The Tempest

Critical Essays

Patrick M. Murphy, Patrick M. Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136601149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Tempest: Critical Essays traces the history of Shakespeare's controversial late romance from its early reception (and adaptation) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present. The volume reprints influential criticism, and it also offers eight originalessays which study The Tempest from a variety of contemporary perspectives, including cultural materialism, feminism, deconstruction, performance theory, and postcolonial studies. Unlike recent anthologies about The Tempest which reprint contemporary articles along with a few new essays, this volume contains a mixture of old and new materials pertaining to the play's use in the theater and in literary history.

Part I.

The Tempest
and the Critical Legacy

Interpreting The Tempest

A History of Its Readings

Patrick M. Murphy

“and next to truth, a confirmed errour does well”

(JONSON, BARTHOLOMEW FAIR 16)

The Tempest has a complex history of performances, editions, adaptations, parodies, rewritings, allusions, and critical interpretations. Its first recorded performance was on Hallowmas in 1611 at Whitehall. However, as Stephen Orgel warns, “A record of performance at court implies neither a play written specifically for the court nor a first performance there” (Introduction 1). The court appropriated the play again in 1613 when it was used (as one of fourteen works) to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. Performances at the Globe were also probable. In 1669 Dry den suggested The Tempest was performed at Blackfriars (Tempest 3). Recently Andrew Gunproposed that “The Tempest was the first play Shakespeare unquestionably wrote for the Blackfriars rather than the Globe” because it “is uniquely a musical play” (92) and shows “unequivocal evidence that it was conceived with act breaks in mind” (93). Moreover, for Gurr, “The whole play depends on the initial realism of the shipwreck scene. It is the verification of Prospero’s magic and the declaration that it is all only a stage play” (96). However, as a published text, The Tempest always seems to frustrate attempts to limit its significance to any specific theatrical context, to determine its meaning, or to appropriate its repetitions. Initially printed as the inaugural work in the First Folio of 1623, The Tempest became a subversive monument. “Whether it was placed [first] by its editors or its publishers, and whatever their reasons,” writes Stephen Orgel, “the decision has profoundly affected the play’s critical history” (Introduction 1).

Shakespeare unquestionably wrote The Tempest; however, Greg’s sense of the text as “unassisted” must be qualified (418). Ralph Crane, the scrivener for the King’s Men who prepared several other plays by Shakespeare for the printer, may have added some detail to the stage-directions. In descriptions like “a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard,” Crane may have described aspects of early performances. Jeanne Addison Roberts noted that the stage directions “are the most elaborate and detailed in the Folio” (214). Roberts speculated (along with Greg) that: “It is certainly not impossible that [Crane] was close enough to the King’s Men to be familiar with their plays and that he could have seen an unrecorded performance of The Tempest” (218). Although the idea is discredited now—Fleay, Robertson and Law suggested that the masque was written by either Beaumont or Chapman. And W. J. Lawrence, Dover Wilson, Greg, and others have all contributed to the “formidable” opinion that the betrothal masque Prospero conjures for Ferdinand and Miranda was perhaps Shakespeare’s addition in 1613 to the first recorded version of 1611 (Kermode xxii). However, Glynne Wickham’s argument about the topical ambiguity of Ferdinand deserves consideration in any discussion about the relevance of the masque in 1611.

The relations among the dramatic work, its sources, performances, reviews, printed editions, and criticism continue to perplex the priorities and values of Tempest interpretations. Different expectations, customs, rules, and conventions of reading come into play among these various uses of the text. Stephen Orgel surveyed the theatrical history to find that all performances of the play’s powerfully subversive energies are partial (Introduction 64–87). Trevor Griffiths in 1983 and Virginia and Alden Vaughan, in an ambitious survey of Shakespeare’s Caliban, published in 1991, discuss the political and colonial contexts that shape Caliban’s history on the stage. In two essays reprinted in this volume Mary M. Nilan discusses the contrast between critical readings of the play and Kean’s production in 1857, and she surveys performances and reviews of the play at the start of the twentieth century, particularly Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1904 production which ended with Caliban, played by Tree himself, left alone on the island. Each period’s appropriation of the play seems to destablize alternative preconceptions about the work, bringing about seemingly endless crises of purpose, agency, form and materiality.

The Folio Tempest granted Shakespeare’s play a relative stability and coherence in relation to the more ephemeral nature of theatrical productions. The Tempest’s adherence to the unities of time and place, a highly unusual practice for Shakespeare, also reinforced this sense of its coherence. However, Ernest Schanzer suggested The Tempest is “Shakespeare’s most extended mockery of the critics’ demand for unity of time” (60). For the critical Schanzer, Shakespeare refutes the rules of commentators: “It was Shakespeare’s last thrust in his scattered skirmishes against that bloated, tyrannical upstart, the doctrine of the unity of time” (61). Whether or not the focus is upon text or performance, there is always a remainder, a supplement—something futural that anticipation cannot discern. When Schanzer discovers the dramatic character of Prospero ironically controlled by the neoclassical principles of the critics, performance is folded into (and momentarily dominated by) criticism, while criticism is mocked by a performance seemingly authorized by the writer’s irony—expressed and realized in critical commentary. Neither text, nor performance, nor criticism can have the last word—although the rhetorical posture of each often contains a pretense of finality.

I. Initial Uses: Allusions, Commentary, and Adaptation

One of the first recorded allusions to The Tempest occurred in the Induction to Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614). Jonson’s reference is brief. When the comment is set in context, however, its consequences may substantially alter our understanding of Shakespeare’s presence in the play as the “mighty workman” who drowns his book, pronounces a valediction to his most potent art, and petitions the audience to set him free by their indulgence.

Jonson’s Induction satirically represents a scene of nascent (performance) criticism while perhaps allegorizing the history of London’s emerging institution of the theater. After apologizing for a delay, the Stage-keeper (or handyman) warns the audience that the play is “like to be a very conceited scuruy one, in plaine English” (13). This Stage-keeper, who “kept the stage in Master Tarlton’s time,” attacks the “master-poet” for his omissions of realistic detail about the fair and for his aggression (14). Jeffrey Masten has suggested that this Stage-keeper is the “spokesman for the improvisatory and collaborative mode of theatrical production of an ostensibly prior era” (109) which was being displaced by a patriarchal idea of authorship that effaced the homoerotic, collaborative processes of theatrical production. This displacement is enacted when the Book-holder (or prompter) and the Scrivener enter and question the Stage-keeper who defends his “rare discourse” saying that “the understanding Gentlemen o’ the ground here, ask’d my iudgement.” The Stage-keeper is banished when the Book-holder commands: “Away Rogue, it’s come to a fine degree in these spectacles when such a youth as you pretend to a iudgement” (14). The Book-holder then announces his purpose: “I am sent out to you here, with a Scrivener and certain Articles drawne out in hast betweene our Author and you; which if you please to heare, and as they appeare reasonable, to approve of; the Play will follow presently” (14–15). The judgment of the audience is potentially subversive, and the contract becomes a protocol of instruction with an aim towards containment.

There are five conditions stipulated in the contract. First, audience members (and readers) must be patient; second, they must know the place that was purchased for them and not exceed their wit; third, their judgment must be consistent, unchanging, and independent of the responses of others; fourth, their expectations must be realistic; and, finally, the reader must avoid searching out topical references but may enjoy them when noticed—as if to say, critical inquiry should not become “solemnly ridiculous” nor out of step with the propriety of entertainment and pleasure. No person, according to the fourth condition, should expect “more then hee knowes, or better ware then a Fay re will affoord”:

If there bee neuer a Seruant-monster i’ the Fayr, who can help it? he [the Author] sayes; nor a nest of Antiques? Hee is loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries, to mixe his head with other mens heeles … (16)

Curiously, Jonson echoed Stephano’s (and Trinculo’s) description of Caliban in this carefully contrived allusion (3.2.4–17). The scrivener also referred to the competition among playwrights and acting companies while gesturing to the philosophical debate about Nature and Art (which Kermode found at the center of The Tempest’s structure and meaning). The same debate also rests at the core of Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” a significant source for Shakespeare’s play. Some readers think the scrivener’s remark signals Jonson’s disapproval of Caliban (Vaughan 89). However, since this comment is usually used as evidence for the date of the play’s composition, its potential significance is sometimes lost, for example, when Morton Luce called it “little more than good natured banter” (xxiii).

In 1969 Harry Levin thought the scrivener’s comment was an overt attack on The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest and similar in content to ideas in Jonson’s preface to the quarto of The Alchemist, first performed in 1610 and published in 1612. “The paradox is that Jonson, for once, was criticizing Shakespeare from the standpoint of nature rather than art” (49). Levin speculated that since The Alchemist and The Tempest were introduced in the successive seasons of 1610 and 1611, perhaps the same actor (maybe Burbage) played the parts of Subtle and Prospero. Shakespeare is attracted to an exotic location; Jonson’s scene is London. Jonson provides a “character-sketch that accompanies the entrance of each personage” so character is static; Shakespeare lets his characters speak for themselves. Shakespeare’s plots are parallel and symmetrical, in Jonson “Human contrivance is bound to be outdone sooner or later by chance, and his contrivers are alert in adapting themselves to the main chance” (53). For Levin the two plays have closely related themes; yet, they are antithetically designed: Prospero becomes a response to Subtle, Miranda to Dol Common, the hoax staged for Dapper is the closest parallel to the masque staged for Ferdinand and Miranda. In The Tempest everyone is changed for the better by their island experience; yet, in Jonson attempted transmutations leave the subjects “basically unchanged” (57). Levin concluded, “That The Tempest came after The Alchemist means, of course, that Shakespeare had the opportunity to reflect and reply, as he is said to have done in the so-called War of the Theatres” (57–58).

In 1983 Thomas Cartelli, following Harry Levin’s lead and using Harold Bloom’s theory of influence, read Bartholomew Fair as Jonson’s somewhat anxious response to Shakespeare. However, Cartelli also agreed with Anne Barton that Jonson managed in Bartholomew Fair to achieve an inclusiveness previously unachieved, perhaps because Shakespeare had recently retired from the stage (165). Unlike Levin who perceived confrontation, Cartelli relied upon C. L. Barber’s work to argue that Jonson used Shakespeare’s satumalian breakthroughs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and especially The Tempest to come to terms with Shakespearean influence and inheritance (155). The Induction is evidence that Jonson had grudgingly conceded to give his audience what it wanted, and he intended to do this by presenting a “‘naturalized’ version of the Shakespearean romances to which he alludes” (161). According to Cartelli, this project continues in Bartholomew Fair when Leather and Joan Trash discuss the merits of Joan’s gingerbread wares by mentioning “what stuff they are made on” as “Nothing but what’s wholesome.” This passage compels the audience “to compare Shakespeare’s inflation of ‘airy nothings’ with Jonson’s own leveling of material reality” to a “stand of gingerbread” which includes a “‘gingerwork’ of ‘Ceres selling her daughter’s picture’” (163). More recently Douglas Bruster has suggested that Bartholomew Fair is propelled by fetishistic desire from the beginning (Drama 91). In an essay reprinted in this volume that argues for the primacy of a “local Tempest” which uses metaphors of colonialism to represent the business of the stage, Bruster suggests that “none of the playwrights who commented on, borrowed from, revised, or otherwise paid homage to The Tempest before the closing of the theaters seems to have been any more interested in colonialism than Shakespeare—or for that matter, showed that he believed Shakespeare, in The Tempest, was talking about the New World” (36). Instead, for Bruster, “The Tempest is a play about art, but it is deeply about the work that art requires” (53).

There are several important consequences to these observations: if Levin, Cartelli, Masten, and Bruster’s readings of The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair are right, then Jonson’s early critical response to Shakespeare’s Tempest does not distinguish among play writing, critical commentary, and performance—unlike our current conventional distinctions among these different kinds of response. If The Tempest sublimates The Alchemist (as Levin suggests), it is as critical of Jonson as the Induction to Bartholomew Fair is of Shakespeare. One dramatic work becomes the pretext for another. And the criticism in Bartholomew Fair therefore begins as citation, repetition, mockery, and as a varied (somewhat anxious) imitation of the phrases (lexia or fragments) of Shakespeare’s anterior text. Moreover, Jonson’s phrasing in the Induction uses the language of the legal contract to sketch out the roles of author and audience, redescribing the reactions of a heterogeneous audience as a rule-governed behavior that applies to everyone, depending upon the cost of admission.

In Comus, first performed in 1634 and printed in 1637, John Milton used The Tempest to experiment not only in dramatic form but to question the very idea and function of form itself. Noting the irreconcilable differences among readers who insisted that Milton’s work was either some kind of comedy, or a masque that had broken free of the drama, or perhaps a pastoral drama, in 1959 John Major thought there was agreement that The Tempest and Comus worked out the same theme: “that upon the spiritual strength of the righteous depends the preservation, in this life, of truth, order and justice” (179).

While trying to think about Milton’s work as a dramatic comedy in the festive tradition, C. L. Barber decided instead that “Milton’s masque is a masque!” Believing that Milton succeeded “in making a happy work which centers, seemingly, on the denial of impulse, when typically in the Renaissance such works involve, in some fashion or other, release from restraint,” Barber explained his difficulty by discovering that questions about the conflicting expectations about the form of Milton’s work “provide a means for understanding how it orders and satisfies feeling” (“Mask” 188). In a feminist and Lacanian reading of The Tempest’s relation to Comus, Mary Loeffelholz began with Barber’s insight that Milton’s work is not so much about dramatic events but about “the creation of the situation” which enabled Milton “to present a trial of chastity” (197, 198): “For preserving chastity involves keeping a relation with what is not present: the chaste person is internally related to what is to be loved, even in its absence” (Barber, “Mask” 198). Curiously, Loeffelholz wanted to “open a feminist inquiry into Shakespeare’s presence in Milton’s Comus by considering the relation of Prospero’s interrupted betrothal masque of Ceres in The Tempest to Milton’s masque” (25). And she thinks this happ...