefly summed up by Cicero in De inventione, courage (fortitudo) is described
as “the quality by which one undertakes dangerous tasks and endures hardships.
Its parts are highmindedness, confidence, patience, perseverance” (Cicero
1949: 331). He has already been called “gentle and not fearful” by Miranda.
Aristotle’s example refers to the apparent paradox that the pain inherent in
sports does not cancel out the pleasure that sportsmen take in their contests:
One who is unperturbed in the presence of terrors and comports himself
rightly towards these is courageous… Not but what it would appear that the
end corresponding to the virtue of courage is really pleasant, only its pleasant-
ness is obscured by the attendant circumstances. This is illustrated by the case
of athletic contests: to boxers, for example, their victory is pleasant, but the
blows they receive must hurt them, being men of flesh and blood, and all the
labour of training is painful… (a courageous man will endure pain) because it
is noble to do so, or because it is base not to do so (171–73).

The “highmindedness” of the definition is demonstrated by Ferdinand’s ability

to accept his task, and to dedicate it as service to Miranda. Ferdinand points out
that he considers his slavery is indeed terrible: “[I] would no more endure/ This
wooden slavery than to suffer/ The flesh-fly blow my mouth” (III.1.61).
We may say that Ferdinand is boxing for Miranda. In Aristotle the transfor-
mation is effected by the love of victory in sport. Her pity for him and her wish
to share in his burden further re-contextualise “this wooden slavery” (III.1.62)
as love’s service. We should compare this with Caliban’s inability to transform
his tasks, since Shakespeare makes Caliban a touchstone, evaluating each
character in his light. Caliban cannot re-contextualise his labour for Prospero,
for instance as something useful. Prospero describes it to Miranda:
We cannot miss him. He does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices
That profit us (I.2.311).

If Caliban could have seen himself as part of a group, for instance, he would
share benefits as well as labour. Anger, the most subjective of all states of mind,
142 Lotte Troupp

de-socialises him further and adds to his isolation, leaving him a victim of his
bitter primary emotions.
The dissolving of physical constraints is typical of the metaphysical poets.
The mundane world becomes insignificant in the overriding meaningfulness of
love or other spiritual solace. Hamlet could call himself “king of infinite space”
though “bounded in a nutshell” (Hamlet, II.2.253), and “stone walls do not a
prison make” for Lovelace (Grierson 1921: 62). Metaphysical transformations
such as this, e.g. from slavery to service, by mere force of words, is perhaps a
case of a subject treating himself as another person, in order to stand back and
objectivise his situation. Or it could be classed as “an illocutionary act” directed
at oneself. Ferdinand’s re-naming in itself acts upon his mind and transforms
pain to pleasure. It could also be classed as a “performative” utterance, “which
does not so much state as do”: the metaphysicalisation of his task — which after
all continues physically unchanged — gives him a moral victory over humilia-
tion, instead of a humiliating defeat of his princely status. Clearly subjectivity
need not refer to fixed states of mind, and allows the individual to play many
parts and effect many transformations on the stage of the mind.
An analogy from a semiotic theory of language learning can be brought to
bear on the processes of transformation that take place in the maturing of love.
Halliday describes an “imaginative function” in language learning. Gradually
a small child’s early “phylogenetic” use of language is integrated into the
linguistic and social common ground of the family and society (Halliday
1978: 71, 90). We may apply this by observing similar processes of meaning
adjustments in the growth of love, if we consider that love is itself a phylo-
genetic imaginative function which becomes socially meaningful when it is
shaped by response from another. Log-bearing, once experienced as slavery,
becomes the nexus for a new joint imaginative function for these two lovers.
The log-bearing is undertaken by each as a gift of love (Miranda lifts logs too),
one might say, instead of jewels and tokens. The acceptance of their “fancy”
(fantasy) by society as a whole finally integrates their private ideational world
into the larger society.

5.4 “Harmonious tongues” vs. “plain and holy innocence”

Miranda is drawn as a contrast to Ferdinand’s former court ladies. In her
modesty she doubts her worthiness to be loved, and deliberately abjures “a
harmonious tongue”. To prove her truth of love with less, not more, eloquence,
she consciously considers her methods of expression:
 “Hear my soul speak” 143

Ferdinand: Wherefore weep you?

Miranda: At mine unworthiness, that dare not offer
What I desire to give, and much less take
What I shall die to want. But this is trifling,
And all the more it seeks to hide itself,
The bigger bulk it shows. Hence, bashful cunning,
And prompt me, plain and holy innocence!
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 (III.1.76).

This speech works from obscurity of expression to clarity, after she rates herself
— “hence, bashful cunning” — for the state of mind which results in this
indirectness. She realises that her real shyness looks like the insincere pretence
of shyness and innocence attributed to court ladies, a reminder of the sonnet’s
representation of the suppression of “simple truth”:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties
(Sonnet 138).

Miranda realises that her indirect wording does not conceal her true meaning.
Her modesty forbids her to name a sexual relation, which is spoken of as what
— “what I desire to give” and “what I shall die to want”. This is indeed beating
about the bush, “trifling”. The what becomes it: the more her sexual desire
“seeks to hide itself the bigger bulk it shows” (an oddly male image in Miranda’s
words). Miranda solves her linguistic problem of naming sex by opposing the
words wife and maid, thus giving the meaning of wife a sexual weighting.
The “plain and holy innocence” which is to be preferred to coyness is a
highly compressed statement about language. Behind it lies the whole issue of
the virtue of plain speech, particularly for women. Innocence will speak plainly
in two senses: openly and also simply. Miranda refers to her unsuccessful verbal
elaboration and changes course stylistically. After her appeal to innocence, her
language becomes direct both syntactically and in content. In her directness, she
might be thought forward by all conventional standards of the time for women.
The present tense “I am your wife…” is forceful to the point of oddness, and
her determination “whether you will or no” would be brusque if it were not the
message Ferdinand desires. Brathwait (1631/1970) suggests straightforwardness
144 Lotte Troupp

as the quality of a gentlewoman, and objects to anything artificial. “Comple-

ment she affects not, as the world takes it. The word in his owne native and
unborrowed signification is good” (9,4v).

5.5 Social deprivation

The pastoral court/nature identities of Ferdinand and Miranda are elaborately
intertwined, since both have courtly and rural aspects. Nature presides over the
simple and instant conviction of their love while they are both living under
nature’s hard but true laws, away from court complication, but Prospero also
presides there and plans the union of Milan and Naples through their mar-
riage. Near the end a game of chess projects their political future — now
betrothed and no longer tentative, Miranda is revealed at chess with Ferdinand
in a tableau:
Miranda: Sweet Lord, you play me false.
Ferdinand: No, my dearest love,
I would not for the world.
Miranda: Yes, for a score of Kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it fair play (V.1.172).

Both are literally “rusticated”, yet both are court-born and trained. Ferdinand
identifies himself as a prince though he is, according to the facts, a prisoner on
a desert island labouring as a log-man. In the earlier meeting Miranda hardly
identifies herself as nature’s child, but rather as a deprived child. Through slow
monosyllables, her simple sentences grope for a frame of reference:
Miranda: 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; but by my modesty,
The jewel in my dower, I would not wish
Any companion in the world but you;
Nor can imagination form a shape
Besides yourself to like of. But I prattle
Something too wildly, and my father’s precepts
I therein do forget (III.1.48).
 “Hear my soul speak” 145

The structure of each sentence is negative — Miranda does not belong to the
world. The sparsity of her experience leaves her mind limpidly displayed to the
listener. The force of the word shape with which she makes Ferdinand a thing,
a strange object seen for the first time, describes a strong physical impact, like
seeing the sea for the first time. Imagination cannot invent Ferdinands beyond
Ferdinand. He is “more” unique to her than she is to Ferdinand as the chosen
loved one, for he is the only young man known to her apart from Caliban. In
her next speech Miranda, believing Ferdinand’s eloquent vows — “I/ Beyond all
limit of what else i’th’ world,/ Do love, prize, honour you” (III.1.71) — propos-
es marriage as the corollary of her belief in Ferdinand’s words.

5.6 Idealisation of the other

We are to see the best both of courtly and pastoral virtues in them both. Each
has been described as royal in nature and nurture, in spite of their different
circumstances. Ferdinand’s speech of praise is as courtly in its rhetorical
flourishes and worldliness as Miranda’s language is sparse. Each is a nonpareil
to the other: To Ferdinand, Miranda is “of every creature’s best”; Ferdinand is
incomparable because for Miranda he is the first man, Adam himself so to
speak. Initially at first meeting each had believed they were looking at a divine
being, struck by the other’s physical beauty:
Miranda: What is’t? — A spirit? …
It carries a brave form. But ’tis a spirit…
I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble (I.2.410,412,418).

These are Ferdinand first words to her: “Most sure, the goddess/ On whom
these airs attend” (I.2.422). Miranda rejects Prospero’s trumped-up accusations
against Ferdinand as impossible in one so beautiful:
There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple.
If the ill spirit have so fair a house,
Good things will strive to dwell with’t (I.2.458).

In this context the body as a temple for the soul is a commonplace, from St Paul:
1 Corinthians 6.19. “What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” There are
twenty-four references to this image in the Index to the Sermons of John Donne
(Reeves 1981: 21–22). Thomas Wright sums up the Christian spiritualisation of
146 Lotte Troupp

sexuality: “Beauty is the rinde of bounty…for bounty and goodness resemble

the sun, beauty the beames” (Wright 1604/1971: 200). Beauty, Wright says,
creates a passionate interaction of body and mind:
The further I passed the more objects alluring to loue I discouered: for beauty
of bodies… so rauish’d their minds that such hearts were more present in
thoughts and desires with such bodies where they liked and loued, than with
that body wherein they soiourned and liued… (O my God, the beauty of
beauty) (197).

Wright stresses intersubjectivity to the point of interchange. In The Tempest,

“At the first sight/ They have changed eyes” (I.2.441). By the end the bonding
is of the body and the soul.
Shakespeare was described as “the most passionate among us to bewaile and
bemoane the perplexities of loue” by Frances Meres in 1598 (quoted in F. E.
Halliday 1964: 313), but that was thirteen years earlier. It must be admitted that
The Tempest lacks some of the pressure and euphoria of love that we see in
earlier plays, such as Romeo and Juliet for instance, or Antony and Cleopatra
(1606–7). In The Tempest it is Ariel and Caliban who stretch the imagination.
Nowhere else, however, has Shakespeare so sharply defined an ideation of love
at the point where “internal notions” and language meet.

Notes

1. Three references in the Bible are particularly applicable to my discussion: Genesis 2:

19–20, Adam’s naming of the animals; Genesis 11:4–9, the confounding of language at Babel;
and Acts 2: 1–8, the disciples “began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them
utterance”, and are understood by the multitude each in his own language.
2. Milton in Tetrachordon still asserts that “Adam had the wisdom giv’n him to know all
creatures, and to name them according to their properties”, as John Leonard points out
(Leonard 1990: 1).
3. Logic was an important aspect of the system, as Trousdale shows in quoting exercises
based on Aristotle’s “places” of logic, the numerous categories (e.g. pp. 27–29) by which
things or ideas could be “discovered”, i.e. variously contextualised; Erasmus’s textbook De
Copia (pp. 43–55) teaches “variation”, a marked feature of Shakespeare’s earlier plays,
though not of The Tempest.
4. A brief example from Quintilian will show how deeply, in practice, rhetorical choices
might govern the plays:
Few indeed are those orators who can sweep the judge with them, lead him to adopt that attitude of
mind which they desire, and compel him to weep with them or share their anger… When tears, which
 “Hear my soul speak” 147

are the aim of most perorations, well forth from his eyes, is he not giving his verdict for all to see?
(Quintilian, 1932: II. vi. 1, p. 401).
Since “fire alone can kindle, and moisture alone can wet”, as Quintilian says (ibid. 433), the
orator who wants to move another must first feel those emotions himself. How is this
possible for an orator, asks Quintilian. “When we desire to awaken pity, we must actually
believe that the ills of which we complain have befallen our own selves… we must identify
ourselves” (ibid.437) “… I have often seen actors, both in tragedy and comedy, leave the
theatre still drowned in tears after concluding the performance of some moving role” (ibid.
437). So the actor in Hamlet proves his mettle when he weeps real tears for Hecuba.
Quintilian also makes the point that the speaker’s ethos is a chief factor in persuasion. The
middle style of oratory is frequently the most suitable because ethos speaks for itself:
The ethos which I have in my mind… is commended to our approval by goodness… the chief merit in
its expression lies in making it seem that all that we say derives directly from the facts and persons
concerned and in the revelation of the character of the orator in such a way that all may recognize it….
Consequently the oratory employed in such cases should be calm and mild with no trace of pride,
elevation or sublimity, all of which would be out of place… therefore the intermediate style is most
suitable (ibid. 427–29).
5. Joint Statement on Abolition of Nuclear Weapons by over sixty retired generals and
admirals from 17 countries. http://www.wagingpeace.org/doc/jointstate.html.
6. Genesis 11: 6. “And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one
language: and this they begin to do, neither is there any let to them from all those things
which they have imagined to doe. 7 Come on, let us goe downe and there confounde their
language, that everyone perceive not his neighbour’s speach.”
7. Of pitty, or Compassion
Pitty is a perturbation of the mind, arising from the apprehension of hurt, or troubles to another that
doth not deserve it, and which he thinketh may happen to himselfe or his…it followes that they be most
compassionate Who have passed through Misery (A Briefe: 1637).
8. Deetz attributes this concept to Husserl:
As Husserl made clear, subjectivity is intersubjectivity… the interest here in interpersonal interaction is
with the development and unfolding of meaning which is not yet available to either interactant… the
nature of dialogue is to open that which is out of reach and beyond comprehension (Deetz 1982: 6).
9. Petrarch writes in the Secretum:
Then, and only then, can a man understand the truth of the standard definition of man as a rational and
mortal animal bandied about in the schools. This then is what I meant by sinking down deeply into the
soul — not while perchance by force of habit you name ‘death’ or reiterate ‘nothing more certain than
death’ and other sayings, for these fly right by and do not sink in (212).
Trinkaus also quotes Valla, who writes that mind and tongue must coincide: “We may say
that truth is both the knowledge of the mind concerning some matter and the signification
of a speech derived from the knowledge of the mind” (212–13).
<DEST "tro-r6">
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148 Lotte Troupp

Sources

All quotations from Shakespeare’s The Tempest are from:

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Oxford: Oxford University Press.
All quotations from other works of Shakespeare are from:
Shakespeare, William. 1951. Peter Alexander (ed.). The Complete Works. London: Collins.
Bible citations are from the Bishops’ Bible of 1588.

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About the author

Lotte Troupp is a member of the English Department at Helsinki University. Her special
subject is Shakespeare, and she also writes and translates poetry and drama. She has written
on subjects related to her Ph.D. thesis on Shakespeare’s moral idea of language (Birmingham
1992), such as the rhetoric of persuasion in Shakespeare, and on image clusters which
elucidate now obsolete concepts in Shakespeare’s plays. Her current interests include
Renaissance concepts of genre and Shakespeare’s use of them.