Enchanted Shows

Vision and Structure in Elizabethan and Shakespearean Comedy about Magic

Elissa Hare

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315305899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

The book, first published in 1988, examines the role of magic in Elizabethan and Shakespearean theatre. The author observes how certain plays, including Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, rationalise the unrealism and improbabilities typical of romantic comedy as miracles wrought by specifically magical intervention. The author also explores the ways in which playwrights justify structural discontinuity by the working of magic. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.

Chapter V
Shakespeare’s dissolving magic: The Tempest

Critics often remark the compelling austerity of The Tempest. L.C. Knights attributes the play’s mysteriousness, and his own “difficulty in saying simply and clearly where (he) feels the play’s greatness to reside,” to its “spare ... notation, that only gets its effect when the reader or spectator is prepared to collaborate fully to give apparently slight clues full weight.”¹ Anne Barton traces The Tempest’s power to its extraordinary combination of density and openness:

Spare, intense, concentrated to the point of being
riddling, The Tempest provokes imaginative
activity on the part of its audiences or readers.
Its very compression, the fact that it seems to
hide as much as it reveals, compels a peculiarly
creative response. A need to invent links between
words, to expand events and characters in order to
understand them, to formulate phrases that can
somehow fix the significance of purely visual or
musical elements is part of the ordinary
experience of reading or watching this play.²

¹ L.C. Knights, “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, ed. C. Tobias and P.G. Zolbrod (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1974), pp.15-17. I use the Arden edition (ed. F. Kermode) of The Tempest.

² Anne Barton, ed., The Tempest (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 19.

The play works its magic on our senses by depriving them,³ making us fill the spaces within its dramatic texture, enlisting our imaginations in the service of the play’s fabrication.

This chapter argues that magic and imagination are both put to work explicitly in the play’s silences, unexpected transitions, and structural discontinuities.⁴ The significant developments of The Tempest occur during interruptions of dramatic progress. Prospero’s magic repeatedly inhibits the completion of action contemplated by other characters: he puts some to sleep, and stills the swords of others. Instead of action Prospero offers spectacular shows that appear out of nowhere and vanish just as abruptly: the tempest, banquet, and masque, all punctuations of action, are themselves interrupted.

The abruptness with which the shows materialize and dissolve into nothingness creates an effect of suspension between reality and illusion;⁵ our eyes are made to focus more and more on the instant of transition between substance and shadow, nature and art. It is the precise point at which “real” meshes with “unreal” that is the focus of Shakespeare’s artistry in the shows of The Tempest, and that most eludes critical definition.⁶ Magicians habitually seek the point of conjunction between real and unreal: the practitioner of sympathetic magic who constructs an imitation of what he lacks and desires is not unlike the artist who tries to transmute base nature into gold by constructing a second nature that imitates and improves the familiar first, “making things better than Nature bringeth forth.”⁷ Prospero, at once artist and magician, aims to redeem his fellows and himself through a series of shows that, increasingly, transfigure as well as imitate natural objects: the banquet, masque and tableau of the lovers at chess are all images of plenty or peace.

³ So Coleridge, Ninth Lecture on Shakespeare and Milton, in Coleridge: Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Some Other Poets andDramatists (London: Dent, n.d.),p. 454, writes that The Tempest “did not appeal to any sensuous impression ... of time and place, but to the imagination.”

⁴ For an interesting general discussion of structural discontinuity in the romances see Barbara Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976), e.g. pp. 98-99.

⁵ A.D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory (London: Routledge, 1967), p. 142, notes that everything in The Tempest is half one thing and half the opposite: “This recurrent sense of ambiguity and suspension is extremely potent dramatically.”

⁶ Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of a Play (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), p. 192, finds this a unique and reprehensible confusion in Shakespeare, unlike Robert Egan, Drama Within Drama (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 1-14, who specifically disputes Righter’s pessimism about the play.

⁷ Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, p. 108; C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, is perhaps the best known critic to link magic and imagination, pp. 139ff.; Robert Egan, Drama Within Drama, pp. 93-95, also finds the link between magic and art in the “control of reality through imitation” and the presentation of a believable “mimetic vision of the ideal”; on believability of the play’s illusions see David Young, The Hart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays, (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), p. 178.

I argue finally that the play’s magic is most fully exposed when what we see dissolves like the tempest into the calms of I.ii. . It is the disappearance of the banquet that gives the courtiers early warning of a lesson to be learned; it is when the masque collapses that the lovers begin to fulfil the prophecies of the masque. It is when the play’s magic dissolves that we are transformed into magicians.⁸ Prospero’s abjuration of magic occurs only after its miracles have been contained in the new and better nature it has made. The renunciation of magic draws us into the world of the play, and empowers our imagination to reach beyond what we know, and to discover our better selves.

We cannot analyze how the play’s strong illusions work to integrate nature and art, without first recognizing the initially divisive strategy of magic. The magic of The Tempest divides in order to unite, as the rope in I.i. is both noose and salvation.⁹ Prospero and Ariel, indeed, always begin by interrupting some projected movement of events in time, or of bodies in space, arresting and redirecting the play’s temporal progress. Prospero puts Miranda to sleep in I.ii. after having at last recounted their past history up to the present moment. The mariners are also divided from their senses -- put to sleep -- this time by Ariel. They, unlike Miranda, remain asleep for the whole play. In II. i. Ariel puts to sleep all the courtiers but Antonio and Sebastian (their greater turpitude requires stronger and more direct magic, as we shall see).

⁸ For alternative, less positive views of the renunciation of magic see e.g. Andrew V. Ettin, “Magic into Art: The Magician’s Renunciation of Magic in English Renaissance Drama,” TSLL, 19 (1977), 268-93; for a less consistently pessimistic reading see Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 247 ff.

⁹ Neil Wright, “Reality and Illusion,” p. 249, makes this point.

The essentially restorative purpose of sleep in the play, though functioning in the end like the reconstitutive sleep of Lear and Macbeth, works in The Tempest at first purely negatively: as always in this play, magic’s reintegrative purpose is initiated by an interruption. Time simply stops for the sleepers: magic creates not the heightened intensity of a dream state as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but a temporary death to the world around them: the sleepers are subtracted for a time from the developing action, taken out of play time. Other characters exploit the time magically taken from the sleepers: Antonio plans to use the moment vouchsafed him by the sudden descent of the others “as by a thunder-stroke” (II.i.199) into oblivion: “Th’occasion speaks thee” (202), he advises Sebastian, and the opportunity solicits their attention. But their nefarious plans are in turn arrested by Ariel. Prospero, who “through his art foresees the danger” (292), sends Ariel, “For else his project dies, -- to keep (the courtiers) living.” Ariel thus wakes the sleepers to the sight of Antonio’s and Sebastian’s drawn swords.

So far the interruptions of sleep are accounted for by Prospero’s and Ariel’s magic: even the more evil intentions of the wakeful are in turn inhibited by -- we have now been conditioned to assume -- magic. But closer examination reveals an unexplained curiosity in this scene. The villains’ swords are halted a split second before Ariel works his magic: they pause, inexplicably, for “but one word” as they draw swords. The Tempest abounds with interruptions not overtly magical in origin. Repeated and multiplied, they acquire a mysterious significance for which no theory of hasty composition will adequately account.¹⁰ Once we discover that these mysterious breaks in continuity are rationalized elsewhere in the play by magic (as when Ferdinand’s sword is halted), we begin to suspect that magic may occasionally work independently of the magician, and that Prospero’s disrobing, “Lie there my Art,” does not necessarily deprive magic of its power, but just denudes the magician of his.

When Prospero stills Ferdinand’s sword, he also charms him from moving: implicit in the arrest of time is the halting of movement in space, as swords and sword-bearers are transfixed. Other magical interventions, by Ariel particularly, break through the normal boundaries of place and person. In III.ii., for example, the lowest caste of villains, Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo, is repeatedly interrupted in its plotting by the invisible Ariel. Functioning like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.ii., the spirit imitates in turn the voices of the conspirators. Caliban hears Ariel’s “Thou liest” (44) and thinks Trinculo has spoken; similar interruptions occur twice more (61,73). Trinculo is threatened by Stephano with dire consequences should he “interrupt the monster one word further” (67), but of course he has not done so in the first place. Here the intrusion of the spirit Ariel into the private space of the villains is in truth an invasion and occupation of their persons. They are, as it were, not the same villains, their very physical integrity violated by the magic that reduces their power to act.

¹⁰ For a...