Beyond Tragedy

Structure and Experience in Shakespeare's Romances

Robert W. Uphaus

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813186658
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

In this compact, yet comprehensive exploration of Shakespeare's romances, Robert W. Uphaus suggests that the romances bring us to a realm of human and dramatic experience that is "beyond tragedy." The inexorable movement of tragedy toward death and a final close is absorbed in romance by a further movement in which death can lead to renewed life, characters can experience a second time of joy and peace, and the audience's conventional expectations about reality and literature are challenged and enlarged.

In the late tragedies of King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, Uphaus finds the tragic structure augmented by elements that will later contribute to the form of the romances. Turning then to the romances themselves, he sees these plays as forming a profession in which Pericles is a brilliant outline of the conventions of romance and Cymbeline is romance taken to its dramatic limits, in fact to the point of parody. Through his fresh and provocative readings of the plays we experience anew the delight of Shakespearean romance and glimpse the world of renewal at its heart.

SIX

Prospero’s Art and the Descent of Romance

In the last chapter I argued that The Winter’s Tale is marked by defiance, meaning that throughout the play Shakespeare is apparently quite willing to do implausible things. That willingness to challenge conventional notions of reality, including the audience’s dependence on rational explanations, is best represented by the statue scene in V.iii. In a sense, this scene is the high point of Shakespearean romance, if we understand “high point” as a metaphor for a peak moment of imaginative experience. This experience, however, is the product of a dramatic process which initially posits a realistic situation, Leontes’s tragic jealousy, and then proceeds to recycle and incorporate this situation, first through pastoral comedy in Act III.iii and Act IV, and then on into romance in Act V. More important, though, the dramatic process of The Winter’s Tale may be regarded as a progressive elevation of the audience’s awareness and experience. As The Winter’s Tale moves both onward, through reversible time and its absorptive structure, and upward, as it were, toward hierophany, it replaces the process of reason with an ineffable sense of wonder which, in Paulina’s words, is designed to awaken the characters’ and audience’s experience of faith.

The Tempest is not marked by such an imaginative ascent to the hierophanic experience of romance. Though there is a sense in which The Tempest is “the logical conclusion of the integrating process that produced The Winter’s Tale,”¹ it is important to note that this play, unlike The Winter’s Tale, enacts the imaginative descent of the experience of romance into areas more accessible to reason. The descending process continues in Henry VIII, where the experience of romance becomes fully rooted in history.² There are several ways that this process of descent appears in The Tempest, and perhaps the best means of stating my approach to the play is to revert to the paradoxical thesis that Prospero’s art performs the dissolution of art in such a way that the imaginative representation or fiction of romance becomes, for the characters and the audience, the actual experience or fact of romance. I shall deal with this paradox by asking two general questions of the play: how and why does Prospero’s dissolution of the art of romance yield the experience of romance?

As a preliminary move toward answering these questions, I first need to establish the presence of the defining attributes of Shakespearean romance—namely, an essential tragic backdrop, the absorption of the tragedy, and the culminating hierophanic moment which manifests the sacred experience of faith. As I observed earlier, the sense of wonder at the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale is not repeated in The Tempest, partly because the latter play is more explicitly deliberate, as opposed to defiant, in its dramatic procedures. Indeed, one might say that when Miranda exclaims, “O brave new world / That has such people in’t’” (V.i.183-84), she is speaking in the same language of wonder and amazement characteristic of Leontes’s speech at the end of The Winter’s Tale—e.g., “If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating.” But the language and action of The Tempest are more often akin to Prospero’s rejoinder, “’Tis new to thee,” with the clear implication that Prospero, like The Tempest, is not easily susceptible to an uninspected sense of wonder.

The world of The Tempest, which is both the stage and the performance of Prospero’s art, is both old and new, both real and imagined, and because it is both simultaneously, the play enacts different uses of time and absorption. The twelve-year gap in time, unlike the passage of sixteen years in The Winter’s Tale, precedes the opening of the play, and this permits us to view The Tempest as an epilogue to a past tragic action in Milan, as Prospero’s absorption in the present of that past action, and as a prologue, no longer controlled by Prospero’s art, to the future actions of the characters on their return to Milan. Viewed as an epilogue to the time of twelve years past, the play, through Prospero’s art, explores the idea that romance, in its absorption of tragedy and its use of reversible time, presents a dramatic and experiential realm beyond the seeming absolute close of tragedy. In contrast to tragedy, this play presents a number of characters with a second chance—a “second time” in the words of Pericles. This second time, paradoxically, is “new” time for Ferdinand and Miranda, and this is why they are so crucial to Prospero’s performance of romance; but it is “old” time—that is, a possible regeneration in the present of the past—for Prospero, Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian.

Speaking from the view of “new” time, Ferdinand says of Miranda:

She

Is daughter to this famous Duke of Milan,
Of whom so often I have heard renown,
But never saw before; of whom I have
Receiv’d a second life; and second father
This lady makes him to me. (V.i.191-96)

He has only heard of Prospero in the past; and now, during the play he sees him and receives a second life. Gonzalo, on the other hand, expresses a more comprehensive view of past and present time, but he formulates his experience in the language of “high” romance which is not to be identified with the rigor of Prospero’s art. Summing up the plot of the play, especially its use of the absorption of tragedy through reversible time, Gonzalo exclaims:

Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue
Should become Kings of Naples? O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves,
When no man was his own. (V.i.205-13)

As an epilogue the play peers into “the dark backward and abysm of time” (I.ii.50), which past is associated with tragedy, and as a prologue it looks forward to a new time codified by the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. But the epilogue and prologue, respectively associated with past and future, also serve as brackets enclosing Prospero’s present performance of the play and its peculiar emphasis on present time. Prospero teaches characters in the present about the past in order to prepare them, as well as himself, for the future; as Joan Hartwig has observed, “The action of the play primarily concerns the education of the characters to a comprehension of what their tragi-comic vision means.”³ But the descending process of The Tempest is also calculated to dissolve distinctions between fiction and fact, the imaginary and the real; and this process of dissolution is evident in the play’s recurrent use of the word now.

When Prospero tells Miranda that “thou must now know farther” (I.ii.33), that “The hour’s now come, / The very minute bids thee open thine ear” (I.ii.36-37), when he opens Act V saying “Now does my project gather to a head,” and when he declares in the Epilogue, “Now my charms are all o’erthrown / . . . Now I want / Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,” he is addressing both the characters within the play and the audience without, at the same time that he is dissolving his art to affirm the immediacy of the play’s experience. The repeated use of “now” joins our sense of virtual and real time, for every “now” within the play coincides with the audience’s “now” outside the play.

Several commentators have observed how scrupulous Prospero is about asking what the time is, and it has also been suggested that the time within the play approximates the amount of time it takes to perform the play.⁴ In Act I we are told that the time is at least two o’clock and that the play will occur during “The time ’twixt six and now” (I.ii.240), which is approximately the actual time of putting on the play. Similarly, we are reminded several times that the action of the play will take between three and four hours (III.i.21, V.i.136, 186, 223) and that it must conclude by supper-time (III.i.95, V.i.4). The effect of all this is to lock firmly into place the audience’s sense of duration with the play’s ostensible representation in such a way that the two are indistinguishable. But the play’s peculiar use of time points in another direction as well—toward the unique character of Prospero’s performance of romance. Because Prospero is, among other things, an artist who has staged a tempest within a play called The Tempest, it seems fair to assume that the play is also a kind of psychodrama with the characters and events of the play acting out facets of Prospero’s mind.⁵ At one point in Act IV, for instance, Prospero tells Ferdinand that the masque has been performed by “Spirits, which by mine art / I have from their confines call’d to enact / My present fancies” (IV.i.120-22). Viewed as psychodrama, the play is used by Prospero “To still my beating mind” (IV.i.163), which is to say his mind’s tempestuous state is revealed through the characters and events of the play.⁶ But instead of the customary hierophany of the romances, where some sacred presence externally manifests itself through an oracle, a dream, or a vision, The Tempest becomes its own hierophany. That is, the art, performance, and experience of the play become one and the same, and this is how Prospero performs his paradoxical intention of dissolving his art to elicit the fullest experience of romance.

A more specific way of seeing how this paradoxical process occurs is to examine what appears to be a deliberate pattern in the play, in which events are first viewed externally, then subjected to diverse interpretations based on the characters’ past or present knowledge, then internalized as new states of awareness, and finally assimilated as a kind of communal experience. This process works in a manner similar to, though not identical with, the way discrepant awareness functions in Cymbeline. The story of Prospero’s past life and present intentions is only partially known by the other characters. In fact, Prospero clusters all the characters save Ariel, who is the vehicle of his art, into three independent groups which are not collected until the end of the play.⁷ These groups, which are continually dealt with separately, are, first, Ferdinand and Miranda; second, Alonso, Antonio, Sebastion, and Gonzalo; and third, Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. No one group sees the entire play, and thus it is, for example, that Alonso at the end of the play finds himself expressing amazement at events which only Prospero and the audience have fully experienced. Alonso observes, in a manner reminiscent of the end of The Winter’s Tale, that

This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of, some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge. (V.i.242-45)

Later, looking on Caliban, Alonso says, “This is a strange thing as e’er I look’d on” (290), and his last remark to Prospero is “I long / To hear the story of your life, which must / Take the ear strangely” (312-14).

But what is strange and unknown to Alonso is by now familiar and known to the audience. By the end of the play only the audience and Prospero share a complete knowledge of Prospero’s story; as an oracle it is only our knowledge that Prospero has rectified. This helps to explain why the audience is addressed as participating and knowledgeable equals in the Epilogue, for only we have had the benefit of fully experiencing the deliberate pattern Prospero imposes on the respective groups of characters.

This pattern is the fourfold process beginning with the occurrence of a seemingly external event, followed by a character’s initial interpretation of the event, then the character’s subsequent internalization of the event’s meaning as a new state of awareness, and finally a communal assimilation of the pattern as a bond of knowledge shared with Prospero. Only the audience and Prospero share a total knowledge of the process, and this is why Prospero promises to tell the characters his story (for us it would be a retelling) at the end of the play. Moreover, this sequential process is implied in the very title of the play. That is, The Tempest is an external event viewed by the characters as a storm and by the audience as a play. Seen as both a play and a storm, it is an analogue to, and a recapitulation and interpretation of, Prospero’s tragic past: it separates the court, just as the court separated Prospero and Miranda from Milan, and it provides an interpretation of that separation. Furthermore, as a reflection of Prospero’s mind The Tempest internalizes Prospero’s new state of awareness resulting from his twelve-year separation; and, finally, the performance of The Tempest, understood either as a storm or as a play, assimilates these diverse experiences and pushes the play beyond the tragedy of twelve years past. Such a view of The Tempest as referring to both external events and internal states of mind is fully supported by the diverse meanings of the words “tempest,” “wrack,” and “rack” listed in the OED, by the one most frequently cited source of the play—William Strachey’s True Repertory of the Wracke—and, most important, by the play’s multiple uses of these terms. Indeed, there is no question that one effective way of producing this play would be to present it, and Prospero, in the character of a storm that slowly and systematically approaches clear weather.

Except for I.i, which is the physical storm, every scene in the first three acts is first marked by a response to the storm as an external event and then subjected to an interpretation based on past and present knowledge. Miranda’s response and interpretation stand at the beginning of I.ii; Gonzalo’s response and interpretation at the beginning of II.i; in II.ii it is Caliban who responds and interprets; at the opening of III.i it is Ferdinand; of III.ii Stephano, and of III.iii Gonzalo. Significantly, only in Acts IV and V does Prospero appear initially, and this is because here the characters begin to internalize, with Prospero’s direct assistance, their experience of the external storm as a new state of awareness. Actually, even I.i presents a response to the storm, but it only intimates diverse interpretations of its meaning. Through some of the characters’ earliest responses (especially those of the court), the play already begins to group the characters. The splitting of the boat, for example, intimates a moral split in the court. Gonzalo, who speaks for patience and prayers, aligns himself with Ferdinand and Alonso: “The King and Prince at prayers, let’s assist them, / For our case is theirs” (I.i.54-55); but Sebastian, who is “out of patience” (55), responds to Antonio’s suggestion, “Let’s all sink w’ th’ King,” by saying, ‘Let’s take leave of him” (64), ...