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The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1610–11, although some researchers have argued for an earlier dating. Its protagonist is the banished sorcerer Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, who uses his magical powers to punish and forgive his enemies when he raises a tempest that drives them ashore. The entire play takes place on an island under his control whose native inhabitants, Ariel and Caliban, aid (or in the case of Caliban, hinder) his work.
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Quotations
Flout 'em and scout 'em, and scout 'em and flout 'em;Thought is free.
Stephano, scene ii
Gonzalo: Here is everything advantageous to life.Antonio: True; save means to live.
Scene i
I have great comfort from this fellow. Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows.
Gonzalo, scene i
I prithee be my god.
Caliban, scene ii
Act III==
My libraryWas dukedom large enough.
Prospero, scene ii
Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole may notHear a foot fall; we now are near his cell.
Caliban, scene i
Encyclopedia
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1610–11, although some researchers have argued for an earlier dating. Its protagonist is the banished sorcerer Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, who uses his magical powers to punish and forgive his enemies when he raises a tempest that drives them ashore. The entire play takes place on an island under his control whose native inhabitants, Ariel and Caliban, aid (or in the case of Caliban, hinder) his work. While listed as a comedy when it was initially published in the First Folio of 1623, many modern editors have since re-labeled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances.
No obvious single source has been found from which Shakespeare may have derived his plot. However, the play does seem to draw on several then-contemporary accounts of shipwrecks in the New World, as well as the works of Montaigne and Ovid's Metamorphoses. The play's basic structure reflects that of the then-popular Italian commedia dell'arte. It is the only one of Shakespeare's plays which follows the neoclassical three unities. Around the 1950s and 60s, The Tempest attracted a lot of attention from post-colonial critics for its portrayal of Ariel's and Caliban's reactions to foreign control of their island.
It did not attract a significant amount of attention before the closing of the theatres in 1642, and after the Restoration it attained popularity only in adapted versions. Theatre productions began to reinstate the original Shakespearean text in the mid-19th century, and, in the 20th century, critics and scholars undertook a significant re-appraisal of the play's value, to the extent that it is now considered to be one of Shakespeare's greatest works.
Characters
- Prospero is the usurped Duke of Milan and the play's protagonist
- Miranda is Prospero's daughter
- Ariel is an airy spirit
- Caliban is Sycorax's son, who has been enslaved by Prospero
- Alonso is the King of Naples
- Sebastian is Alonso's brother
- Antonio is Prospero's brother, the usurping Duke of Milan
- Ferdinand is Alonso's son
- Gonzalo is a counsellor who gave aid to Prospero and Miranda before they were cast off
- Adrian and Francisco are lords
- Trinculo is a jester
- Stephano is a drunken butler
- Boatswain
- Master of the ship
- Iris, Ceres and Juno are spirits
- Sycorax is Caliban's mother and an evil witch
Synopsis
The sorcerer Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, and his daughter, Miranda, have been stranded for twelve years on an island after Prospero's jealous brother Antonio — helped by Alonso, the King of Naples — deposed him and set him adrift with the then three-year-old Miranda. Gonzalo, the King's counsellor, had secretly supplied their boat with plenty of food, water, clothes and the most-prized books from Prospero's library. Possessed of magic powers due to his great learning, Prospero is reluctantly served by a spirit, Ariel, whom Prospero had rescued from a tree in which he had been trapped by the witch Sycorax. Prospero maintains Ariel's loyalty by repeatedly promising to release the "airy spirit" from servitude. Sycorax had been banished to this island, and had died before Prospero's arrival. Her son, Caliban, a deformed monster and the only non-spiritual inhabitant before the arrival of Prospero, was initially adopted and raised by him. He taught Prospero how to survive on the island, while Prospero and Miranda taught Caliban religion and their own language. Following Caliban's attempted rape of Miranda, he had been compelled by Prospero to serve as the sorcerer's slave. In slavery, Caliban has come to view Prospero as a usurper and has grown to resent him and his daughter. Prospero and Miranda in turn view Caliban with contempt and disgust.
The play opens as Prospero, having divined that his brother, Antonio, is on a ship passing close by the island, has raised a tempest which causes the ship to run aground. Also on the ship are Antonio's friend and fellow conspirator, King Alonso of Naples, Alonso's brother and son (Sebastian and Ferdinand), and Alonso's advisor, Gonzalo. All these passengers are returning from the wedding of Alonso's daughter Claribel with the King of Tunis. Prospero, by his spells, contrives to separate the survivors of the wreck into several groups. Alonso and Ferdinand are separated and believe one another to be dead.
Three plots then alternate through the play. In one, Caliban falls in with Stephano and Trinculo, two drunkards, whom he believes to have come from the moon. They attempt to raise a rebellion against Prospero, which ultimately fails. In another, Prospero works to establish a romantic relationship between Ferdinand and Miranda; the two fall immediately in love, but Prospero worries that "too light winning [may] make the prize light", and compels Ferdinand to become his servant, pretending that he regards him as a spy. In the third subplot, Antonio and Sebastian conspire to kill Alonso and Gonzalo so that Sebastian can become King. They are thwarted by Ariel, at Prospero's command. Ariel appears to the "three men of sin" (Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian) as a harpy, reprimanding them for their betrayal of Prospero. Prospero manipulates the course of his enemies' path through the island, drawing them closer and closer to him.
In the conclusion, all the main characters are brought together before Prospero, who forgives Alonso. He also forgives Antonio and Sebastian, but warns them against further betrayal. Ariel is charged to prepare the proper sailing weather to guide Alonso and his entourage (including Prospero himself and Miranda) back to the Royal fleet and then to Naples, where Ferdinand and Miranda will be married. After discharging this task, Ariel will finally be free. Prospero pardons Caliban, who is sent to prepare Prospero’s cell, to which Alonso and his party are invited for a final night before their departure. Prospero indicates that he intends to entertain them with the story of his life on the island. Prospero has resolved to break and bury his staff, and "drown" his book of magic, and in his epilogue, shorn of his magic powers, he invites the audience to set him free from the island with their applause.
Sources
There is no obvious single source for the plot of The Tempest; it seems to have been created out of an amalgamation of sources. Since source scholarship began in the 18th century, researchers have suggested that passages from Erasmus's Naufragium (The Shipwreck, published in 1523 and translated into English in 1606) and Richard Eden's 1555 translation of Peter Martyr's De orbo novo (or Decades of the New Worlde Or West India, 1530) influenced the composition of the play. In addition, many scholars see parallel imagery in a work by William Strachey, an eyewitness report of the real-life shipwreck of the Sea Venture in 1609 on the islands of Bermuda while sailing toward Virginia; a character in the play makes reference to the "still-vexed Bermoothes." Strachey's report was written in 1610; although it was not printed until 1625, it circulated in manuscript and many critics think that Shakespeare may have taken the idea of the shipwreck and some images from it. Another Sea Venture survivor, Sylvester Jordain, also published an account, A Discovery of The Barmudas, so the event would have been widely known. Kenneth Muir warns that even though "[t]here is little doubt that Shakespeare had read ... William Strachey's True Reportory of the Wracke" and other accounts, "[t]he extent of the verbal echoes of [the Bermuda] pamphlets has, I think, been exaggerated. There is hardly a shipwreck in history or fiction which does not mention splitting, in which the ship is not lightened of its cargo, in which the passengers do not give themselves up for lost, in which north winds are not sharp, and in which no one gets to shore by clinging to wreckage," and goes on to say that "Strachey's account of the shipwreck is blended with memories of St Paul's – in which too not a hair perished – and with Erasmus' colloquy." Along these lines, as a possible source for the play, modern researchers have recently added Ariosto's 1516 Orlando Furioso, which contains many of the storm references also found in Naufragium.
The Tempest may take its overall structure from traditional Italian commedia dell'arte, which sometimes featured a magus and his daughter, their supernatural attendants, and a number of rustics. The commedia often featured a clown known as Arlecchino (or his predecessor, Zanni) and his partner Brighella, who bear a striking resemblance to Stephano and Trinculo; a lecherous Neapolitan hunchback named Pulcinella, who corresponds to Caliban; and the clever and beautiful Isabella, whose wealthy and manipulative father, Pantalone, constantly seeks a suitor for her, thus mirroring the relationship between Miranda and Prospero.
One of Gonzalo's speeches is derived from Montaigne's essay Of the Canibales, which John Florio translated into English in 1603, that praises the society of the Caribbean natives:
In addition, much of Prospero's renunciative speech is taken word for word from a speech by Medea in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses.
Date and text
The Tempest is believed to have been written in 1610–11, and is generally accepted as the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone, although some researchers have questioned both assertions. Scholars also note that it is impossible to determine if the play was written before, after, or at the same time as The Winter's Tale, whose dating has been equally problematic. Edward Blount entered The Tempest into the Stationers' Register on 8 November 1623. It was one of 16 Shakespearean plays that Blount registered on that date.
Edmond Malone placed the emphasis for the 1610-11 date on the account by Silvester Jourdain — A Discovery of the Bermudas (13 October 1610) — and the Virginia Council of London's A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (8 November 1610), whereas E.K. Chambers identified William Strachey's A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight as Shakespeare's "main authority" for The Tempest.
Some scholars have challenged the 1610–11 dating of the play, discounting the likelihood of Strachey's narrative as a source and proposing other, earlier, source material. This idea may be traced to the 19th century scholars Joseph Hunter and Karl Elze and has recently been supported by researchers Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky. Alden T. Vaughan, however, challenges the conclusions of Kositsky and Stritmatter in his 2008 paper "A Closer Look at the Evidence".
The Tempest presents relatively few textual problems in comparison with many of Shakespeare's other plays. The text as we have it has a simple history: it was first published in the First Folio in December 1623. In that volume, The Tempest is the first play in the section of Comedies, and therefore the opening play of the collection. This printing includes more stage directions than any of Shakespeare's other plays, although these directions seem to have been written more for a reader than for an actor. This leads scholars to infer that the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, added the directions to the folio to aid the reader, and that they were not necessarily what Shakespeare originally intended. Scholars have also wondered about the masque in act 4, which seems to have been added as an afterthought, possibly in honor of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V in 1613. However, other scholars see this as unlikely, arguing that to take the masque out of the play creates more problems than it solves.
Themes and motifs
The theatre
The Tempest is explicitly concerned with its own nature as a play, frequently drawing links between Prospero's Art and theatrical illusion; the shipwreck was a spectacle that Ariel performed, while Antonio and Sebastian are cast in a troop to act. Prospero may even refer to the Globe Theatre when he describes the whole world as an illusion: "the great globe ... shall dissolve ... like this insubstantial pageant". Ariel frequently disguises himself as figures from Classical mythology, for example a nymph, a harpy and Ceres, acting as the latter in a masque and anti-masque that Prospero creates.
Early critics, such as Thomas Campbell in 1838, saw this constant allusion to the theatre as an indication that Prospero was meant to represent Shakespeare; the character's renunciation of magic thus signalling Shakespeare's farewell to the stage. This theory persists among later critics, and remains solidly within the critical canon.
Magic
Magic was a controversial subject in Shakespeare's day. In Italy in 1600, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his occult studies. Outside the Catholic world, in Protestant England, where Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, magic was also taboo; not all "magic," however, was considered evil. Several thinkers took a more rational approach to the study of the supernatural, with the determination to discover the workings of unusual phenomena. The German Henricus Cornelius Agrippa was one such thinker, who published in De Occulta Philosophia his observations of "divine" magic. Agrippa's work influenced Dr. John Dee, an Englishman and student of supernatural phenomena. Both Agrippa and Dee describe a kind of magic similar to Prospero's: one that is based on 16th-century science, rationality, and divinity, rather than the occult. When King James took the throne, Dee found himself under attack for his beliefs, but was able to defend himself successfully by explaining the divine nature of his profession. However, he died in disgrace in 1608.
Shakespeare is also careful to make the distinction that Prospero is a rational, and not an occultist, magician. He does this by providing a contrast to him in Sycorax. Sycorax is said to have worshiped the devil and been full of "earthy and abhored commands". She was unable to control Ariel, who was "too delicate" for such dark tasks. Prospero's rational goodness enables him to control Ariel where Sycorax can only trap him in a tree. Sycorax's magic is frequently described as destructive and terrible, where Prospero's is said to be wondrous and beautiful. Prospero seeks to set things right in his world through his magic, and once that is done, he renounces it, setting Ariel free.
Criticism and interpretation
Genre
The story draws heavily on the tradition of the romance, a fictitious narrative set far away from ordinary life. Romances were typically based around themes such as the supernatural, wandering, exploration and discovery. They were often set in coastal regions, and typically featured exotic, fantastical locations and themes of transgression and redemption, loss and retrieval, exile and reunion. As a result, while The Tempest was originally listed as a comedy in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, subsequent editors have chosen to give it the more specific label of Shakespearean romance. Like the other romances, the play was influenced by the then-new genre of tragicomedy, introduced by John Fletcher in the first decade of the seventeenth century and developed in the Beaumont and Fletcher collaborations, as well as by the explosion of development of the courtly masque form by such as Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones at the same time.
Dramatic structure
The Tempest differs from Shakespeare's other plays in its observation of a stricter, more organised neo-classical style. The clearest indication of this is Shakespeare's respect for the three unities in the play: the Unities of Time, Place, and Action. Shakespeare's other plays rarely respected the three unities, taking place in separate locations miles apart and over several days or even years. The play's events unfold in real time before the audience, Prospero even declaring at the end of the play that everything has happened in mere hours. All action is unified into one basic plot: Prospero's struggle to regain his dukedom; it is also confined to one place, a fictional island, which many scholars agree is meant to be located in the Mediterranean Sea. (Another reading suggests that it takes place in the New World, as some parts read like records of English and Spanish conquest in the Americas. Still others argue that the Island can represent any land that has been colonised.)
Postcolonialist
In Shakespeare's day, most of the planet was still being "discovered", and stories were coming back from distant islands, with myths about the Cannibals of the Caribbean, faraway Edens, and distant tropical Utopias. With the character Caliban (whose name is roughly anagrammatic to Cannibal), Shakespeare may be offering an in-depth discussion into the morality of colonialism. Different views of this are found in the play, with examples including Gonzalo's Utopia, Prospero's enslavement of Caliban, and Caliban's subsequent resentment. Caliban is also shown as one of the most natural characters in the play, being very much in touch with the natural world (and modern audiences have come to view him as far nobler than his two Old World friends, Stephano and Trinculo, although the original intent of the author may have been different). There is evidence that Shakespeare drew on Montaigne's essay Of Cannibals — which discusses the values of societies insulated from European influences — while writing The Tempest.
Beginning in about 1950, with the publication of Psychology of Colonization by Octave Mannoni, The Tempest was viewed more and more through the lens of postcolonial theory. This new way of looking at the text explored the effect of the coloniser (Prospero) on the colonised (Ariel and Caliban). Though Ariel is often overlooked in these debates in favor of the more intriguing Caliban, he is nonetheless an essential component of them. The French writer Aimé Césaire, in his play Une Tempête sets The Tempest in Haiti, portraying Ariel as a mulatto who, unlike the more rebellious Caliban, feels that negotiation and partnership is the way to freedom from the colonisers. Fernandez Retamar sets his version of the play in Cuba, and portrays Ariel as a wealthy Cuban (in comparison to the lower-class Caliban) who also must choose between rebellion or negotiation. Although scholars have suggested that his dialogue with Caliban in Act two, Scene one, contains hints of a future alliance between the two when Prospero leaves, Ariel is generally viewed by scholars as the good servant, in comparison with the conniving Caliban — a view which Shakespeare's audience may well have shared. Ariel is used by some postcolonial writers as a symbol of their efforts to overcome the effects of colonisation on their culture. Michelle Cliff, for example, a Jamaican author, has said that she tries to combine Caliban and Ariel within herself to create a way of writing that represents her culture better. Such use of Ariel in postcolonial thought is far from uncommon; the spirit is even the namesake of a scholarly journal covering post-colonial criticism.
Feminist
The Tempest has only one female character, Miranda. Other women, such as Caliban's mother Sycorax, Miranda's mother and Alonso's daughter Claribel, are only mentioned. Because of the small role women play in the story in comparison to other Shakespeare plays, The Tempest has not attracted much feminist criticism. Miranda is typically viewed as being completely deprived of freedom by her father. Her only duty in his eyes is to remain chaste. Ann Thompson argues that Miranda, in a manner typical of women in a colonial atmosphere, has completely internalised the patriarchal order of things, thinking of herself as subordinate to her father.
The less-prominent women mentioned in the play are subordinated as well, as they are only described through the men of the play. Most of what is said about Sycorax, for example, is said by Prospero. Further, Stephen Orgel notes that Prospero has never met Sycorax—all he learned about her he learned from Ariel. According to Orgel, Prospero's suspicion of women makes him an unreliable source of information. Orgel suggests that he is sceptical of female virtue in general, citing his ambiguous remark about his wife's fidelity.
Afterlife
Shakespeare's day
The first recorded performance of The Tempest occurred on 1 November 1611, when the King's Men acted the play before James I and the English royal court at Whitehall Palace on Hallowmas night. It was also one of the eight Shakespearean plays acted at Court during the winter of 1612–13, as part of the festivities surrounding the marriage of Princess Elizabeth with Frederick V, the Elector Palatine of the Rhine. There is no further public performance recorded prior to the Restoration; but in his preface to the 1667 Dryden/Davenant version, Sir William Davenant states that The Tempest had been performed at the Blackfriars Theatre. Careful consideration of stage directions within the play supports this, strongly suggesting that the play was written with Blackfriars Theatre rather than the Globe Theatre in mind.
Restoration and 18th century
Adaptations of the play, not Shakespeare's original, dominated the performance history of The Tempest from the restoration until the mid-nineteenth century. All theatres were closed down by the puritan government during the Commonwealth. Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, two patent companies—the King's Company and the Duke's Company—were established, and the existing theatrical repertoire divided between them. Sir William Davenant's Duke's Company had the rights to perform Shakespeare's Tempest. However, the play was considered unsuitable for Restoration audiences, and in 1667 it was heavily cut and adapted by Davenant and John Dryden, and given the title The Tempest or, The Enchanted Island. Dryden and Davenant added characters and plotlines: Miranda has a sister, named Dorinda; and Caliban a sister, also named Sycorax. As a parallel to Shakespeare's Miranda/Ferdinand plot, Prospero has a foster-son, Hippolito, who has never set eyes on a woman. Hippolito was a popular breeches role, a man played by a woman, popular with restoration theatre management for the opportunity to reveal actresses' legs. Scholar Michael Dobson has described Enchanted Island as "the most frequently revived play of the entire Restoration" and as establishing the importance of enhanced and additional roles for women.
In 1674, Thomas Shadwell re-adapted Dryden and Davenant's Enchanted Island as an opera: although in Restoration theatre "opera" did not have its modern meaning, instead referring to a play with added songs, closer in style to a modern musical comedy. Restoration playgoers appear to have regarded the Dryden/Davenant/Shadwell version as Shakespeare's: Samuel Pepys, for example, described it as "an old play of Shakespeares" in his diary. The opera was extremely popular, and Pepys considered it "full of so good variety, that I cannot be more pleased almost in a comedy." The Prospero in this version is very different from Shakespeare's: Eckhard Auberlen describes him as "...reduced to the status of a Polonius-like overbusy father, intent on protecting the chastity of his two sexually naive daughters while planning advantageous dynastic marriages for them." Enchanted Island was successful enough to provoke a parody, The Mock Tempest, written by Thomas Duffett for the King's Company in 1675. It opened with what appeared to be a tempest, but turns out to be a riot in a brothel.
In the early eighteenth century, the Dryden/Davenant/Shadwell version dominated the stage. Ariel was—with two exceptions—played by a woman, and invariably by a graceful dancer and superb singer. Caliban was a comedian's role, played by actors "known for their awkward figures". In 1756, David Garrick staged another operatic version, a "three-act extravaganza" with music by John Christopher Smith.
The Tempest was one of the staples of the repertoire of Romantic Era theatres. John Philip Kemble produced an acting version which was closer to Shakespeare's original, but nevertheless retained Dorinda and Hippolito. Kemble was much-mocked for his insistence on archaic pronunciation of Shakespeare's texts, including "aitches" for "aches". It was said that spectators "packed the pit, just to enjoy hissing Kemble's delivery of 'I'll rack thee with old cramps, / Fill all they bones with aches'." The actor-managers of the Romantic Era established the fashion for opulence in sets and costumes which would dominate Shakespeare performances until the late nineteenth century: Kemble's Dorinda and Miranda, for example, were played "in white ornamented with spotted furs".
In 1757, a year after the debut of his operatic version, David Garrick produced a heavily-cut performance of Shakespeare's script at Drury Lane, and it was revived, profitably, throughout the century.
19th century
It was not until William Charles Macready's influential production in 1838, that Shakespeare's text established its primacy over the adapted and operatic versions which had been popular for most of the previous two centuries. The performance was particularly admired for George Bennett's performance as Caliban: it was described by Patrick MacDonnell—in his An Essay on the Play of The Tempest published in 1840—as "maintaining in his mind, a stong resistance to that tyranny, which held him in the thraldom of slavery".
The Victorian Era marked the height of the movement which would later be described as "pictorial": based on lavish sets and visual spectacle, heavily cut texts making room for lengthy scene-changes, and elaborate stage effects. In Charles Kean's 1857 production of The Tempest, Ariel was several times seen to descend in a ball of fire. The hundred and forty stage-hands supposedly employed on this production were described by the Literary Gazette as "unseen ... but alas never unheard". Hans Christian Andersen also saw this production and described Ariel as "isolated by the electric ray", referring to the effect of a carbon arc lamp directed at the actress playing the role. The next generation of producers, which included William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker, returned to a leaner and more text-based style.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became Caliban, not Prospero, who was perceived as the star act of the Tempest, and was the role which the actor-managers chose for themselves. Frank Benson researched the role by viewing monkeys and baboons at the zoo: on stage, he hung upside-down from a tree and gibbered.
20th century & beyond
Continuing the late-nineteenth-century tradition, in 1904 Herbert Beerbohm Tree wore fur and seaweed to play Caliban, with waist-length hair and apelike bearing, suggestive of a primitive part-animal part-human stage of evolution. This "missing-link" portrayal of Caliban became the norm in productions until Roger Livesey, in 1934, was the first actor to play the role with black makeup. In 1945 Canada Lee played the role at the Theatre Guild in New York, establishing a tradition of black actors taking the role, including Earle Hyman in 1960 and James Earl Jones in 1962.
In 1916, Percy MacKaye presented a community masque, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, at the Lewisohn Stadium in New York. Amidst a huge cast of dancers and masquers, the pageant centers on the rebellious nature of Caliban but ends with his plea for more knowledge ("I yearn to build, to be thine Artist / And 'stablish this thine Earth among the stars- / Beautiful!") followed by Shakespeare, as a character, reciting Prospero's "Our revels now are ended" speech.
John Gielgud played Prospero numerous times, and called it his favorite role. Douglas Brode describes him as "universally heralded as... [the 20th] century's greatest stage Prospero". His first appearance in the role was in 1930: he wore a turban, later confessing that he intended to look like Dante. He played the role in three more stage productions, lastly at the Royal National Theatre in 1974.
Peter Brook directed an experimental production at the Round House in 1968, in which the text was "almost wholly abandoned" in favour of mime. According to Margaret Croydon's review, Sycorax was "portrayed by an enormous woman able to expand her face and body to still larger proportions - a fantastic emblem of the grotesque ... [who] suddenly ... gives a horrendous yell, and Caliban, with black sweater over his head, emerges from between her legs: Evil is born."
In spite of the existing tradition of a black actor playing Caliban opposite a white Prospero, colonial interpretations of the play did not find their way onto the stage until the 1970s. Performances in England directed by Jonathan Miller and by Clifford Williams explicitly portrayed Prospero as coloniser. Miller's production was described, by David Hirst, as depicting "the tragic and inevitable disintegration of a more primitive culture as the result of European invasion and colonisation." Miller developed this approach in his 1988 production at the Old Vic in London, starring Max von Sydow as Prospero. This used a mixed cast made up of white actors as the humans and black actors playing the spirits and creatures of the island. According to Michael Billington, "von Sydow's Prospero became a white overlord manipulating a mutinous black Caliban and a collaborative Ariel keenly mimicking the gestures of the island's invaders. The colonial metaphor was pushed through to its logical conclusion so that finally Ariel gathered up the pieces of Prospero's abandoned staff and, watched by awe-struck tribesmen, fitted them back together to hold his wand of office aloft before an immobilised Caliban. The Tempest suddenly acquired a new political dimension unforeseen by Shakespeare."
Psychoanalytic interpretations have proved more difficult to depict on stage. Gerald Freedman's production at the American Shakespeare Theatre in 1979 and Ron Daniels' Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1982 both attempted to depict Ariel and Caliban as opposing aspects of Prospero's psyche. However neither was regarded as wholly successful: Shakespeare Quarterly, reviewing Freedman's production, commented that "Mr. Freedman did nothing on stage to make such a notion clear to any audience that had not heard of it before."
In 1988, John Wood played Prospero for the RSC, emphasising the character's human complexity. The Financial Times reviewer described him as "a demented stage manager on a theatrical island suspended between smouldering rage at his usurpation and unbridled glee at his alternative ethereal power".
Japanese theatre styles have been applied to The Tempest. In 1988 and again in 1992 Yukio Ninagawa brought his version of The Tempest to the UK. It was staged as a rehearsal of a Noh drama, with a traditional Noh theatre at the back of the stage, but also using elements which were at odds with Noh conventions. In 1992, Minoru Fujita presented a Bunraku (Japanese puppet) version in Osaka and at the Tokyo Globe.
Sam Mendes directed a 1993 RSC production in which Simon Russell Beale's Ariel was openly resentful of the control exercised by Alec McCowen's Prospero. Controversially, in the early performances of the run, Ariel spat at Prospero, once granted his freedom. An entirely different effect was achieved by George C. Wolfe in the outdoor New York Shakespeare Festival production of 1995, where the casting of Aunjanue Ellis as Ariel opposite Patrick Stewart's Prospero charged the production with erotic tensions. Late twentieth-century productions have gradually increased the focus placed on sexual (and sometimes homosexual) tensions between the characters, including Prospero/Miranda, Prospero/Ariel, Miranda/Caliban, Miranda/Ferdinand and even Caliban/Trinculo.
The Tempest was performed at the Globe Theatre in 2000 with Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero, playing the role as neither male nor female, but with "authority, humanity and humour... a watchful parent to both Miranda and Ariel." While the audience respected Prospero, Jasper Britton's Caliban "was their man" (in Peter Thomson's words), in spite of the fact that he spat fish at the groundlings, and singled some of them out for humiliating encounters.
By the end of 2005, BBC Radio had aired over 300 Shakespeare performances in its history, and The Tempest was the most popular of them, having been produced 21 times.
Mark Rylance played Prospero, Stephano, Sebastian and Alonso in an innovative take on the play performed by three actors at Shakespeare's Globe in 2005.
In 2006 Rupert Goold directed the play for the RSC with Patrick Stewart as Prospero.
In 2009 Anthony Sher played Prospero and John Kani Caliban in a joint RSC/Baxter Theatre Centre production that toured South Africa and the UK.
Music
The Tempest has proved more popular as a subject for composers than most of Shakespeare's plays. Scholar Julie Sanders ascribes this to the "perceived 'musicality' or lyricism" of the play.
Two settings of songs from The Tempest which may have been used in performances during Shakespeare's lifetime have survived. These are Full Fathom Five and Where The Bee Sucks There Suck I in the 1659 publication Cheerful Ayres or Ballads, in which they are attributed to Robert Johnson, the lutenist to James I. It has been common throughout the history of the play for the producers to commission contemporary settings of these two songs, and also of Come Unto These Yellow Sands.
Full Fathom Five and The Cloud-Capp'd Towers are two of the Three Shakespeare Songs set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. These were written for a cappella SATB choir in 1951 for the British Federation of Music Festivals, and they remain a popular part of British choral repertoire today. Michael Nyman's Ariel Songs are taken from his score for the film Prospero's Books.
The Tempest has also influenced songs written in the "folk and "hippie" traditions: for example, versions of Full Fathom Five were recorded by Marianne Faithfull for Come My Way in 1965 and by Pete Seeger for Dangerous Songs!? in 1966.
Among those who wrote incidental music to The Tempest were:
La tempête, a French translation by Maurice Bouchor. This is believed to be the first orchestral work that made use of the celesta. Jean Sibelius: his 1926 incidental music was written for a lavish production at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. An epilogue was added for a 1927 performance in Helsinki. He represented individual characters through instrumentation choices: particularly admired was his use of harps and percussion to represent Prospero, said to capture the "resonant ambiguity of the character". Lennox Berkeley, Arthur Bliss, Engelbert Humperdinck, Willem Pijper and Henry Purcell.
At least forty-six operas or semi-operas based on The Tempest exist. In addition to the Dryden/Davenant and Garrick versions mentioned in the "Restoration and 18th century" section above, Frederic Reynolds produced an operatic version in 1821, with music by Sir Henry Bishop. Other pre-twentieth-century operas based on The Tempest include Fromental Halévy's La Tempesta (1850) and Zdenek Fibich's Boure (1894).
In the twentieth-century, Kurt Atterberg's Stormen premiered in 1948 and Frank Martin's Der Sturm in 1965. Michael Tippett's 1971 opera The Knot Garden, contains various allusions to The Tempest. In Act 3, a psychoanalyst, Mangus, pretends to be Prospero and uses situations from Shakespeare's play in his therapy sessions. John Eaton, in 1985, produced a fusion of live jazz with pre-recorded electronic music, with a libretto by Andrew Porter. Michael Nyman's 1991 opera Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs was first performed as an opera-ballet by Karine Saporta. This opera is unique in that the three vocalists, a soprano, contralto, and tenor, are voices rather than individual characters, with the tenor just as likely as the soprano to sing Miranda, or all three sing as one character.
The soprano who sings the part of Ariel in Thomas Adès' twenty-first century opera is stretched at the lower end of the register, highlighting the androgyny of the role.
Orchestral works for concert presentation include Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's fantasy The Tempest (1873), Fibich's symphonic poem Boure (1880), John Knowles Paine's symphonic poem The Tempest, Arthur Honegger's orchestral prelude (1923), and Egon Wellesz's Prosperos Beschwörungen (five works 1934-36).
Ballet sequences have been used in many performances of the play since Restoration times.
Ludwig van Beethoven's 1802 Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, was given the subtitle "The Tempest" some time after Beethoven's death because, when asked about the meaning of the sonata, Beethoven was alleged to have said "Read The Tempest". But this story comes from his associate Anton Schindler, who is often not trustworthy.
Literature and art
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the earliest poets to be influenced by The Tempest. His With a Guitar, To Jane identifies Ariel with the poet and his songs with poetry. The poem uses simple diction to convey Ariel's closeness to nature and "imitates the straightforward beauty of Shakespeare's original songs." Following the publication of Darwin's ideas on evolution, writers began to question mankind's place in the world and its relationship with God. One writer who explored these ideas was Robert Browning, whose poem Caliban upon Setebos (1864) sets Shakespeare's character pondering theological and philosophical questions. The French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote a closet drama, Caliban: Suite de La Tempête (Caliban: Sequel to The Tempest), in 1878. This features a female Ariel who follows Prospero back to Milan, and a Caliban who leads a coup against Prospero, after the success of which he actively imitates his former master's virtues. W. H. Auden's "long poem" The Sea and the Mirror takes the form of a reflection by each of the supporting characters of The Tempest on their experiences. The poem takes a Freudian viewpoint, seeing Caliban (whose lengthy contribution is a prose poem) as Prospero's libido.
Caliban influenced numerous works of African literature in the 1970s, including pieces by Taban Lo Liyong in Uganda, Lemuel Johnson in Sierra Leone, Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Kenya, and David Wallace of Zambia's Do You Love Me, Master?. A similar phenomenon occurred in late 20th-century Canada, where several writers produced works inspired by Miranda, including The Diviners by Margaret Laurence, Prospero's Daughter by Constance Beresford-Howe and The Measure of Miranda by Sarah Murphy. Other writers have feminised Ariel (as in Marina Warner's novel Indigo) or Caliban (as in Suniti Namjoshi's sequence of poems Snaphots of Caliban).
From the mid-eighteenth century, Shakespeare's plays, including The Tempest, began to appear as the subject of paintings. In around 1735, William Hogarth produced his painting A Scene from The Tempest: "a baroque, sentimental fantasy costumed in the style of Van Dyck and Rembrandt". The painting is based upon Shakespeare's text, containing no representation of the stage, nor of the (Davenant-Dryden centred) stage tradition of the time. Henry Fuseli, in a painting commissioned for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (1789) modelled his Prospero on Leonardo da Vinci. These two eighteenth century depictions of the play indicate that Prospero was regarded as its moral centre: viewers of Hogarth's and Fuseli's paintings would have accepted Prospero's wisdom and authority. John Everett Millais's Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1851) is among the Pre-Raphaelite paintings based on the play. In the late nineteenth century, artists tended to depict Caliban as a Darwinian "missing-link", with fish-like or ape-like features, as evidenced in Noel Paton's Caliban.
Charles Knight produced the Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare in eight volumes (1838–43). The work attempted to translate the contents of the plays into pictorial form. This extended not just to the action, but also to images and metaphors: Gonzalo's line about "mountaineers dewlapped like bulls" is illustrated with a picture of a Swiss peasant with a goitre. In 1908, Edmund Dulac produced an edition of Shakespeare's Comedy of The Tempest with a scholarly plot summary and commentary by Arthur Quiller-Couch, lavishly bound and illustrated with 40 watercolour illustrations. The illustrations highlight the fairy-tale quality of the play, avoiding its dark side. Of the 40, only 12 are direct depictions of the action of the play: the others are based on action before the play begins, or on images such as "full fathom five thy father lies" or "sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not".
Screen
See also Shakespeare on screen (The Tempest).
The Tempest first appeared on the screen in 1905. Charles Urban filmed the opening storm sequence of Herbert Beerbohm Tree's version at Her Majesty's Theatre for a 2½-minute flicker, on which individual frames were hand-tinted to give the impression of colour film, long before its invention. In 1908, Percy Stowe directed a Tempest running a little over ten minutes, which is now a part of the British Film Institute's compilation Silent Shakespeare. Much of its action takes place on Prospero's island before the storm which opens Shakespeare's play. At least two further silent versions, one of them by Edwin Thanhouser, are known to have existed, but have been lost. The plot was adapted for the Western Yellow Sky, directed by William A. Wellman, in 1946.
The 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet set the story on the planet Altair IV. Professor Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) are the Prospero and Miranda figures. Ariel is represented by the helpful Robbie the Robot, but Caliban is represented by the dangerous and invisible "monster from the id": a projection of Morbius' psyche.
In the opinion of Douglas Brode, there has only been one screen "performance" of The Tempest since the silent era: he describes all other versions as "variations". That one performance is the Hallmark Hall of Fame version from 1960, directed by George Schaefer, and starring Maurice Evans, Lee Remick and Roddy McDowall. Critic Virginia Vaughan praised it as "light as a soufflé, but ... substantial enough for the main course."
In 1980, Derek Jarman produced a homoerotic Tempest which used Shakespeare's language, but was most notable for its deviations from Shakespeare. One scene shows a corpulent and naked Sycorax (Claire Davenport) breastfeeding her adult son Caliban (Jack Birkett). The film reaches its climax with Elisabeth Welch belting out Stormy Weather. The central performances were Toyah Willcox' Miranda and Heathcote Williams' Prospero, a "dark brooding figure who takes pleasure in exploiting both his servants"
Paul Mazursky's 1982 modern-language adaptation of The Tempest, with Philip (Prospero) as a disillusioned New York architect who retreats to a lonely Greek island with his daughter Miranda, dealt frankly with the sexual tensions of the characters' isolated existence. The Caliban character, the goatherd Kalibanos, asks Philip which of them is going to have sex with Miranda. John Cassavetes played Philip, Raul Julia Kalibanos, and Molly Ringwald Miranda. Susan Sarandon plays the Ariel character, Philip's frequently-bored girlfriend Aretha. The film has been criticised as "overlong and rambling", but also praised for its good humour, especially in a sequence in which Kalibanos' and his goats dance to Kander and Ebb's New York, New York.
John Gielgud has written that playing Prospero in a film of The Tempest was his life's ambition. Over the years, he approached Alain Resnais, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Orson Welles to direct. Eventually, the project was taken on by Peter Greenaway, who directed Prospero's Books (1991) featuring "an 87-year-old John Gielgud and an impressive amount of nudity". Prospero is reimagined as the author of The Tempest, speaking the lines of the other characters, as well as his own. Although the film was acknowledged as innovative in its use of Quantel Paintbox to create visual tableaux, resulting in "unprecedented visual complexity", critical responses to the film were frequently negative: John Simon called it "contemptible and pretentious".
Closer to the spirit of Shakespeare's original, in the view of critics such as Brode, is Leon Garfield's abridgement of the play for S4C's 1992 Shakespeare: The Animated Tales series. The 29-minute production, directed by Stanislav Sokolov and featuring Timothy West as the voice of Prospero, used stop-motion puppets to capture the fairy-tale quality of the play. Disney's animated feature Pocahontas has been described as a "politically corrected" Tempest. Another "offbeat variation" (in Brode's words) was produced for NBC in 1998: Jack Bender's The Tempest featured Peter Fonda as Gideon Prosper, a Southern slave-owner forced off his plantation by his brother shortly before the Civil War. A magician who has learned his art from one of his slaves, Prosper uses his magic to protect his teenage daughter and to assist the Union Army.
Secondary sources
Further reading
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, London, Faber and Faber, 1992, pp. 379-500.G. Wilson Knight, Shakespearean Dimensions, Harvester, 1984.Gerald Graff and James Phelan, The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, London, MacMillan, 2000Keith Sagar, "The Crime Against Caliban" in Literature and the Crime Against Nature, London, Chaucer Press, 2005.Frances A. Yates, Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.McCollum, John I. Jr. 1961. The Restoration Stage. Houghton Mifflin Research Series, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Riverside Press. ASIN: B000FVW5YI.
External links
- - plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg
- - scene indexed, online version of the play.
- - HTML version of this title.
- - Searchable, scene-indexed version of the play.
- in E. Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898).
- at Web English Teacher
- at Virtual Jamestown.
- - a free recorded performance of The Tempest by the Universal Shakespeare Broadcasting Company.
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