Steve Watson

Shakespeare – The Tempest

April 9, 2019 – 8:29 am

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises.
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

The Intention

A standard interpretation of the Tempest is that it is Shakespeare’s meditations upon the theatre; that Prospero as magus is Shakespeare’s image of himself, and that Prospero’s renunciation of magic at the end is Shakespeare saying farewell to the stage. Certainly, it is plausible that this is Shakespeare’s last play (except for a couple of collaborations.) The evidence of the supposed sources for the shipwreck scene (which were written or published in 1610) and of the known  performances at court on Hallowmas night of 1611, and also in 1612-13 for the wedding celebrations of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, support the idea that it was written in about 1610. If Shakespeare had intended that this was to be his final play, it’s not impossible that he should have made it a swansong.

In support of this idea, Prospero’s very fine speech at IV, 1 after the masque, is cited:

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-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye 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.

Particular note is taken of the mention of the ‘Globe’ here (although interestingly, there is no record of a performance at the Globe;)  but even so, this would be thin evidence in itself, since the image of the world being a stage and all the men and women being players on it is hardly unknown elsewhere. In fact, the strongest argument for this theatrical theme is just that the behaviour of Prospero in determining the fates of others more or less by simply willing it so, has reminded many observers of the powers over the world of the stage exercised by the playwright. In that little realm he is almost omnipotent (through his agents) and Prospero is in a similar case on his island. Perhaps to emphasize the theatrical situation of the island Shakespeare in this play respects the Aristotelian unities in a way that he rarely does elsewhere.

The Plot Source

If that were the intention of Shakespeare in this play, then the choice of a magician as the central figure is explicable, but then the problem would be to find a model of a magician that resonates with the audience and would not condemn the author. (Shakespeare almost always has a basic source text for the fundamentals of the plots and characters of his plays.) Acceptable examples of magicians in fiction are not many. Marlowe had used Faust in 1593, of course, but that would hardly be appropriate. Other possibilities such as Circe, Pythagoras, Merlin, Simon Magus, etc. would all have their own problems.

Amongst these possibilities, however, the magician figure from the Italian Commedia dell’arte is relatively unobjectionable, and so Shakespeare seems to have adapted the plot of his play from several scenarios in that genre. These scenarios are plot outlines within which the actors of the Commedia could improvise their performances – and such performances were plausibly known to Shakespeare. (A representative collection of the scenarios was published in 1611 by Flaminio Scala in Il Teatro Delle Favole Rappresentative (tr. H. F. Salerno (1967) Scenarios of the Commedia dell’arte)) Three in particular were identified by Ferdinando Neri ((1913) Scenarios delle Maschere in Arcadia, Città di Castello, Lapi):

1. Il Mago deals with The Magician who inhabits a remote island where a group of buffoons are shipwrecked. After various tricks, plots and amorous adventures, all is happily resolved.

2. La Nave deals with a shipwreck on a remote island where a magician holds sway over some spirits. After various tricks, plots and amorous adventures, all is happily resolved. 

3. Li Tre Satiri deals with three satyrs who are used by a magician on a remote island to torment a group of shipwrecked buffoons. After various tricks, plots and amorous adventures, all is happily resolved.

An analysis of the plot points by Kathleen M Lea ((1934) Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the commedia dell’arte 1560-1620 with Special Reference to the English Stage, Oxford:OUP 2 vols) has been summarised by K.Gilvary ((2007) “The Tempest as an Italian Pastoral Comedy,” Shakespeare in Italy Conference, Utrecht, Netherlands) to give the following chart.

Table of Correspondences between Pastoral Scenarios & The Tempest Events in Pastoral Scenarios

	Mago	La Nave	Tre Satiri	Tempest
Unities of time, place and action	X	X	X	X
Scene is in a lost island	1.1	X	X	X
Magician causes a storm and a shipwrecked		3.7		X
Pantalone bemoans the shipwreck & his hunger	1.1	1.1	1.3	X
characters are trapped inside a tree and a rock		3.14	1.2	X
characters dress as / are taken by others as gods	1.5		1.11	X
food magically appears and/or disappears	1.16	1.2	2.15	X
Magician broods and considers marriages of others	1.7	1.6	1.2	X
Magician controls spirits, devils and/or satyrs	2.12	1.6	2.2	X
Magic garlands / Clothes appear		1.7	1.13	X
Attempt to steal magician’s book and / or kill him	1.15	3.13	2.14	X
Lovers are revealed as children of Pantalone and/or Gratiano		3.13 3.15	3.13	X
Magician loses his art		3.14		X

The names of the characters in the Tempest have, of course been changed. They seem to have been inspired by certain passages in William Thomas’s Historie of Italie published in 1549 (ed. G. B. Parks (1963) Folger Library, Cornell University Press:New York.) Gilvary (op. cit. pp. 6 f.) notes the story therein of “a Duke of Genoa, Prospero Adorno, who briefly held power in 1460.” He was expelled, but “returned sixteen years later and ruled as deputy for the Duke of Milan. Prospero then made an alliance with Ferdinando, King of Naples and continued ruling for many years.” Furthermore, “Thomas also describes the rule of Alfonso, King of Naples, who married the daughter of the rightful Duke of Milan, but later (in 1495) renounced his state to his son Ferdinand and sailed into Sicily where he gave himself to ‘study, solitariness, and religion.’”

The Problem of the Plot

It is clear that very many of the plot points of the Tempest are derived from or at least not much changed from the elements suggested by Shakespeare’s sources. The only significant change is that the magician is now at centre stage rather than being merely a device to drive action in the scenario. What seems to be more remarkable here is that Shakespeare has made so little effort to adapt his material so as to create a plot that makes sense of the action. For consider the plot that he gives us:

1. Prospero, exiled by his usurping brother, desires to be revenged and restored
2. By magic he wrecks the ship his brother is on as it happens to sail nearby
3. The crew is set aside asleep until the play ends
4. Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, is cast up alone. Prospero desires him to marry his daughter Miranda so he causes them to fall in love
5. Stephano and Trinculo are cast up together; they meet Caliban, Prospero’s servant, learn of Prospero’s rule, and plot to usurp him.
6. The King of Naples, the usurper, and two others are cast up together. The others plot to kill the king.
7. Ferdinand and Miranda wed
8. The plot of Caliban’s group collapses into farce
9. Prospero halts the plot against Naples
10. Prospero frees his servants Ariel and Caliban
11. Prospero forgives everyone, and returns to his rightful rule.

It is often remarked (it was remarked above) that in this play Shakespeare respects the unities; but this isn’t really true for the unity of action. If we ignore that Aristotle’s strictures were intended for tragedies, we can compare that complex of actions against Aristotle’s recommendations. In his Poetics he says it ought to be

unified in the same way as a single imitation in any other mimetic field, by having a single object: since the plot is an imitation of an action, the latter ought to be both unified and complete, and the component events ought to be so firmly compacted that if any one of them is shifted to another place, or removed, the whole is loosened up and dislocated; for an element whose addition or subtraction makes no perceptible extra difference is not really a part of the whole. (1451^a30-35)

But in making the comparison we note that:

1. The marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda is irrelevant to Prospero’s restoration.
2. The plotting of Caliban’s group is sterile and contributes nothing to the resolution.
3. The plotting against Naples is sterile and contributes nothing to the resolution.
4. The captivity and liberation of Caliban and Ariel are both irrelevant to the resolution.
5. The restoration of Prospero is achieved by his declaring it so.

In fact, nothing that happens, apart from the shipwreck bringing the usurper before him, seems to be relevant to the resolution of the play. One does not have to be wedded to a particular theory of storytelling to find this completely unsatisfactory. In this respect, the play has to be considered a failure as a play.  

However, it may be a mistake to look at the Tempest as a play like Shakespeare’s other plays. It has been difficult to assign it a genre, and has been classed as a Romance or a Tragi-comedy; but even this uncertainty may underestimate its distinct character. It may be better viewed, in fact, not so much as a play but rather as a framework or scenario into which have been fitted comic or dramatic scenes to taste and theatrical diversions to amuse and astound, beginning with the shipwreck scene that opens the performance. There is a suspicion that it was written for a royal marriage celebration, even if we can’t be sure that it was the one between the Elector Palatine and Elizabeth. The fact that there is a masque interlude in Act IV suggests this, because masques were quite unknown to the common public – they were purely a diversion for the nobility – and thus were not used by Shakespeare anywhere else; moreover, it is explicitly a nuptial masque.

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