SIX
Prosperoâs Art and the Descent of Romance
In the last chapter I argued that The Winterâs 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 audienceâs 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 âhigh pointâ 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, Leontesâs 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 Winterâs Tale may be regarded as a progressive elevation of the audienceâs awareness and experience. As The Winterâs 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 Paulinaâs words, is designed to awaken the charactersâ and audienceâs 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 âthe logical conclusion of the integrating process that produced The Winterâs Tale,â1 it is important to note that this play, unlike The Winterâs 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 Prosperoâs 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 Prosperoâs 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 romanceânamely, 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 Winterâs 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, âO brave new world / That has such people inâtââ (V.i.183-84), she is speaking in the same language of wonder and amazement characteristic of Leontesâs speech at the end of The Winterâs Taleâe.g., âIf this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating.â But the language and action of The Tempest are more often akin to Prosperoâs rejoinder, ââTis new to thee,â 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 Prosperoâs 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 Winterâs 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 Prosperoâs absorption in the present of that past action, and as a prologue, no longer controlled by Prosperoâs 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 Prosperoâs 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 chanceâa âsecond timeâ in the words of Pericles. This second time, paradoxically, is ânewâ time for Ferdinand and Miranda, and this is why they are so crucial to Prosperoâs performance of romance; but it is âoldâ timeâthat is, a possible regeneration in the present of the pastâfor Prospero, Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian.
Speaking from the view of ânewâ 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
Receivâd 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 âhighâ romance which is not to be identified with the rigor of Prosperoâs 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 âthe dark backward and abysm of timeâ (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 Prosperoâs 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, âThe action of the play primarily concerns the education of the characters to a comprehension of what their tragi-comic vision means.â3 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 playâs recurrent use of the word now.
When Prospero tells Miranda that âthou must now know fartherâ (I.ii.33), that âThe hourâs now come, / The very minute bids thee open thine earâ (I.ii.36-37), when he opens Act V saying âNow does my project gather to a head,â and when he declares in the Epilogue, âNow my charms are all oâerthrown / . . . Now I want / Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,â 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 playâs experience. The repeated use of ânowâ joins our sense of virtual and real time, for every ânowâ within the play coincides with the audienceâs ânowâ 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 oâclock and that the play will occur during âThe time âtwixt six and nowâ (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 audienceâs sense of duration with the playâs ostensible representation in such a way that the two are indistinguishable. But the playâs peculiar use of time points in another direction as wellâtoward the unique character of Prosperoâs 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 Prosperoâs mind.5 At one point in Act IV, for instance, Prospero tells Ferdinand that the masque has been performed by âSpirits, which by mine art / I have from their confines callâd to enact / My present fanciesâ (IV.i.120-22). Viewed as psychodrama, the play is used by Prospero âTo still my beating mindâ (IV.i.163), which is to say his mindâs 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 charactersâ 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 Prosperoâs 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 Winterâs Tale, that
This is as strange a maze as eâer 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, âThis is a strange thing as eâer I lookâd onâ (290), and his last remark to Prospero is âI long / To hear the story of your life, which must / Take the ear strangelyâ (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 Prosperoâs 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 characterâs initial interpretation of the event, then the characterâs subsequent internalization of the eventâs 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, Prosperoâs 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 Prosperoâs mind The Tempest internalizes Prosperoâs 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 âtempest,â âwrack,â and ârackâ listed in the OED, by the one most frequently cited source of the playâWilliam Stracheyâs True Repertory of the Wrackeâand, most important, by the playâs 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. Mirandaâs response and interpretation stand at the beginning of I.ii; Gonzaloâs 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 Prosperoâs 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 charactersâ 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: âThe King and Prince at prayers, letâs assist them, / For our case is theirsâ (I.i.54-55); but Sebastian, who is âout of patienceâ (55), responds to Antonioâs suggestion, âLetâs all sink wâ thâ King,â by saying, âLetâs take leave of himâ (64), ...