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The Tempest: 4
Known Sources
• Caliban also probably reflects Shakespeare’s reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (C. 4th BCE).
• Another important influence on The Tempest was Ovid’s Metamorphoses – written 15 centuries before the ‘discovery’ of the Americas.
• Caliban is similar to ‘the salvage man’[1] in Book VI of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, who is found in an Irish context.
• The Caliban figure was also influenced by the Wild Man in the anonymous play Mucedorus (1610).[2]
• One possible source of Prospero as a magician with a daughter and of the faithful spirit he commands is Anthony Munday’s play John a Kent and John a Cumber (1594). The action in this play takes place[3] in Wales.
• Jonson. In Every Man in his Humour (1598) there are characters called ‘Prospero’. It is claimed that Caliban could be based on the character ‘Cob’ in the same play. Later Jonson wrote a play about magic, The Alchemist (1608). In this play Jonson draws parallels between alchemy and stagecraft[4]. The parallelisms between Shakespeare’s play and Jonson’s plays are such that Oxfordians J.T. Looney and Marie Merkel have argued that Jonson wrote The Tempest![5] Incidentally, The Alchemist takes place in London.
It is also worth noting that The Tempest is in many ways a reworking of As You Like It with its usurped Duke, its sibling rivalry, its ‘other place’, its masque of Hymen, etc.
- within this structure the equivalent of Caliban as malcontent who stays behind in the other place at the end of the play is Jaques.
Even Frank Kermode, who defends the post-colonialist viewpoint, admits that
“there is nothing in The Tempest fundamental to its structure of ideas which could not have existed had America remained undiscovered, and the Bermuda voyage never taken place”.
The Commedia dell’Arte
However, the most important collective source for The Tempest seems to be the Commedia dell’Arte (which may have also influenced John a Kent and John a Cumber, Mucedorus and even Jonson’s plays mentioned above[6]).
In 1611 Flaminio Scala’s Il teatro delle favole rappresentative was published.
- it was a collection of 50 scenarios[7] that was an encyclopaedia of the plays he had performed with different Commedia dell’Arte troupes over the preceding decades.
One of the final scenarios, “L’albore incantato, pastorale” includes
- frustrated lovers,
- an omnipresent mago who manipulates his subjects with magical spells[8] that transfix[9] them or transform them into trees,
- a savage man who serves the magician,
- tempting food that emits flames when one approaches it,
- false deaths and
- buffoonish characters who attempt to[10] steal[11] things from the magician’s grotto[12].
In Il Gran Mago Pantolone and Gratiano plan to kill the magician.
However, the commedia dell’arte, that is most similar to The Tempest is Li Tre Satiri (= the Three Satyrs), which was performed in England in the 1570s.
- It featured[13] a magician, a wild islander who plots[14] with two Europeans to steal00 the magician’s book and control his spirits, and a virginal girl, as well as a storm, a shipwreck and a lost son.[15]
In Li Tre Satiri the magician
- transfixes00 his subjects with immobilizing spells;
- he physically chastises them with invisible torments;
- he imprisons them inside trees (and rocks);
- he tempts the strangers with succulent meals that suddenly[16] appear from nowhere, only to vanish[17] equally suddenly; and
- he haunts[18] them with disembodied[19] voices.
A type of Commedia dell’Arte was summarized[20] by Richard Andrews as follows:
“An isolated island is ruled by a magician, whose power within his territory is limitless[21]. A range[22] of characters find themselves on the island, against their will[23] – they include lovers and others from gentlemanly[24] classes, and more ridiculous figures from improvised comedy. By the end of their encounters with each other and with the magician, reconciliations both sentimental and comic have been achieved: these solutions may involve the magician himself, in relation to his past life.”
Richard Andrews “Shakespeare and Italian Comedy” (2004)
Notice that in the Commedia the mago is morally ambiguous
- he calls on the powers of hell.
In some of the scenarios00 the magician relinquishes his power at the end of the play.
In Li Tre Satiri and Arcadia Incantata comic characters steal clothes from the temple and impersonate pagan gods for the credulous local inhabitants.
Some of the Arcadian scenarios00 end with the shipwrecked characters recognizing their children, whom they thought dead.
At the end of Pantaloncino,
“The magician, declaring that he no longer wishes to practice his art but wants to live with the others, throws away his magic staff and book”.[25]
Shakespeare’s return to the unities in The Tempest compares with the regular use of them in the Commedia dell’Arte.
- Moreover, their retrospective antefatti[26] are similar to Prospero’s initial tale to Miranda (the exposition scene: Act I, Scene ii).
A German Tempest
It is important to remember that the first known performance of The Tempest was at court on 1st November 1611 for the marriage of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick, the Prince Palatine.
- Nothing could have been more appropriate for this German Prince that a tale based on recent events in the Holy Roman Empire.
Between 1605 and 1611 Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) who was forced from power by his younger brother (Matthias), the latter being the year The Tempest was probably written.
Why did Matthias force Rudolf from power?
One reason was his neglect of state affairs and his obsessive interest in magic!
- both John Dee and Edward Kelly had been employed as magicians at Rudolf’s court.
Rudolph II was and is associated with the Golem of Prague.
This was a brainless drudge made out of clay that, though resentful, could be made to do hard work.
In some versions of the legend the Golem of Prague fell in love and, when rejected, turned violent.
- Golem legends influenced the genesis of Frankenstein.
The Tempest may have been influenced by Die Schöne Sidea (Beautiful Sidea), a German play written by Jacob Ayrer before 1605 (when Ayrer died).
- in this play a magician prince is ousted by his brother and goes to live in a forest with his daughter (Sidea) and a spirit he commands. One day when out hunting the usurper’s son falls into the magician’s hands and he forces him to carry logs for his daughter. Reconciliation finally comes when the cousins fall in love.
- One theory is that both plays are based on an earlier lost English play.[27]
Of course, this putative earlier English play would probably have been based on the Commedia dell’Arte.
Historical Events in Italy
Another possible inspiration for Prospero was Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615).
Della Porta was an alchemist and a playwright[28].
- Crucially, he was a Neapolitan.
On the other hand, in 1551 a fleet of Emperor Charles V’s ships was wrecked off the island of Lampedusa.
- Lampedusa was already notorious[29] for storms, occurrences of St. Elmo’s fire
- local legend says that the storm that wrecked the ships was conjured up by an Algerian Jewish magician.
- There are also textual parallels between the mention of Lampedusa in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso[30] and the description of Ferdinand swimming ashore in The Tempest.
For more on links between Lampedusa and The Tempest read Chapter 8 of On the Date, Sources & Design of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pp. 85-95) in Google Books:
A Jewish Prospero
Some commentators see Prospero as a cabalistic philosopher
- this would explain the Hebrew name of his spirit, Ariel and of ‘Caleb(an)’.
- the possible Hebrew origin of Caliban’s name.
- the connection with the Golem.
- the connection with the Algerian Jewish magician.
Smoke & Mirrors
As so often with Shakespeare, this play is about appearance and reality.
The most ‘realistic’ scene is the shipwreck,
- no other play begins with quite such a coup de théâtre as The Tempest’s storm.
The storm is followed by much more fanciful[31] scenes.
However, we eventually[32] learn that it is the shipwreck which has been an illusion and the other scenes that are ‘real’.
The boundaries of reality are an important theme and mistaken beliefs abound[33]:
- Ferdinand and Miranda each mistake the other for a supernatural being,
- Caliban takes Trinculo and Stephano for gods.
- Alonso and Ferdinand each believe the other is dead.
- Stephano mistakes Caliban and Trinculo for a two-headed, four-legged creature.
Consider the layers of reality during the masque:
- the goddesses are supernatural, but they are merely portrayed[34] by actors presenting a masque.
- However, those actors are themselves supernatural, Ariel’s cohorts[35].
- Yet in reminding Ferdinand of this, Prospero reminds us that these spirits are themselves actors in The Tempest.
- Then Prospero goes on to dissolve that reality as well[36], along with “the great globe itself” because “we are such stuff as dreams are made on”.
The dizzying effect similar to the gender game in As You Like It or the multiple audiences in The Spanish Tragedy.
All of the characters are more or less in Prospero’s power and they become increasingly uncertain about the borders[37] between appearance and reality.
Prospero draws the other characters into a maze[38] of increasing complexity.
- Their experiences all seem vividly real and painful but, in the end, the causes of their suffering turn out to be largely illusory.
The point is that
“The world is stranger than man thinks and the experiences of the moment, no matter how intense, lose their reality in the miraculous process of change and transformation through which all life passes.”
Alvin Kernan
Dreams
On the island sleep and waking are states that are oddly hard[39] to distinguish.
Dreaming is centrally important to the perception of illusion and reality; “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”
• Miranda describes the little she remembers of Milan as “far off; / And rather like a dream” (memory as dream)
• Miranda falls asleep during her father’s discourse
• The mariners remain asleep throughout[40] the main action of the play
• Alonso and Gonzalo are overcome with sleep
• Prospero sleeps every afternoon
• Caliban describes his dreams in graphic detail
• Caliban cries to dream again because the imaginary world of the dream seems preferable to the real world. (dream as escape)
Just as in a dream, strange events, shapes and sounds seem real
- dream is the blending point between fantasy and reality.
Prospero must choose between continuing in his dream world or returning to his social reality.
- We could compare the choice to that of kicking drugs.
The Nature of Work
The Tempest is also a discourse about work.
Two conflicting view of work existed then, as now;
1. the idea that work strengthens the character (“the Protestant work ethic”, if you like) i.e. creative work, and
2. the opposing idea that work was soul-destroying (i.e. toil).
On the one hand, Gonzalo describes his dream “communist republic” in which no-one has to work and in which there is no private property.
On the other, Prospero firmly believes in the therapeutic value (for others!) of hard work, and Ariel and Ferdinand are presented as archetypes of willing workers.
- By contrast, Caliban is the reluctant drudge.
It is interesting to note how the new phenomenon of unemployment was being created at the time The Tempest was written by the Enclosures[41],
- promoted by rural landlords (such as Shakespeare himself)[42].
A Work About Nature
From one perspective (e.g. Montaigne’s and Gonzalo’s) a natural society without all the accretions[43] of ‘civilization’ would be a happy one.
From another, something natural is by definition imperfect and needs to be refined through Art.
Any worldview based on the Great Chain of Being has to take the view that nature is at the bottom under the hierarchy of society.
Prospero’s “Art” is to control Nature through his spirits.
- If humanity is to live in harmony with the rest of Nature he cannot allow it to run wild.
- What is ‘natural’ must sometimes be ordered so that it reaches its full potential.
Humans are also part of Nature and if they are allowed to run wild – to follow their ‘natural’ inclinations – chaos would result.
The purpose of civilization is to bring order and to enable man to use his natural inclinations within a framework of control.
Fathers also nurture their children so that they also achieve their full potential.
The Tempest can be seen as an exploration of the relationship between nurture, civilization and art – on the one hand – and Nature.
Civilizing also involves self-control: a skill Caliban fails to acquire.
- Self-control is a key attribute that makes us human.
From this perspective Caliban is the personification of the wild man,
- capable of some sensitivity and beauty but predominantly evil.
- attempts to civilize him have failed and so he is not fully human.
But we have to ask “Is his evil genetically inherited from his parents (a witch and the Devil) or because he is uncivilized?”
Caliban is natural in the sense that he has no self-control and does not think through the consequences of his actions.
Caliban demonstrates no sense of morality nor any ability to understand or appreciate the needs of anyone other than[44] himself.
Although he can appreciate nature’s beauty, he is self-centered.
- In this, he is little more than an animal; he wants to indulge his desires, without control.
This is what being free means to Caliban, whose cry for freedom (II.2, 177-178) clarifies many of his actions.
In the end he is free, but outside society as he is left on the island.
The play is not categorical about determinism, however.
- As Miranda says (with surprising insight[45] given her isolation!) in Act II, Scene 1, “Good wombs have born bad sons”.
There is room for[46] an alternative interpretation:
- Caliban is aware[47] that he is not the legitimate son of Prospero – rather like Edmund in King Lear – so he rebels against the patriarch.
Miranda, by contrast, behaves in the way it would have been considered natural for an adolescent girl to behave towards her father,
- especially since her father is her only protection against the would-be rapist, Caliban.
Moreover, notice that ‘unnatural’ Antonio and Sebastian – products of European court life – are far worse[48] than Caliban.
The central characters who must learn self-discipline and restraint, however, are Prospero and Ferdinand, not Caliban.
Purgatorial Trials
The play includes a series of purgatorial trials:
• There is the testing of Ferdinand’s love. He recognizes the nature of the trial and realizes[49] that only through servitude and suffering can he win his freedom and Miranda.
• Alonso sees the ‘death’ of his son as a punishment for his crimes and he atones – he is purified through suffering.
• Moreover, the king and his followers are rendered ‘distracted’[50] (V.i.12)
• Antonio and Sebastian also suffer their purgatory but they remain impenitent.
Their incapacity for remorse is punished by a “ling’ring perdition worse than any death can be at once”.
• Drunken Stephano and Trinculo the Clown go through a comic purgatory finding themselves in a ‘pickle’ (V.i.282); they don’t learn from their suffering but are not condemned as evil in the way that Antonio and Sebastian are.
The servants are simply beneath any type of moral enlightenment.
Indeed[51], All of the island’s visitors are subject to a purging experience of some sort[52].
- Compare this purging experience to that of the restorative forest in As You Like It.
Prospero & His Books
The title of the play could refer to Prospero’s problems with anger management. Prof. Nigel Smith comments, “The very word ‘tempest’, echoing the Latin tempus (= time) bears also the dual sense of ‘temperance’ and ‘temper’, the two sides of Prospero’s character which are revealed to us as he seeks to[53] control, to educate and to regain his lost state.”
- Could Ariel and Caliban simply be personifications of temperance and temper?
Prospero plans the reconciliation from the moment his astrology tells him that his enemies are within his reach: “A most auspicious star” (I.ii.182)
- that is why he separates Ferdinand from Alonso and orchestrates the young man’s meeting with Miranda.
However, when he tells their story to Miranda (I.ii), it is clear that he still feels pain for what has happened to him, and the option of revenge seems to remain open until he finally renounces it at V.i.127-8:
“The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance.”
The most difficult part of the play is the exposition scene (Act I, Scene ii)
- Shakespeare didn’t have a problem telling the back story through a character in this rather clumsy way (as we say in As You Like It [I.i] and in the Henriad)
- However, in this case Prospero’s lengthy discourse helps to establish him as the centre of consciousness (this is events from his perspective). Remember he speaks 30% of the entire play (more than Ariel, Caliban, Antonio and Miranda combined).
Amusingly, Prospero’s exposition is a complete waste of time.
- After explaining in great detail to his daughter what happened to them, she meets the Prince of Naples moments later and the name draws a complete blank!
- Moreover, she never once in her scenes with Ferdinand refers to events of the past or the share which Naples had in them.
- At the end of the play she bestows undifferentiated admiration on all the courtiers: Alonso, Antonio, Sebastian and Gonzalo.
Even if one accepts the post-colonialist arguments, it should be noted, as argued by W.H. Auden and Deborah Willis, that the truly threatening ‘other’ to Prospero is not Caliban but Antonio; a character who demonstrates “aggression unmodulated by a sense of familial or communal bonds”.
- As a Machiavellian villain, Antonio has been compared to Richard III and Iago.
And, despite the ‘post-colonialist’ interest in the figure of Caliban, the central character of the play is undoubtedly Prospero.
He speaks more than three times more lines than any other character.
- However, not all of these words are spoken to the other characters:
- Prospero uses more asides than any other character in Shakespeare’s plays.
Prospero has 674 lines, Ariel 194 and Caliban only 175.
One inspiration for Prospero was probably Dr John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s alchemist. He had a substantial library of science, philosophy and magic.
- according to legend, he raised the storm that destroyed the Spanish Armada.
Prospero’s obsession about the possibility of sex in the younger generation echoes the fixation of the magician who controls the island in ‘Il Gran Mago’ (a Commedia dell’Arte).
R. S. White has compared Prospero to a controller of a virtual reality “a la Matrix”.
He has such control over other people that he doesn’t really relate to them, and his renunciation of magic at the end of the play reminds one of someone switching off his or her computer at the end of a VR session.
Prospero is a strangely opaque character
- soliloquy reveals the private working of the minds of Hamlet, Macbeth or Angelo but Prospero’s soliloquys are strangely external.
One way to understand this is to conceive of the whole play as taking place in Prospero’s mind: the island is simply a place of psychomachia.
- in other words the characters represent various aspects of Prospero’s unconscious enacting an internal conflict.
- Poet William Wordsworth described The Tempest as “a journey of the mind”.
Prospero has few social skills; he is resentful, untrusting and has no sense of humour.
- Moreover, he is often abusive when he speaks to others and he is unrelentingly severe with Caliban, generating our sympathy for the would-be rapist[54].
At no point is Prospero more unattractive than when he turns the spirits who have just performed the masque (the fullest demonstration of Art) into hounds to hunt Caliban and the others.
However, the significance of the ending is that Prospero has reached a point in his life when he can offer forgiveness and hence the possibility of reconciliation.
- He is the central character and the point is that he manages to substitute love for hate in his own head.
Prospero the God
Another view is to see Prospero as a sort of Old Testament God
- from this perspective, Caliban is the individual who resists the laws of God and suffers as a consequence, a sort of Elizabethan/Jacobean atheist (in the sense presented in Faustus and Tamburlaine of an individual who challenged God’s authority.).
- while Ariel is the faithful servant of God, a happy, characterless slave.
There is no mention of the Christian God because on 27th May, 1607 swearing was banned from the stage.
- This included mention of God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost or the Trinity.
Prospero forgives his unnatural brother but Antonio does not seek forgiveness.
- In fact Prospero can only subdue Antonio with a veiled comment that he knows that Antonio plotted[55] to kill King Alonso and could destroy him with this information.
On the island Prospero seems to have usurped the power of God/the gods
- he can manipulate the minds and the experiences of all those around him.
- What Prospero’s magic cannot do, significantly, is alter the nature and inclinations of other’s hearts/characters.
Subjectless Kings & Masterless Men
When Caliban says:
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own King: ...
- He is betrayed by his own words. When he was alone on the island he had no subjects and could not be described as king. Prospero has at least three subjects (Miranda, Caliban and Ariel) as well as sundry unnamed spirits.
This is presumably a parallel with Gonzalo who also would be king with no subjects.
The subjectless king is a recurring theme. What sense is there in Sebastian plotting to kill his brother Alonso when there is no means off the island?
Indeed, the series of subjectless kings and masterless men ties into contemporary debates about master-servant conflicts.
In this play more than any other authority depends on context.
- In the storm the boatswain orders the king and his court below decks (“Keep below!”)
- the ship is a common metaphor for the state (“the ship of state”)
“What care these roarers for the name of king?” [I.i.16-17]
Later we have Ferdinand, who believes he is now king of Naples, carrying logs like a servant.
Prospero does a very specific thing when his enemies arrive on the island; he separates them into four groups:
- the sailors stay on the ship asleep,
- Ferdinand is drawn off to meet Miranda,
- the king and his courtiers form another group, and
- the comic servants separately encounter Caliban.
The characters have been separated into classes
- The servants, without their masters, are drunken, anarchic and eventually[56] rebellious.
- The masters without their servants dream of founding unachievable dynasties and plot[57] against each other. Indeed, the king, without a son – his raison d’être – becomes completely ineffectual and literally suicidal.
The separation of the shipwreck survivors into groups in this way is found in Li Tre Satiri.
The Island
Notice that the island was once a place where “abhorred” deeds were carried out by Sycorax.
- That savagery is always simmering under the surface in The Tempest.
Discord and moral chaos predominate; bitterness, hatred and suspicion are always close to the surface. The island seems hostile.
Notice that the play starts in total confusion; in Act I Scene ii, when Prospero is telling Miranda (and us) about the treachery of his brother, his account frequently breaks down in confused syntax and lines of thought.
- He is reliving pain – like a Lear or an Othello at the end of a tragedy.
But this is a romance so the depths are reached in the middle of the play (or even earlier, as here).
- Cf. Prospero’s broken speech patterns with those of Leontes in Acts I, II and III of The Winter’s Tale.
Prospero is always tempted towards “the dark side” (to use Star Wars terminology!).
- He is not purely good and he has a powerful need for revenge.
The Tempest is of course one of a series of island adventures that takes a small isolated island as a microcosm in which to experiment with different political structures.
- the tradition probably starts with More’s Utopia and also includes Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Golding’s The Lord of the Flies and even that appalling TV series Lost.
The Testing of Ferdinand
Why does Prospero treat Ferdinand so harshly?
- Prospero trusted Antonio and later Caliban and was let down.
As a result he does not trust appearances and needs proof; goodwill must be tested.
Ferdinand is expected to subdue the Caliban within him.
Prospero probably has some reason to question Ferdinand’s sincerity:
Notice that he mentions that he is prince of Naples twice in his first encounter with Miranda but doesn’t bother to find out her name until their second meeting… Men!
Could ‘white’ magic just[58] be a metaphor for the healing powers of a younger generation?
- Alonso’s desperate description of his supposedly drowned son who is “deeper than e’er plummet sounded” is almost identical to Prospero’s description of where his book is going to end up.
A Play about Freedom
A major theme of the play is: What does it mean to be ‘free’?
‘Freedom’ is the mentioned at the end of Acts I, II and IV and ‘free’ is the last word of the entire play.
Freedom for Shakespeare requires self-discipline:
- Ferdinand, Miranda and Prospero all exercise the self-discipline that Caliban lacks, and their success and happiness are contrasted with his misery.
Caliban doesn’t even seem to understand freedom during the play and only wishes for “a new master” (II.ii.185).
Miranda
Innocent and obedient – is a perfect hate-figure for feminist criticism (Prospero can be seen as the ultimate[59] patriarch).
The reading of her character hinges on whether she is given Act I, Scene 2, 350-361 or not.
If she is, then she is not all sugar, is capable of defending herself and is resentful;
i.e. those 12 lines make her human.
However, even if the lines are not given to her the criticisms against her character are a little unfair;
- she is, after all, only 14 and has only known two other people, her father and Caliban.
Caliban
Prospero finds Caliban when the latter is still a child (12).
- He naturally both adopts a position of adult authority over the boy and brings him up.
- The change in their relationship comes when Caliban (aged about 22) tries to rape barely adolescent Miranda. From this point on Prospero’s attitude towards Caliban is, not unreasonably, that he needs to be constantly controlled.
- Given the laws at the time, Prospero’s treatment of a would-be rapist of a minor is clement and benign.
There is confusion about whether Caliban should be considered human. Indeed, on the same day (the day of the play), Miranda says that Fernando is only the third man she has met (including Caliban) but later than she only knows two men (Prospero and Ferdinand – excluding Caliban).
Caliban is probably best viewed as an enfant sauvage (= wild child as in Truffaut’s film), socialized too late to fully incorporate into human society.
- Interestingly, Victor de Ayeron, the real-life boy at the centre of Truffaut’s film was 11 or 12 when he was found in 1798, the same age as we must assume Caliban was when found by Prospero.
- Victor was considered “uncivilized” and strenuous (though unsuccessful) efforts were made to teach him to speak. Indeed, his case was linked at the time to the concept of the Nobel Savage.
Notice that the real flaw[60] in Caliban’s character is that he does not learn from his experience with (the ‘colonialist’) Prospero when the Clowns arrive.
- Rather, he repeats the entire process of revealing the island’s resources for Stephano, responding once again to newcomers’ rather condescending generosity.
Moreover, Prospero’s learning is the key to his power
- but it is rejected by Caliban, and the creature is correspondingly powerless.
- his slavery is a function of his own defects as well as of Prospero’s magic.
However, he seems to learn in the end when he accepts his final work assignment in exchange for Prospero’s forgiveness (and, presumably, freedom).
Ariel
If Caliban is an untransfigurable brute, representing the physical, Ariel is a metaphoric spirit.
- More than any other character, he is “such stuff as dreams are made on” (i.e. immaterial).
He is not human. He is loyal but he has little original thought and cannot feel like a human.
One has to ask to what extent Ariel exists beyond Prospero’s imagination.
- He never interacts with anyone else (and nobody else mentions him).
- There is no evidence that either Miranda or Caliban know that he exists.
- So, we could say that he is just a projection of Prospero’s will – the means that Prospero uses to do magic, nothing more.
Prospero depends on “bountiful Fortune” (I.ii.178) to bring his enemies within range of his magic.
He knows of the approach of his enemies’ ship through astrology.
However, after that he works entirely through Ariel.
- It is Ariel’s appeal to Prospero that he should forgive his enemies at V.i.17-24 that changes the end of the play.
- If Ariel is simply an extension of Prospero’s will for reconciliation, Caliban could be an extension of his resentment.
According to Charles Boyce, “Ariel and Caliban are essentially allegorical, representing human possibilities. Ariel embodies our potential spirituality, Caliban our propensity to waste that potential in materialism and sensual pleasure.”
Trinculo
A consistently drunken jester, who is a servant of Alonso’s, and brought ashore in the shipwreck. He is a dull fool mostly, not capable of any real action, and providing a good deal of comic relief.
When Caliban meets him, he immediately dislikes him and his inebriated insults; but, Trinculo does become a part of Caliban’s plan to murder Prospero and take over the island, though Trinculo proves completely ineffective in this.
Trinculo is less charismatic and more cowardly than Stephano.
He resents Caliban’s worship of Stephano.
He seems to be incapable of loyalty and plans to sell Caliban to a freak show if he ever gets off the island.
Trinculo is less vicious than Stephano; he is a follower in a conspiracy he could not have conceived himself. Stephano and Trinculo are thus, respectively, like Antonio and Sebastian, within the play’s various parallels and oppositions.
Stephano
Trinculo’s friend, a consistently drunken butler.
He is jolly, inebriated, and somehow Caliban mistakes him for a god because he gives Caliban wine and gets him drunk, so he takes him on as a new master, thinking that he has some magical powers. He agrees to Caliban’s plot to make him ruler of the island, and gain him the favors of Miranda.
Sebastian represents the new class of servant who is motivated only by money and self-interest (rather than loyalty).
He is willing to commit murder for financial reward. So, by contrast, Shakespeare depicts the ‘civilized’ commoner as worse than the uncivilized islander in that Caliban is at least motivated by the righting of a perceived wrong: he wants justice not material gain.
Stephano’s name meant ‘belly’ in Renaissance Neapolitan slang
- At the end of the play, he makes a pun on his name saying, “I am not Stephano, but a cramp.” (V.i.286)
- Shakespeare took this term from John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes (1598).
In any case, like Trinculo, Stephano is not cunning, and is completely incapable of carrying out the plan.
The two servants represent the plebeian parallel to Sebastian and Antonio.
But, if common Europeans are worse than the uncivilized islanders, the worst characters in the play are the noblemen who contra natura, have no sense of fraternal loyalty.
In Commedia dell’Arte performances such as Li Tre Satiri the zanni confuse a temple with an inn.
- commentators see Stephano presenting himself and Trinculo as gods to Caliban as a version of this.
- moreover, the gabardine under which Caliban and Trinculo hide strongly echoes the cappa magica of the Commedia.
Think about the importance of clothing:
- Prospero’s magic robe,
- Prospero’s ducal robe,
- the clothes used to trap Trinculo and Stephano,
- Caliban’s gabardine and
- the courtiers’ clothes unsullied by the sea-water.
Prsopero’s display of ‘glistering apparel’ is essentially a theatrical wardrobe.
Chess
Notice the symbolism of chess – a game focused on cornering your opponent’s king so that he cannot move.
Middleton later took the metaphor further in A Game of Chess (1621) about Anglo-Spanish diplomatic relations. [pic]
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[1] i.e. the savage man, the wild man
[2] this character appears in an entirely Old World (i.e. in a non-colonial) context.
[3] to take place (take-took-taken) – occur, happen
[4] stagecraft – theatre
[5] I can send you the PDF of this argument, if you are interested.
[6] as we will see next week, the Commedia had a great influence on Jonson’s Volpone.
[7] scenario – (false friend) plot, storyline
[8] spell (n.) – incantation, magic formulation
[9] to transfix – paralyse, immobilize
[10] to attempt to – try to
[11] to steal (steal-stole-stolen) – rob
[12] grotto – cave used for habitation
[13] to feature – include prominently
[14] to plot – conspire
[15] there is no American connection in Li Tre Satiri.
[16] suddenly – abruptly, unexpectedly
[17] to vanish – disappear
[18] to haunt – torment (in a phantasmagorical way)
[19] disembodied – spectral, incorporeal
[20] to summarize – synopsize
[21] limitless – infinite
[22] range – variety
[23] against one’s will – involuntarily
[24] gentlemanly – noble, courtly
[25] Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, p. 635 (1962)
[26] antefatto – (Italian) back story
[27] Ayrer specialized in translating English plays
[28] playwright – dramatist
[29] notorious – infamous
[30] this epic poem was enormously popular at the time and, as we have seen, was a minor source for AYLI
[31] fanciful – unrealistic
[32] eventually – (false friend) in the end
[33] to abound – be frequent
[34] to portray – represent, depict, act
[35] cohorts – (in this case) fellow spirits
[36] as well – too, also
[37] border – frontier, boundary
[38] maze – labyrinth
[39] oddly hard – surprisingly difficult
[40] throughout – during all of
[41] Enclosures – situation in Early Modern England in which poor people were forced off the common land in the interests of efficient agriculture
[42] in 1610 James I, for whom The Tempest was written, encouraged The House of Commons to adopt a programme of enclosures
[43] accretion – sth. added from outside
[44] other than – apart from
[45] insight – perspicacity
[46] room for – the possibility of
[47] to be aware – be conscious
[48] far worse – much worse
[49] to realize – (false friend) become conscious
[50] distracted – (in this case) mad, crazy
[51] indeed – (emphatic) in fact
[52] sort (n.) – kind, type
[53] to seek to (seek-sought-sought) – try to
[54] would-be rapist – sb. who plans to commit sexual assault
[55] to plot – conspire
[56] eventually – (false friend) in the end
[57] to plot – conspire
[58] just – (in this case) simply
[59] ultimate – (false friend) definitive
[60] flaw – defect
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