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Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 29 068213 REAL 29_068213 REAL 29 Titelei 29.07.13 09: 42 Seite 1 068213 REAL 29_068213 REAL 29 Titelei 29.07.13 09: 42 Seite 2 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Winfried Fluck Herbert Grabes · Donald E. Pease 29 Critical and Cultural Transformations: Shakespeare’s The Tempest - 1611 to the Present Edited by Tobias Döring and Virginia Mason Vaughan 068213 REAL 29_068213 REAL 29 Titelei 29.07.13 09: 42 Seite 3 Notice to Contributors The editors invite submissions of manuscripts appropriate to the topics of the forthcoming volumes of REAL. The 2014 volume, edited by Winfried Fluck and Donald E. Pease, will be on “Towards a Post-Exceptionalist American Studies.” The 2015 volume, edited by Winfried Fluck, will be on “Reading Practices”. Each author will receive one copy of the yearbook and a pdf file of the article. Articles submitted for consideration may be sent directly to the volume editors or via an advisor. They should reach the volume editors by December 1 of the year prior to publication, and should not exceed 10,000 words (including endnotes and references).To facilitate processing, they should be sent in duplicate and on cd or disc; they must be typed in English, doublespaced, and should observe the conventions laid down in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003 sqq.). Editors Tobias Döring, LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, D-80799 München, Germany Winfried Fluck, Freie Universität Berlin, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Lansstraße 5-9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany Herbert Grabes, Universität Gießen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10, D-35394 Gießen, Germany Donald E. Pease, English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (Columbia University), Catherine Belsey (University of Wales), Avrom Fleishman (Johns Hopkins University), Ronald Shusterman (University of Bordeaux 3), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Albert E. Stone (University of Iowa), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen). Text-editing and final layout: Sarah Söhlemann. © 2013 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. http: / / www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de Printed by: TZ Verlag & Print, Roßdorf Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-8233-4184-0 ISSN 0723-0338 068213 REAL 29_068213 REAL 29 Titelei 29.07.13 09: 42 Seite 4 Contents Foreword ……………………………………………………………….………….vii Contributors ……………………………………………………….…...……..…... ix T OBIAS D ÖRING Change and strange: transformations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. An introduction ………………….........………….. xi Part I N ANDINI D AS Islands of time: The Tempest and cultural memory ………...……...….....……... 1 N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne’s “Of the Institution and Education of Children”.…………………………….... 17 A NDREW M ORAN In medias res, at work and prayer: Augustine and The Tempest ...……………………………………………..….…. 37 J OHN M UCCIOLO The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick the Elector of Palatine at Whitehall Palace, 1612-1613 ………………………. 57 N ATASCHA W ANNINGER Fertility and witchcraft in The Tempest and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch ………….….….………………...……….....…. 79 T OBIAS D ÖRING Learning to charm: on the virtue of words and the forgetting of language in The Tempest ………………………………...….... 99 vi Part II M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller ……………………….…………………... 115 D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, cannibalism and Caliban ...…………..…… 131 H ISAO O SHIMA The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku ...…………………………………..……………… 149 R URU L I The Chinese reception of The Tempest: a visual examination of three productions ...………………..….…….……… 173 S IMON J OHN R YLE Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest ..………………………………...……...…… 209 M IMI Y IU Prospero’s Book of Architecture ..………………………….…………………. 235 E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ ...………………..…………………… 265 V IRGINIA M ASON V AUGHAN Un-Masquing The Tempest: staging 4.1.60-138 ...…………………………..….283 Foreword Most of the contributions to this volume were first presented and discussed in a seminar held at the World Shakespeare Congress in Prague, in July 2011. The editors would like to thank all participants of this enjoyable event for their generous comments and their shared commitment. The publication project has been in many ways supported by the Ludwig Maximilians- Universität München and its Center for Advanced Studies. Sarah Söhlemann and Lotte Kößler have been extremely helpful with editorial work and in preparing the manuscript; Elisa Leroy and Johannes Ungelenk have helped with proof reading. At Narr Verlag, Tübingen, Kathrin Heyng and Karin Burger have been highly cooperative and competent. For all, our thanks. Tobias Döring Virginia Mason Vaughan Contributors D AS , N ANDINI . University of Liverpool, UK. D ÖRING , T OBIAS . Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. L I , R URU . University of Leeds, UK. M ORAN , A NDREW . University of Dallas, US. M UCCIOLO , J OHN . Glen Ridge Public School, US. O SHIMA , H ISAO . Kyushu University, Japan. R AMALHETE G OMES , M IGUEL . Universidade do Porto, Portugal. R OTHSCHILD , N. A MOS . Hampden-Sydney College, US. R YLE , S IMON J OHN . Sveu ilište u Splitu, Croatia. V AUGHAN , V IRGINIA M ASON . Clark University Worcester, US. V OIGTS -V IRCHOW , E CKART . Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. W ANNINGER , N ATASCHA . Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. W OODFORD -G ORMLEY , D ONNA . New Mexico Highlands University, US. Y IU , M IMI . Georgetown University, US. T OBIAS D ÖRING Change and strange: transformations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. An introduction Transformations are the stuff that theatre and dreams are made on, the work sometimes of magic or of music, sometimes of water and of elemental change. In every case, this is a process not of loss or ultimate annihilation, but of some subtle shifts in substance, status and significance while some of the defining elements remain. Material exchange quite possibly combines here with symbolic continuity as spelled out, for instance, in the following lines: Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. (1.2.397-402) 1 This song, directed to a shipwrecked son, is meant to offer consolation by evoking transformation: at the bottom of the sea, the father is not lost but wondrously transformed, as in a workshop where skilled craftsmen treat a given substance so as to turn its perishable being into some lasting form. The drowned thus stays alive in memory, enshrined in precious cultural shape which helps prevent the dead from fading, although he is no longer what he used to be: with pearls for eyes, he can no longer see himself but will continue to be seen by others like his son and, in this way, become their product. With such a transformation into cultural memory, the son is transformed just as well: henceforth he turns into his father’s maker. At the same time, Ariel’s song to Ferdinand itself performs what he sings of. A compound noun like “sea-change” is not an isolated neologism, a word unknown in the vocabulary, but shows a use of language actually capable of transformations in a given verbal repertoire. Throughout, the verbal and 1 Throughout this book, all citations from The Tempest follow the 2011 revised edition in the Arden series, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. I NTRODUCTION xii poetic forms employed here manifest processes of memory, especially in sound patterns and rhymes. Rhyme operates by continuity and difference, it only works when we remember what we heard before and realize when the present sound seems like an echo and chimes in. Such similarity in sound is generally felt to be semantically productive, suggesting some affinity in sense and so may well transform established meanings. A rhyme pair such as “change” and “strange”, for instance, mutually infects the meanings of these words as if to emphasize that change must necessarily result in unfamiliar forms so that all transformations are estranging. In this way, the poetic structure and cultural strategies exemplified by this song from The Tempest manifest, as in a nutshell, the critical and cultural transformations of this very play. Since its earliest records, Shakespeare’s Tempest has undergone continuous change. It is a play by which, according to age-old experience, readers, spectators and critics just as artists, writers, actors or directors try to understand themselves. Over the course of four centuries and across the many different cultural, political or aesthetic fields in which The Tempest has been seen, performed, produced, appropriated, translated, read, reread, debated, changed, adapted, painted, filmed and taught - if there is one thing that emerges from this rich history and impact, it must be the prominence that this particular drama holds for processes of self-seeking or selfpositioning. From its first recorded performance, at Whitehall on Hallowmas 1611 as entertainment for the Jacobean court, to the reappearance of its most celebrated lines in Danny Boyle’s grand opening spectacle for the London 2012 Olympics, from the first printing of its text as the inaugural piece of the 1623 Folio edition, to one of its most recent uses and rewritings in the story of bisexual awakening which John Irving tells us in his 2012 novel, The Tempest continuously emerges as a focal point of meaning, a reservoir of cultural guises and a key occasion to explore the question of who we are. Each place and culture, all periods and generations that encountered this Shakespearean drama and have engaged with it creatively or critically have found it a persistent stimulus or challenge also for encountering themselves and for exploring consequences and conditions of the creative acts that they themselves perform. To some extent, this may hold true for many other texts as well, perhaps for all canonical works and certainly for plays from the Shakespeare canon such as Hamlet which, in many instances or places, share such a history of constant re-engagements. Yet both the global outreach across so many different cultural fields and the intensity of the debates and critical appropriations that have so long involved The Tempest seem to single it out as a site of critical and cultural transformations that are particularly intense and far-reaching. Perhaps it comes down to the prominence Heming and Condell Change and strange: transformations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest xiii first gave it in their Folio edition, perhaps to the biographical narratives, or romantic fantasies, that like to cast its aged author in the role of Prospero saying farewell to his art; perhaps it has to do with the play’s salient exploration of theatre’s own medium, or perhaps with the pedagogical desire for reform, enculturation and correction that drives so much of its plot - whatever the precise reason may be, four hundred years of cultural production clearly show that this has been the text by which many readers, spectators and critics just as artists, writers, actors or directors have come to know their own meaning. If Shakespeare often performs a generative principle by which meaning is produced, as Terence Hawkes (3) once argued, Shakespeare’s Tempest may well be the strongest instance of this process. The present volume aims to chart this history in parts, placing special emphasis on the early seventeenth century and the present, Shakespeare’s time and our own. The first six essays here presented explore some of the literary, historical, philosophical, religious and/ or cultural connections through which this text is interrelated - and interacts - with discourses and practices in the period of its first production (see Das, Rothschild, Mucciolo, Moran, Wanninger, Döring). The remaining seven essays, highlighting some of its recent engagements across a range of media and different cultures, explore what contemporary meanings have been made by it (see Gomes, Woodford-Gormley, Oshima, Li, Ryle, Yiu, Voigts-Virchow, Vaughan). Whether in Cuba, China, Germany or Japan, whether in theatrical staging or rewriting, in DIY versions on YouTube or in arthouse films on screen, all these critical and cultural transformations of the play are nothing if not rich and strange. Our volume follows earlier projects of this sort, critical heritage volumes such as Vaughan and Vaughan’s (1998) or Patrick Murphy’s (2001), and essay collections or monograph studies such as Hulme and Sherman’s (2000) or Zabus’s (2002), tracing the play’s many metamorphoses and wide-ranging cultural travels. In relation to such powerful work, on which readers and contributors continue to draw, our volume does not simply profit from its more recent date so as to take into account some extremely current versions, visions or revisions of The Tempest; it also profits from two quatrocentenaries in the history of the play. Most of our contributions were first presented and discussed in a seminar as part of the World Shakespeare Congress 2011 in Prague, four hundred years after the first performance that we know of and situated in a central European city whose Renaissance court under Emperor Rudolf II may once have held key relevance, as has been argued (cf. Kastan), for Shakespeare’s view of Prospero and his construction of the dynastic plot. Our volume appears in 2013, four hundred years after the most prominent revival of The Tempest in Shakespeare’s life-time, as one of fourteen plays I NTRODUCTION xiv performed at court to celebrate a royal wedding, as discussed in some detail in one of our essays (see Mucciolo). While such anniversaries can easily be seen as mere coincidences of the calendar which do not, in themselves, bear much significance, they may indeed contribute to the meaning-making process in this case: for a play to be so much obsessed with memory, commemoration and the problem of forgetting like The Tempest (see Das), the cultural dynamics of anniversary years, to say the least, are fitting. As Prospero says to Ariel, “I must / Once in a month recount what thou hast been, / Which thou forget’st” (1.2.261-3), so critical accounts once in a while review what further transformations Shakespeare’s play has undergone and what it has once been. Our two quatrocentenaries provide such an occasion. To illustrate this, we need only think of one of the most spectacular - and most unlikely - Tempest transformations ever, which millions had the chance to watch last year. When Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle announced in January 2012 that the Olympic opening ceremony he was planning was to be themed “Isle of Wonders”, taking inspiration from The Tempest and especially from Caliban’s famous speech “Be not afeared. The isle is full of noises” (3.2.135), 2 readers of the play may well have wondered why Shakespeare’s deformed savage should now be turned into a spokesman for the country welcoming the world. A prominent Shakespearean, James Shapiro, is on record in the US media to have questioned this surprising twist: “Why you would choose Caliban’s lines as - in a sense - a kind of anthem for the Olympics, I’m not sure. If you gave those lines some thought, especially in the light of the British Empire, it’s an odd choice.” 3 Whoever is familiar with Shakespeare’s Caliban and his frequent cultural transformations in performances, rewritings, adaptations, paintings, screenings and political interpretations (as comprehensively discussed in Vaughan & Vaughan 1993), may surely marvel at his recent seachange into a kind of colour-bearer for the brave new world of global sports: from thing of darkness to Olympic figurehead, from sullen slave to master of ceremony, from inarticulate and cursing monster to the interpreter of British identity and provider of the signature lines for the UK. “What country, friends, is this? ” we may indeed want to ask, in Viola’s words from Twelfth Night (1.2.1), which set the theme for the concurrent season of the Royal Shakespeare Company during the Olympic summer. As a matter of fact, with the opening approaching ten days before the great event, stormy London weather seemed to give the Tempest theme rather a more literal realization 2 “Boyle turns to The Tempest to inspire a cast of thousands for London Olympics spectacular”. The Guardian, 28 January 2012. 3. 3 USA Today, 27 June 2012. http: / / usatoday30.usatoday.com/ sports/ olympics/ london/ story/ 2012-07-27/ shakespeare-tempest-london-olympics-openingceremony/ 56548372/ 1 (accessed 20 January 2013). Change and strange: transformations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest xv than Danny Boyle had planned. 4 On 27 July, however, all went well in Stratford East. At a climactic moment of the show, Kenneth Branagh in Victorian costume impersonating Isambard Kingdom Brunel stood on a hill under a giant oak and recited Caliban’s nine lines of verse, after which the oak tree dematerialized and the country scenery gave way to blackened colliers and miners. Odd indeed - and precisely for this reason emblematic of four hundred years of Tempest transformations. Likewise, in the major Shakespeare exhibition at the British Museum as part of the Olympics cultural programme, “Staging the World”, Caliban turned out to be central. The entire exhibition culminated in a section on The Tempest where, again, this figure emerged as an emblem of the fundamental principles of cultural transformation Shakespeare employs in his work. Visitors were here presented with various early modern images of Wild Men, Indians, Inuks, Werewolves and some other monstrous, strange or wondrous creatures whose features may all have contributed, in some way or another, to imagining and constructing Caliban. As the catalogue explains, this “method of visual representation - piecing together exotic associations and references to make a new composite figure of fantasy - is suggestively analogous to Shakespeare’s subtle way of presenting Caliban.” (Bate & Thornton 252) That is to say, not only is the Shakespearean playhouse a place of exotic sights and constant cultural encounters (242), but the very process of associating and/ or amalgamating foreign, found and often disparate elements into new stage fictions, by which Shakespearean drama lives, can paradigmatically be seen and studied in this figure, thus showing transformation to be not just a feature of a single play or special character but of Shakespeare’s art in general. “Like Circe’s island of Aeaea,” the exhibition makers argue (255), “Prospero’s island is a place of unnerving transformations.” And as such, we may add, it is not only shaped on classic models such as Homer, but has itself become a model for the ongoing processes of reshaping and reinventing Shakespeare and his final solo-play over the last centuries and beyond. Transformation is indeed the keyword for what happens in The Tempest, not just what has happened to it. The prime example for the multiple, sometimes uncanny, metamorphoses that structure its entire plot, would again be Caliban, with the contested history of his enculturation on whose outcome so much of the play depends. As argued at greater length below (see Rothschild), education is clearly an embattled practice, much debated in early modern writing like Montaigne’s on which Shakespeare evidently draws. But virtually all other aspects of the play - from petty aspirations like 4 “London Olympics: A Tempest Surrounding Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony“. 18 July 2012. See: http: / / www.deadline.com/ 2012/ 07/ olympics-london-danny-boyletension-rehearsals/ (accessed 6 December 2012). I NTRODUCTION xvi Stephano’s desire for social advancement (3.2.106) to universal changes like “the great globe itself” that “shall dissolve” (4.1.153-4) - are governed by effects of transformation, too, right down to the fundamental theme explored throughout, the foundational opposition between nature and culture, including the discussions on “plantation” (2.1.144) and the colonial inflections of this term, all predicated on transformative events. Even Prospero himself, just like his slave, seems to be subject to this power: as former Duke of Milan, then outcast and now ruler of a solitary island, he has undergone most drastic transformations, and he initiates another at the end with the drowning of his book and the breaking of his staff, willfully retransforming himself, as it were, into his former self and status. It cannot be coincidence, therefore, that at the very moment when the magician thus performs his abdication (5.1.33-50), the play transforms and cites some well-known lines of Ovid’s powerful Medea, widely seen at the time as “witch-craft’s great set-piece”, according to Bate (252), so as to stage the conjuror’s farewell: a curious textual exchange between a classic and an early modern writer, between narrative and drama, witch and magus, male and female agency, black magic and white. In fact, Ovid as the poet of the Metamorphoses, quite transformed into an English text in the Renaissance canon, pervades the entire play and so turns The Tempest into a model of, and meditation on, Shakespeare’s own art of transformation: performing seachange in and by the theatre. This may, after all, suggest a reason why this play adheres to classic precedents and, unlike any other, so carefully applies the principles of dramatic unity in space and time. As stipulated in Aristotle’s Art of Poetry and the prescriptions of his later followers, the setting never changes in The Tempest and the dramatic stage action develops continuously over the course of a single afternoon, unusually coherent for Shakespearean drama. Yet precisely if the essence of the play is transformation, a consistent frame of reference must remain and so provide a firm context in which to stage, perform, explore and witness such multiple metamorphoses as here take place. In fact, the creative tension between mutability and strictness has been seen as a main feature of the entire space construction in this drama: Kristen Poole (10) identifies two spatial concepts, “an understanding of space as mathematical and geometric, and an understanding of space as metamorphic and fluid” coexisting in early modern culture; in her reading, The Tempest is exemplary of such a dual understanding, with Prospero’s staff operating both as a surveyor’s and a sorcerer’s instrument, thus signifying both the geometric-scientific and the demonic-supernatural powers converging in this figure: “This push-and-pull dynamic of the play is exemplified (and created) by Prospero himself: godlike but utterly dependent on Providence, controlling the environment but at its mercy, beneficent but suspect.” (216) In Change and strange: transformations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest xvii just this way, the dramatic unities provide the precondition of the transformative tensions and performative dynamics here observed. Like the innovative compound words noted earlier or the similarity of sound in rhyme pairs such as “change” and “strange”, which suggest semantic similarities, the play as a whole works towards interconnections and mutual transformations and never seems to tolerate isolated elements for long. All change, however, is estranging, as The Tempest also amply shows. When at the climax of the counter plot, the would-be rebels are attracted to the glistering garments they find on a line, their desired transformation into the island’s masters is staged as a costume show. Only Caliban, their native guide, remains careful and warns against Prospero’s superior powers of transformation: “If he awake, / From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches, / Make us strange stuff.” (4.1.233-5) This scene is yet another point at which the play draws attention to its own theatricality and invites interpretation in metadramatic terms. Stephano’s and Trinculo’s behaviour seems like a parodistic mirroring of anti-theatrical attacks which were routinely launched against the playhouse. For to put on precious garments and wear clothes not appropriate for a player’s lowly social station was a standard point in such polemics as, for example, Philip Stubbes’s The Anatomie of Abuses (1583): “By wearying of Apparell more gorgeous, sumptuous and precious than our state, callyng or condition of lyfe requireth, whereby we are puffed vp into Pride and inforced to thinke of our selues, more than we ought […].” (n.p.) By putting on more gorgeous clothing than becomes them, players thus presume on an appearance which outwardly transforms them, just like the dressed-up drunkards in The Tempest whose attempted social elevation will be punished by making them “strange stuff”. At heart, however, inward changes are at stake here, i.e. more consequential transformations, beyond apparel and all outward show, since early modern fears of the potentially transgressive consequences of playacting were not confined to Puritan pamphleteers. Even declared friends and patrons of the theatre are on record to have marvelled at the powerful effects, right down to physical reactions, which the art of theatre can work, as when Prince Hamlet muses on the tears in the First Player’s eyes, tears shed for Hecuba, for nothing, a mere fiction in performance. When Hamlet at this point invites us to see the player’s art as “monstrous” (2.2.528), this lexical choice registers both awe and fascination but also horror and anxiety at the monstrosities produced by such impersonation. To perform, we learn here, means to transform - transform both the performer as well as his audience, thus venturing together on a dangerous and open-ended process whose outcome may be difficult to calculate, let alone control. If role play thus affects the spectator no less than the player, The Tempest can be seen as I NTRODUCTION xviii Shakespeare’s grand experiment and demonstration of such a transformation process, with Prospero’s staged storm and the casting of his former adversaries into the roles of helpless victims, powerfully demonstrating what the art of theatre can do: not unlike magic, working towards lasting change. This may be why, as noted at the outset, The Tempest has indeed been used, over so many generations and across so many cultures, as a medium, mould or model whenever people feel the need to tap such magic power and use it for their purposes. Whether Romantic artist, poets or musicians who used the play so as to celebrate their new aesthetics of imagination, whether colonial administrators or Victorian schoolmasters like J.S. Philpotts, who used the play to propagate the English civilizing mission, 5 whether Latin American intellectuals like José Enrique Rodó, who in 1900 used the play to explore cross-cultural positions, 6 whether a psychological and political analyst like Octave Mannoni, who used the play in 1948 to account for colonial predicaments, 7 whether Caribbean writers like Aimé Césaire, George Lamming and so many others who, partly in response to this notorious analysis, used the play to articulate emerging postcolonial agendas, 8 whether writers in present-day Britain like Marina Warner who used the play to come to terms with post-imperial legacies and feminist concerns in the contemporary world, 9 or whether indeed any of the writers, directors, performers, film makers or other artists whose work is discussed in the contributions to this volume - they all demonstrate the eminent usefulness of Shakespeare’s great theatrical experiment, precisely by repeating and so changing it. If to perform means to transform, then all critical and cultural transformations demand such ongoing performances. 5 Philpotts was headmaster of Bedford Grammar school and editor of The Tempest in the 1876 Rugby Edition of the play, dedicated for the use in schools; in his introduction he praised it as a document with special relevance for a time when savage races were to be made subject of English education and humanization, cf. Felperin (176-7). 6 Rodó, a Uruguayan intellectual and philosopher, used his essay Ariel (1900) to discuss issues of transcultural identity in Latin American countries; see the excerpts included in The Tempest (2011), pp. 347-53. 7 In Psychologie de la Colonisation (1948), Mannoni, serving as an official in colonial Madagascar, used The Tempest to postulate a ‘dependency complex’ in colonized people; see the excerpts included in The Tempest (2011), pp. 353-64. 8 Césaire, Martiniquan writer and anti-colonial politician, premiered his stage version for a black theatre Une Tempête, co-written with Jean-Marie Serreau, in Paris in 1969; George Lamming, Caribbean-British writer from Barbados, made extensive uses of The Tempest throughout his work, e.g. in the essay collection The Pleasures of Exile (1960) or the novel Water With Berries (1971). 9 Marina Warner, whose ancestor Sir Thomas Warner in 1623 was given the first royal charter to colonize the Caribbean island of St Kitts, undertook a complex rewriting of the play in her novel Indigo, or Mapping the Waters, published in 1992; for a critical discussion of this text, cf. Zabus (140-154). Change and strange: transformations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest xix The same holds true, in fact, for Shakespeare scholarship and academia where The Tempest has long served as the key text for exploring innovative critical procedures and establishing new disciplinary protocols. It played the main role, for example through the work of Sidney Lee in the later nineteenth century, for the Americanization of Shakespeare (cf. Vaughan & Vaughan 2012) just as it was crucial, a little later, for English and American rapprochements, inventing a sense of shared Anglo-American history and culture (cf. Murphy 26). Not least for this reason, it is particularly apt to publish our present volume on critical and cultural transformations of The Tempest in a series of research in English and American studies, combining transatlantic views. In the later twentieth century and beyond, the play has also functioned a prime site on which to test, debate, establish or critique new paradigms in literary and cultural studies, such as New Criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Postcolonialism, Animal Studies, the Spatial or Religious Turn or Eco-Criticism. Without going into any detail here, this serves to show how reinventions of the discipline quite often seek to gain credence or authority by tackling The Tempest. At the same time, the play text continues to attract new creative engagements, sometimes in rather unexpected fields. In his most recent novel In One Person, for instance, American writer John Irving tells a story of initiation in small town America before the sexual revolution of the later 1960s. His hero and first-person narrator, an emerging writer, grows up to discover and eventually accept the unusually versatile erotic longings of his bisexuality, which he first manages to explore through literature and playacting, encouraged by the local librarian and the amateur theatrical society. Crucial for his remarkable career through various forms of transvestism and transexuality is a production of The Tempest, for which he is cast as Ariel, a part, it turns out, quite congenial to his own “emerging and confusing sexual orientation” (56). As the director explains, Ariel’s gender is mutable” (ibid.), and it is this mutability which prompts and helps the youthful player to rehearse not just this role but, in the longer process, his sexual identity performances. In this way, theatrical play-acting enables personal transformations. So we might take Irving’s story as an instance where, in the contemporary world, the transformative potential of the theatre is established and enacted with The Tempest. Just what anti-theatrical polemicists of Shakespeare’s time like Stubbes once feared is here played out: the real force of masquerading and of acting. This also includes the effects of fiction and of reading: “Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren’t they? ” (60), the hero’s mother anxiously points out. Yet in Irving’s novel, the guardians and instigators of such practices, inspired by Shakespearean drama, win the day. “The best way for young boys or girls to understand Shakespeare”, the leader of the drama group declares, “is for them to put on I NTRODUCTION xx the plays.” (15) And as the novel goes on to suggest, putting on the plays means putting on continuously different and strange parts that continue to transform their players, so much so that, in the last analysis, trying to understand Shakespeare they come to understand themselves. The Tempest therefore figures as a play of transformation that crucially epitomizes the fundamental process Hawkes describes as “meaning by Shakespeare”, cited at the outset. In all the examples mentioned in this introduction, as well as in the cases more fully studied in the following essays, Shakespeare never has or is a given meaning but rather works as a code by which meaning is made or sought, claimed or contested, questioned or established. According to the film version of Peter Greenaway, Prospero is writing the text of the very play of which he is himself the central part. In just this way, the many writers, artists, readers and performers who have engaged with The Tempest worldwide over four hundred years may all be engaged in writing this text so as to find and give themselves their part. And at the end, when Prospero drowns his book, we know that this is not a moment of conclusion or annihilation, but of continuing transformation. Full fathom five this book now lies, its covers turning into coral, its pages perhaps into pearl, so nothing ever fades from it but is transformed into a sea of stories and changed into the cultural memory: a treasure rich and strange, waiting for continued exploration. Change and strange: transformations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest xxi Works Cited Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Bate, Jonathan, and Dora Thornton. Shakespeare. Staging the World. London: The British Museum Press, 2012. Felperin, Howard. “The Tempest in our Time”. The uses of the canon: Elizabethan literature and contemporary theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. 170-190. Hawkes, Terence. Meaning By Shakespeare. New York, London: Routledge, 1992. Hulme, Peter, and William H. Sherman. Eds. The Tempest and Its Travels. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Irving, John. In One Person. Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012. Kastan, David. “’The Duke of Milan/ And His Brave Son’: Dynastic Politics in The Tempest”. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan, Alden T. Vaughan. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: G.K. Hall, 1998. 91-103. Murphy, Patrick M. Ed. The Tempest. Critical Essays. New York, London: Routledge, 2001. Poole, Kristen. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England. Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Eds Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan, Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Stubbes, Philip. The Anatomie of Abuses. Facsimile Reprint [unpaginated]. Amsterdam, New York: Theatrvm Orbis Terrarum, Da Capo Press, 1972 [1583]. Vaughan, Alden T., and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban. A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Vaughan, Virginia Mason, and Alden T. Vaughan. Eds. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: G.K. Hall, 1998. Vaughan, Alden T., and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Zabus, Chantal. Tempests after Shakespeare. London, New York: Palgrave, 2002. N ANDINI D AS Islands of time: The Tempest and cultural memory ANTONIO: … what’s past is prologue … The Tempest (2.1.253) When Antonio, in his conspiracy to overthrow the King of Naples, tells Sebastian to “perform an act / Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come / In yours and my discharge” (2.1.252-54), his language does strange things to Time. That ‘is’, a floating piece of text rearing up its head between the past and the future, draws our attention to the gap that it occupies. It clears out all action from the space of the present, and hangs isolated between past events and the yet-unsettled succession ‘to come’, simply a possibility framed by conversation and remembrance. “I remember / You did supplant your brother Prospero” (2.1.272-73), Sebastian says in response. The Tempest itself is a floating text, in as much as its island locus is notoriously impossible to pin down in space, and there has been much provocative speculation about its possible Atlantic, Mediterranean and Irish contexts. It is equally difficult to fix its literary bearings. Barbara Mowat has noted that it is famously “different from such plays as Richard III, Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale, plays in which a single literary or historical work provides an obvious controlling infracontext; but it has much in common with, for example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play whose surface context rests on a disparate and complex infracontextual system”(Mowat 28). 1 It is also a text obsessed with acts of remembering. Full of the memories that Prospero 1 Mowat adapts Claes Schaar’s concept of ‘infracontext’ here, which distinguishes itself from traditional source study by arguing that the concept of a “vertical context system” (Schaar 1978, 382) is more aligned with the reading habits of the Renaissance than simple one-to-one correspondence between source and allusion. Schaar argues that while the question ‘Is this passage an allusion? ’ does not always make sense or provide useful insight, the question ‘Does this passage suggest some other passage? ’ always does. His concept of a ‘vertical context system’, therefore, posits “a surface context charged with additional meaning by contact with a deep context, an infracontext, bearing some kind of verbal similarity to the surface context. [...] In a great number of cases [...] the meaning of the surface context is modified, amplified, reinforced or brought into contrast by the infracontext” (1978, 382). N ANDINI D AS 2 carries of his brother’s treachery, as befits the protagonist of a play of revenge, it forms itself around whispered accounts. There is the one that he tells Miranda about a childhood that she does not quite remember, the prehistories that Caliban and Ariel seem to remember only too clearly, and the absent presences, like the references to Sycorax and Claribel, which linger insistently in the background. The role that memory repeatedly performs in the play has received ample attention in recent years (cf. Walch; Tribble; Perkins Wilder; Hiscock). My interest is not so much in how memory works within the narrative of the play, as it is in what surfaces out of the matrix of memories of which the play itself is a part. The primary impulse in this essay is to trace the links that flow back and forth between The Tempest and another narrative that would become a foundational fiction of a nation, the story of the English adventurer John Smith’s encounter with Native American Pocahontas in seventeenth century Virginia. Both these narratives are remembering agents themselves, as well as objects remembered within a wider, shared cultural memory. I am suggesting that following the exchange between the two reveals the kind of multidirectional approach that certain cultural conversations demand of us, a form of reading that conflates the gesture back and glance forward, the ‘past’ and the ‘prologue’. What John Smith remembered The strands of the exchange that I want to follow here weave back and forth, but 1607 offers a natural point of inception. On 26 April 1607, three ships sent by the first expedition of the English Virginia Company - the Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery - entered the Chesapeake Bay. In December of that year, the Pamunkey warchief Opechancanough and his men captured the leader of one of the parties sent inland by the English settlers to explore up the Chickahominy River, a tributary of the James River about six miles from the fledgling Jamestown settlement. Opechancanough kept his English prisoner for a few weeks, before sending him to be presented before his brother and leader, Powhatan, also known as Wahunsenacawh or Mamanatowick (‘great king’), supreme chief of over thirty Algonquian-speaking tribal groups along the length of the Virginia coast. The Algonquians had come across white men before, especially the Spanish. Now, faced with intermittent Spanish attacks on the one hand and constant tension with neighbouring tribes on the other, it seemed that Powhatan was keen to size up these new arrivals and test their strength and intentions. It was important for the English too. An alliance with Powhatan would be crucial for the survival of Jamestown, yet all their attempts to make contact with him so far had failed. Over the next two decades and beyond, the part played in this drama by Pocahontas, Powhatan’s daughter, who supposedly saved the Englishman’s Islands of time: The Tempest and cultural memory 3 life at this momentous first encounter, would grow into one of the most iconic cross-cultural meetings in the New World. ‘Pocahontas’ or ‘the Little Wanton’, also known as Matoaka or Amonute, was about nine or ten in 1607, a lively child who seems to have taken a keen interest in the English settlers. Known to be a particular favourite of her father, she in turn would be kidnapped by the English in 1613, convert to Christianity and be renamed as ‘Rebecca’. She married the English settler, John Rolfe, and in 1616, travelled to England with her husband and son. Here, as John Chamberlain reported in one of his many letters to Sir Dudley Carleton, “[t]he Virginian woman Poca-huntas, with her father[’s] counsaillor hath ben with the King and graciously used, and both she and her assistant well placed at the maske. She is on her return (though sore against her will) yf the wind wold come about to send them away” (Chamberlain 50) 2 . Pocahontas met John Smith for a final time during this visit, but never did return to Virginia. She died the following year just before the ship was due to set sail, and was buried at Gravesend (cf. Barbour 1969a; Mossiker; Price; Rennie; Rountree 1990 and 2005). John Smith’s life is as strikingly different as one could imagine from that of his unlikely saviour. A Lincolnshire yeoman’s son whose ambitions drove him to study Machiavelli’s Art of War and Marcus Aurelius’s Dial of Princes as well as honing his skills in riding and jousting with an expatriate Italian in the neighbourhood, his military career reads like a romance. As a young soldier and adventurer, he travelled in France and the Low Countries, then to the Balkans and Hungary. He was captured and enslaved by the Ottomans in Russia, escaped and travelled through central Europe, Morocco and the coast of Northern Africa. At the age of about twenty-six, he returned to England just as the plans to establish a new English colony in Virginia were unfolding (cf. Barbour 1964; Vaughan 1975). At the time of his capture by the Algonquians, he had been newly elected to the fledgling Virginia colony’s council and was destined to become the first de facto governor of Virginia within a year of his meeting with Powhatan. Smith produced two early versions of his account of this momentous meeting. The first was written as a letter within months of the encounter and sent back on the supply ship, The Phoenix. On its arrival in England in 1608, it was adapted for publication by ‘I. H.’ (John Healey) - possibly without Smith’s permission or knowledge 3 - as A True Relation of Such Occurrences of 2 Ironically, given the drift of Chamberlain’s comment, the ‘maske’ in question was Ben Jonson’s The Vision of Delight, presented at the banqueting hall of Whitehall on 6 January 1617, its message echoing James I’s speech about London before the Star Chamber in 1616, expressing concern about the swelling population overwhelming the city and arguing for a return to the countryside. 3 The first edition was misattributed to a ‘Thomas Watson’, an error which was corrected later by ‘I. H.’ in a prefatory epistle. N ANDINI D AS 4 Noate as Hath Happened in Virginia. The second, written in collaboration with other Virginia colonists, was printed in 1612 in two parts: The Map of Virginia and The Proceedings of the English Colony in Virginia. It has been pointed out before that neither of these actually mention Pocahontas’s involvement in that incident. In the first account, A True Relation (1608), Smith only notes his reception by Powhatan, who “kindly welcomed me with good wordes, and great Platters of sundrie victuals” (sig. C1v). The nearest we come to any reference to coercion are indirect and fleeting. The True Relation mentions Powhatan “assuring mee his friendship, and my libertie within foure dayes” (sig. C1v), and the Proceedings simply note that Smith “procured his owne liberty” (sig. C1v). The choice of words in both cases suggests that Smith believed his ‘liberty’ to be threatened by the Algonquians at some point, although the actual details of his experience vary considerably from account to account. In any case, as further versions of the encounter emerged over the next two decades, the story assumed the known contours which are familiar to us from numerous modern retellings on screen and in print. The first reference to Pocahontas’s role appeared in New Englands Trials (second ed., 1622). Here, Smith tells the story of how his companions fled leaving him a captive of the tribe, “yet God made Pocahontas the Kings daughter the meanes to deliver me” (sig. C2v). Reference is made to this deliverance again in the 1623 broadside advertisement of Smith’s much longer account, The Generall Historie of Virginia. However, it was only when the Historie was printed in the following year, seventeen years after the event itself supposedly had occurred, that the story emerged in its familiar form for the first time: Before a fire upon a seat like a bedsted, [Powhatan] sat covered with a great robe, made of Rarowcun skinnes, and all the tayles hanging by. On either hand did sit a young wench of 16 or 18 yeares, and along on each side the house, two rowes of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red; many of their heads bedecked with the white downe of Birds; but every one with something: and a great chayne of white beads about their necks. At [Smith’s] entrance before the King, all the people gave a great shout. The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead of a Towell to dry them: having feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper. (sig. G4v-H1r) Islands of time: The Tempest and cultural memory 5 Dwelling on this narrative raises a number of problems. Firstly, the multiple versions of Smith’s story and its increasing elaboration in the later iterations throw the veracity of the account as a whole into question (cf. Fuller). Secondly, even if Smith’s report is largely accurate in its description of events and Native American culture, it seems unlikely that he would have understood the full significance of his experiences among the Alongquians. As recent studies by Lemay and Gleach have argued, it is possible that what Smith perceived as a threat to his life and liberty was the traditional initiation ceremony through which the Algonquians redefined their worldview to include the English settlers, and adopted Smith himself into Powhatan’s tribe as a local chief or werowance (cf. Lemay; Gleach). Thirdly and crucially for our purposes - what does this have to do with The Tempest? Geoffrey Bullough’s foundational account of Shakespeare’s narrative and dramatic sources magisterially asserted that to compare Pocahontas to Miranda is a “tempting fancy which must be sternly repressed” (241). Bullough’s caveat has a point. The first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s play was in November 1611, more than a decade before the first complete account of Pocahontas’s act of mercy emerged in The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624). Leaving aside such doubts and caveats for the moment, however, allows us to follow a different entry into the conversation between the two texts. It begins with the first, rather than the most iconic, of the meetings between Pocahontas and John Smith. Within the True Relation of Such Occurrences of Noate as Hath Happened in Virginia, the first printed account with its telling silence regarding Smith’s deliverance, a different captivity narrative lies hidden, buried among numerous other incidents. Shortly after Smith’s release by Powhatan in 1608, a meeting was arranged between Powhatan and Captain Christopher Newport, the overall commander of the English expedition. Part of the business was a diplomatic exchange. In a move that was not unusual among early European settlers in the Americas, the English decided to swap the suitably-named thirteen-year-old English boy called Thomas Savage in return for one of Powhatan’s favourites, Namontack (cf. Vaughan 2000 49-59). While the latter accompanied Newport as Powhatan’s first official envoy to King James I when he sailed for England, Thomas Savage was to stay with the Algonquians and learn their language. He was returned after a few weeks, but quickly became a pawn in the negotiations between the English and the Algonquians again when Smith accused and captured some of Powhatan’s people for stealing weapons from the English settlement. What happens in Smith’s story is best told in his own words from the True Relation: Powhatan understanding we detained certaine Salvages, sent his Daughter, a child al tenne yeares old, which not only for feature, countenance, & proportion much exceedeth any of the rest of his people, but for wit, and spirit, the only Nonpariel N ANDINI D AS 6 of his Country: this hee sent by his most trustie messenger, called Rawhunt, as much excéeding in deformitie of person, but of a subtill wit, and crafty understanding, he with a long circumstance, told mee, how well Powhatan, loved and respected mée, and in that I should not doubt any way of his kindnesse. He had sent his child, which he most esteemed, to see me, a Deere, and bread, besides for a present: desiring me that the Boy [Thomas Savage, known to Powhatan as Newport’s ‘son’] might come againe, which he loved exceedingly, his little Daughter hée had taught this lesson also... (sig. E3v). It is understandable if there are images here that seem familiar. Looming behind The Tempest is a rich tessellation of allusions and references. We know that the old worlds of the Aeneid and the medieval chivalric romances have a place within it (cf. Hamilton; Bullough 237-339). So do the texts that emerged from Europe’s encounter with the new world. Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essay “Of the Canniballes”, Antonio Pigafetta’s accounts of Patagonia, and the reports of the wreck of the Sea Venture on the coast of the Bermudas in 1609 by William Strachey, are only a few, if the best known, among the latter (cf. Vaughan and Vaughan 1991, 43). Smith’s 1608 letter occupies a place within that network. Newport, who first instigated that exchange of ‘boys’, would become the captain of the ill-fated Sea Venture in 1609. If, as it has been argued frequently, Shakespeare was interested enough in English experiences in the New World to draw on Stratchey’s account in manuscript form, then one might expect him also to have read the first printed account of the Virginia expedition that was offered by Smith’s True Relation. 4 The resonances evoked are striking. Smith’s account of his first meeting with Pocahontas weaves its moment of encounter around the familiar image of a young girl pleading for the lives of endangered men and a much-loved ‘Boy’ to a stern European patriarch and governor, while the representation of the messenger ‘Rawhunt’, a curious combination of physical deformity and quickness of wit, gestures forward to both Caliban and Ariel. The word ‘nonpareil’ itself extends a fragile tendril from one text to another. It is an established, distinctive adjective for Pocahontas. In The Proceedings of the English Colony in Virginia (1612), Smith himself would describe her again as “the very nomparell of [Powhatan’s] kingdome” (sig. O2r). It was picked up subsequently in other accounts of English settlers in Virginia, such as Ralph Hamor, whose True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (1615) refers to “Powhatans delight and darling, his daughter Pocahuntas, (whose fame hath even bin spred in England by the title of Nonparella 4 Strachey’s account would be printed in 1625, two years after the printing of the familiar Pocahontas story in the Generall History. Other Bermuda pamphlets which have often been linked to The Tempest include Sylvester Jourdain’s Discovery of The Barmudas (1610) and Virginia Company's A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (1610). Islands of time: The Tempest and cultural memory 7 of Virginia)” (sig. B2v). 5 Shakespeare’s Caliban notably uses it for Miranda, when he tells Stephano and Trinculo that Prospero has a daughter: And that most deeply to consider is The beauty of his daughter; he himself Calls her a nonpareil. I never saw a woman But only Sycorax, my dam, and she; But she as far surpasseth Sycorax As great’st does least. (3.2.98-103) 6 The crucial point, of course, is that this traffic in ideas is not unidirectional. If the fragmented memories of Smith’s early New World account may be discerned lingering behind The Tempest’s own figuring of a moment of first encounter between the King of Naples’s son and the Duke of Milan’s “more braver daughter” (1.2.440) and Prospero’s feigned anger, the subsequent received narrative of the Pocahontas story itself gestures back at older stories, including The Tempest. At the simplest level, Smith’s act of remembrance is a record not only of his own story, but a response to a narrative trope that had become a part of the shared lore of travel. Behind it loom familiar shadows of countless women of classical and medieval narratives, from Ariadne and Medea to Bevis of Hampton’s Josian and Cervantes’s Zoraida in Don Quixote. Young, alien women pleading for the lives of European heroes to unsympathetic patriarchs constituted a well-established narrative trope in European fiction and drama. They were especially visible in this period, as we know, in the captivity narratives and plays based on Iberian conflicts both with the old world of Islamic empires, the Turks and the Ottomans, and the new world of the Americas. As a wealth of recent work on the English ‘Turk plays’ has pointed out, such stories were familiar and widely available for popular consumption in England (cf. Matar; Vitkus 2001 and 2003; Dimmock; Voigt). Closer to home, one story familiar to New World travellers like Smith was that of a young Spanish explorer called Juan Ortiz, found during Hernando De Soto’s 1539 expedition in Florida (cf. Voigt 99-153). Accounts of the expedition report how De Soto’s men spotted a “Christian, naked and sun-burnt,” among the native Americans, “his arms tattooed after their manner, and he in no respect differing from them” (Fidalgo of Elvas 27). Once he is taken back to the Spanish camp, it emerges that in 1527-8, twelve years before the De Soto expedition, Juan Ortiz had been trapped and captured by the warriors of the Indian chief Hirrihigua. Tied to a barbacoa (a smoking and drying rack 5 As the full title suggests, Pocahontas is at the centre of Hamor’s account. 6 It is a word that Shakepeare uses rarely and only here in complete earnest. Olivia might be the ‘nonpareil’ of beauty, but she is proud (cf. Twelfth Night 1.5); Posthumous tortures himself with the thought that Imogen only ‘seem’d’ the nonpareil of the times (cf. Cymbeline, 2.5). Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra (3.2) and the hired assassin of Banquo and Fleance in Macbeth (3.4) are nonpareils of a very different kind. N ANDINI D AS 8 for foods and hides, a word that survives today as ‘barbeque’) and about to be set on fire, he was saved through the intervention of the daughter of the chief (and in some versions, his wife) and made to serve them as a slave. The two best known versions of Ortiz’s own account were widely known in Europe and England. Garcilaso de la Vega’s La Florida del Inca was published in 1605. Richard Hakluyt, who would have accompanied Smith and the others on the first Virginia expedition if he had not changed his mind inexplicably at the last moment, and whose steady stream of travel accounts, according to the poet Michael Drayton’s Ode ‘To the Virginian voyage,’ “inflame[d] / men to seeke fame,” (56) printed his version in the pamphlet, Virginia richly valued, in 1609 and again in 1611. Smith’s fondness for this particular trope is evident, and markedly combines its influences from the old world of Mediterranean clashes with Islamic forces with the new world of the Americas. It emerges tellingly in the Generall Historie of Virginia, for example, where he offers a quick review of his female protectors in his dedicatory epistle to Frances, Duchess of Lennox and Richmond, reminiscing how honorable and vertuous Ladies, and comparable but amongst themselves, have offred me rescue and protection in my greatest dangers: even in foreign parts, I have felt relief from that sex. The beauteous Lady Tragabigzanda, when I was a slave to the Turkes, did all she could to secure me. When I overcame the Bashaw of Nalbrits in Tartaria, the charitable Lady Callamata supplyed my necessities. In the utmost of many extremities, that blessed Pokahontas, the great Kings daughter of Virginia, oft saved my life. When I escaped the crueltie of Pirats and most furious stormes, a long time alone in a small Boat at Sea, and driven ashore in France, the good Lady Madam Chanoyes, bountifully assisted me. (sig. [ii]v) That litany of adventure and deliverance admittedly reads like an unlikely retelling of a chivalric romance, but that romanticisation was necessary for Smith, whose evident ambition ‘to seeke fame’ in Virginia in particular were fraught with clashes that developed along lines of social difference. Smith had found himself in trouble even before landing in Virginia by opposing Edward-Maria Wingfield, one of the gentleman investors of the expedition travelling abroad the Susan Constant. Like many of the gentlemen leaders of the Jamestown venture, Wingfield resented the recognition that the Company had given to Smith’s experience by naming him as a member of the colony’s ruling council, and is reported to have said later that “if he were in England he would thinck scorne [t]his man should be [his] Companyon” (Barbour 1969b, 220). Smith was accused of planning a mutiny “to usurp the government, murder the council, and make himself king” (ibid. 381). Narrowly escaping hanging and placed under restraints, on their arrival in Virginia he was initially barred from admission to the council despite the Company’s instructions, and “an oration made, whie Captaine Smith was not Islands of time: The Tempest and cultural memory 9 admitted of the Councell as the rest” (ibid. 379). 7 In the face of such opposition, Smith’s attempt, both in Virginia and subsequently in the various versions of his experiences produced in England, is to reconfigure himself as a hero of a new world, whose hard-earned experience nevertheless reflects the familiar narrative trajectories of the old. Both the social impetus and the romance transformation it triggers are at once recorded and denied tellingly in The Proceedings of the English Colony in Virginia (1612), which notes: Some propheticall spirit calculated hee had the Salvages in such subjection, hee would have made himselfe a king, by marrying Pocahontas, Powhatans daughter. It is true she was the very nomparell of his kingdome, and at most not past 13 or 14 yeares of age. Very oft shee came to our fort, with what shee could get for Captain Smith, that ever loved and used all the Countrie well, but her especially he ever much respected: and she so well requited it, that when her father intended to have surprized him, shee by stealth in the darke night came through the wild woods and told him of it. But her marriage could no way have intitled him by any right to the kingdome, nor was it ever suspected hee had ever such a thought, or more regarded her, or any of them, then in honest reason, and discreation he might. If he would he might have married her, or have done what him listed. For there was none that could have hindered his determination. (sig. O2r) In Smith’s expanding series of accounts of captivity and deliverance, therefore, it is possible to see a slow accretion of multiple memories, translated across space and time, old worlds and new. Taking elements from the familiar romance of European captivity narratives, combining them with his own past experiences in other lands and in other circumstances, what Smith ultimately produces in the Pocahontas story is a tessellation of the personal and the collective. The Tempest is a part of that matrix of memories. Smith had sailed back to England in October 1609, which meant that he would have been present in England throughout the years surrounding The Tempest’s first recorded performance in 1611, and its repeat performance at court in 1613, during the wedding celebrations of James I’s daughter to Frederic, the Elector Palatine, before embarking on his next voyage to New England in 1614. So, a decade later, when the young English boy and the Algonquian prisoners, equally helpless pawns in a bigger game, are erased from his recollections, and their place taken by the reworking of a familiar trope in which Smith himself plays the male beneficiary of Pocahontas’s compassion, it would seem that The Tempest and Ferdinand and Miranda may well have become a 7 If this seems uncannily like the rebellions that Antonio and Ferdinand on the one hand, and Stephano and Trinculo on the other, plan on Prospero’s island, then Smith’s wellknown disdain for the idleness of the inexperienced gentleman adventurers who attempt to control the expedition also has something in common with the play’s initial striking challenge to social hierarchy: “What cares these roarers for the name of king? ” (1.1.16-7). On Smith, in this context, see Jeffrey Knapp. The Tempest’s pitting of social discourses against each other is explored brilliantly by David Norbrook. N ANDINI D AS 10 part of Smith’s memory of that familiar trope of rescue. That composite trope shapes the revision of his account of this moment of cross-cultural encounter, the act of remembering turning the attacker into the heroic protagonist, sociopolitical negotiation into romance. What’s past is prologue What exactly is happening here in this conversation, this strange encounter between Smith’s narrative and Shakespeare’s play? The interchange between travel accounts abroad and the fictions that emerge ‘at home’ is nothing new. It is memory to which we need to attend here, and more specifically, to the particular process through which memory is created, transformed and retold both within these texts and beyond. Texts of travel and encounter are dependent understandably on remembrance and retelling, and how memory works is at the heart of our understanding of such records. That memory is open to individual acts of intervention. Yet at the same time, it is equally open to social revision and manipulation. It functions like fiction, like narrative, at a fundamental level. It is fluid. What one remembers, chooses to remember, and chooses to narrate as memory, as Edric Caldicott and Anne Fuchs have pointed out, “are not static representations of past events but ‘advancing stories’ through which both individuals and communities forge their sense of identity” (11-32). Such a view of memory as a collective and evolving phenomenon has become an increasingly active area of scholarship in recent years. Studies in cultural memory across a range of fields have repeatedly drawn our attention to the fact that memory is neither exclusively nor simply a construct of personal experience, uniquely embodied in an individual presence and individual neurophysiological mechanisms. “[I]t is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories” (38), claimed Maurice Halbwachs in his pioneering 1950s study, On Collective Memory. Halbwachs’ argument has been nuanced and challenged in many ways by current theorists and the emphasis has shifted largely from the social to the cultural domain, with cultural memory and its relationship to history forming the focus of significant work by scholars such as Jan Assmann, Pierre Nora, James Young, Geoffrey Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Eric Hobsbawm and Andreas Huyssen. However, there is an overarching emphasis in all such enquiries on the framing of memory by socially constituted forms, narratives and relations, which illuminates some of the puzzles we have been exploring here. Take The Tempest first. We know that acts of remembering and retelling produce much of the narrative dynamics of the play. “Dost thou attend me? ” (1.2.78), “Dost thou hear? ” (1.2.106), Prospero asks Miranda. “Canst thou Islands of time: The Tempest and cultural memory 11 remember / A time before we came unto this cell? ” (1.2.38-39). “Certainly, sir, I can,” (1.2.41) says Miranda, but ‘’tis far off’ (1.2.44). Miranda’s recollection of the female community that protected and surrounded her infancy hardly matches Prospero’s own memories of male political and social competition, yet the story that he offers triggers a valorising response if only because of the shared narrative experience that supplies memory’s place: “Alack, for pity./ I, not rememb’ring how I cried out then, / Will cry it o’er again” (1.2.132-4). As acts of remembrance and memorialisation, such transactions dramatise what Marianne Hirsch has called ‘postmemory’ (cf. 1997). For Hirsch, [p]ostmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. (2008, 106-107) 8 Postmemory, in this context, involves adopting “the traumatic experiences - and thus also the memories - of others as one’s own” (Hirsch 1999, 9), but at the same time underlines the insurmountable distance between those who lived through the trauma, and those who did not, a distance that constant retelling and memorialisation must attempt to bridge. Prospero’s story, and the play itself, similarly take shape for us with every cumulative narrative of remembrance, from the denunciation of Caliban and the admonition of Ariel to the repentance of the King of Naples. Both their need and validity are corroborated by the gestures back at past retellings that will trigger yet more in times to come. “I must / Once in a month recount what thou hast been, / Which thou forget’st” (1.2.261-3), Prospero tells Ariel, even as at the end, he will promise Alonso to “deliver all” (5.1.314). Smith, too, offers not only retellings, but memories of retellings of supposedly earlier versions of the encounter. In The Generall Historie of 1624, he claims that he had actually narrated the story of his rescue in a letter he had written to Queen Anna in 1616, of which he now provides an ‘abstract’. That claim is reinforced by the citation of yet another statement of previous narration, reprinted now as a document called “A briefe relation written by Captain Smith to his Majesties Commissioners”. A final reference comes in Smith’s True Travels, Adventures, and Observations, printed in 1630. Here again, readers are reminded how Powhatan “commanded him to be slaine; [and] his daughter Pocahontas saved his life” (58). Memory works proleptically in these endeavours for listeners within and outside the world of both texts. It inscribes itself by self-consciously creating 8 Hirsch’s focus, as with much of current work on memory studies and cultural history, is on trauma and the memorial legacy of the Holocaust. N ANDINI D AS 12 and participating in a communally ‘remembered’ narrative. As Jan Assmann has suggested, using a curiously apposite phrase given our present context, the formation of cultural memory often works in this way. It coalesces around “fixed points [that are] fateful events of the past”, creating “islands of time” that emerge slowly out of the “flow of everyday communications” (Assmann and Czaplicka 129) through repetition and reiteration in a commonly shared cultural domain, their contours fixed through repeated negotiations at multiple levels and among multiple agents. Smith’s close brush with Algonquian ritual and culture in Virginia, increasingly isolated from European faces and European time in each narrative iteration, created such a space. Even more striking is the ‘bare island’ that hosts the present action in Shakespeare’s play, the space of Antonio’s ‘is’. Suspended between “the dark backward” (1.2.50) inscribed in Milan and a future envisioned in Naples, it provides the apt crucible for the formation of memories that can forge a community anew. It is possible to see such workings of memory continuing to operate outside the texts, even in the status that both narratives claim in our shared memory today. The identification of Smith’s contested experience in the encounter with Powhatan is recognised as a foundational American myth, its place within a national mythos marked out through lengthy debate. The acknowledgement of The Tempest as the focus of our critical and creative engagements with questions of cross-cultural encounter, colonialism, nationhood and power stretches from imaginative interventions such as Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, to the equally longstanding debate about the play as a response to colonial enterprise. Through all such conversations, interventions and retellings, both Smith’s story and The Tempest have emerged as postcolonial cultural icons in their own right, marking imagined moments of exchange, encounter, communication, and resistance in the trauma of early colonial ventures. Like the narratives of The Tempest, such reiterations and debate create their own “islands of time” (Assmann and Czaplicka 129). With each self-acknowledged ‘retelling’, a collective story of first encounter gradually takes shape, the reader’s incremental piecing together of the story itself offering its own additional form of investment in the cultural resonance of the original event. In the traffic of texts and time, each version asks us whether we have been ‘attending’ to the tale, reminding us that we have heard it before, testing whether we remember how the past retellings validate the way in which first contact is meant to unfold in our collective memories. And slowly, we do. Islands, as Roland Greene has reminded us, were special places in the early modern period: Islands of time: The Tempest and cultural memory 13 Celebrated in productions such as utopias, romances and isolarii, islands are held at a premium in the sixteenth century not merely out of geographical curiosity but because they afford a perspective that can have only an oblique relation to the accumulating and totalizing worldview of the imperial and economic centres. (141) If the ethical and artistic imperative of such ‘island logic’ is inevitably to question ‘mainland’ views, he argues, then “[i]n this light, The Tempest is Shakespeare’s island play, and it applies island logic to its contemporaneous world as well as to its own models and procedures” (Greene 141). But to look at The Tempest and John Smith’s account as ‘islands of time’ is to understand something else about the function of islands. From Circe’s enchanted Aeaea to More’s Utopia, an island is also a space where time might stand still. Or rather, it is a pocket of space that emerges from and outside time even as it is separated from the mainland. The English, “penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos” according to Virgil’s much-cited description from the First Eclogue, would know that above all. ‘Island logic’, in that context, does not simply question the mainland; it offers a space to rethink its very place in time. It is where the mainland stores its revisions both of alterity and identity, created out of and outside of the “flow of [the] everyday” (Assmann and Czaplicka 129). N ANDINI D AS 14 Works Cited Assmann, Jan and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”. New German Critique 65 (Spring/ Summer, 1995): 125-133. Barbour, Philip. The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. . Pocahontas and Her World: A Chronicle of America's First Settlement in Which Is Related the Story of the Indians and the Englishmen, particularly Captain John Smith, Captain Samuel Argall, and Master John Rolfe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969a. . Ed. The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606-1609: Documents Relating to the Foundation of Jamestown. Volume 1. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society; Cambridge University Press, 1969b. Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Volume 8. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Caldicott, Edric and Anne Fuchs. Eds. Cultural Memory: Essays on European Literature and History. Bern: Peter Lang. Chamberlain, John. The Letters of John Chamberlain. Volume 2. Ed. Norman Egbert McClure. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939. Dimmock, Mathew. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Drayton, Michael. Selected Poems. Ed. Vivien Thomas. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1977. Fidalgo of Elvas. A true relation of the vicissitudes that attended the Governor Don Hernando de Soto and some nobles of Portugal in the discovery of the region of Florida. Trans. Buckingham Smith. Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto in the Conquest of Florida. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1866 [1557]. Fuller, Mary. Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576-1624. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Gleach, Frederic. Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Greene, Roland. “Island Logic”. ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels. Eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. London: Reaktion, 2000. 138-45. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Trans. and ed. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hamilton, Donna B. Virgil and The Tempest: The Politics of Imitation. Columbus: Ohio State U. Press, 1990. Hamor, Raphe. A true discourse of the present estate of Virginia and the successe of the affaires there till the 18 of Iune. 1614. Together with a relation of the seuerall English townes and forts, the assured hopes of that countrie and the peace concluded with the Indians. The christening of Powhatans daughter and her mariage with an English-man. Written by the yonger, late secretarie in that colony. London, Printed by Iohn Beale for W. Welby, 1615. Hartman, Geoffrey. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Islands of time: The Tempest and cultural memory 15 Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. . “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy”. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Mieke Bal et al. Hanover: UP of New England, 1999. 3-23. . “The Generation of Postmemory”. Poetics Today 29.1 (Spring 2008): 103-128. Hiscock, Andrew. Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 1-6. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger. Eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London, Routledge, 1995. Knapp, Jeffrey. An Empire Nowhere: England, America and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest. Berkeley, Los Angeles: U of California P, 1992. Lemay, J.A. Leo. The American Dream of Captain John Smith. Charlottesville, London: UP of Virginia, 1991. Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Mossiker, Frances. Pocahontas: The Life and the Legend. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Mowat, Barbara A. “‘Knowing I loved my books’: reading The Tempest intertextually”. ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels. Eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. London: Reaktion, 2000. 27-36. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire”. Representations 26 (1989), 7-25. . Les lieux de mémoire. 7 volumes. Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992. Norbrook, David. “‘What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King? ’: Language and Utopia in The Tempest”. Renaissance Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After. Eds. Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope. London: Routledge, 1992. 20-54. Perkins Wilder, Lina. Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Price, David A. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of A New Nation. New York: Random House, 2003. Rennie, Neil. Pocahontas, Little Wanton: Myth, Life & Afterlife. London: Bernard Quaritch, 2007. Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas’ People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Though Four Centuries. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990. . Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. Schaar, Claes. “Vertical Context Systems”. Style and Text: Studies Presented to Nils Erik Enkvist. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975. 146-57. . “Linear Sequence, Spatial Structure, Complex Sign, and Vertical Context System”. Poetics 7 (1978): 377-400. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Smith, John. A True Relation of Such Occurrences of Noate as Hath Happened in Virginia. 1608. N ANDINI D AS 16 . New England’s Trials. 1622. . The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles. 1624. . The Map of Virginia. 1612. . The Proceedings of the English Colony in Virginia. 1612. . True Travels, Adventures, and Observations. 1630. Tribble, Evelyn. “The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time: Memory in The Tempest”. College Literature 33: 1 (2006): 149-67. Vaughan, Alden T. American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975. . “Trinculo’s Indian: American Natives in Shakespeare’s England”. ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels. Eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. London: Reaktion, 2000. 49-59. Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Virgil, Maro Publius. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. 2 Volumes. Trans. H. R. Fairclough. London: Loeb Classical Library, 1916-18. Eclogue 1.67. Vitkus, Daniel. Ed. Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barabry Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. . Ed. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Voigt, Lisa. Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009. 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A MOS R OTHSCHILD Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne’s “Of the Institution and Education of Children” Inherited standards of scholarly rigor may be obstructing our efforts to understand the intertextual connections between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Montaigne’s Essais. 1 Early twentieth-century scholars declared direct textual parallels the only legitimate evidence of connection between the two texts, and their exacting criteria still endure. 2 For example, Alan de Gooyer begins a recent attempt to relate the Essais to The Tempest by conceding that “connections other than verifiable borrowings are difficult to confirm and when suggested they are always in danger of falling prey to charges of vagueness” (513); he goes on to assert that “against such criticisms there is little to be said, except that if we relate the two works in order to complicate and deepen our sense of the play […] we have done [it] some service” (ibid.). There is, however, another reply to such criticisms. While earlier scholars provided a necessary check on vague and far-reaching claims about Montaigne’s influence on Shakespeare, they also imposed their own modern definitions of allusion on works that participate in an early modern cultural conversation about the relations between texts. In Tudor-Stuart discourses on imitatio, “verifiable borrowings” were a contested subject of some significance. Following Erasmus, many English humanists ridiculed the strict (and readily identifiable) imitation advocated by Ciceronianism as cultivating intellectual servility and shallow learning; instead, they encouraged thorough assimilation of another’s words and ideas as productive of intellectual liberty and true erudition. 3 The modern, ‘smoking gun’ standard of 1 For a survey of proposed links between The Tempest and the Essais, see Grady (2006). Capell is credited with discovering in 1784 Gonzalo’s paraphrase from Montaigne’s “Of the Caniballes” (2.1.148-65). On Shakespeare’s use of Montaigne’s “Of Cruelty” in Prospero’s forgiveness speech (5.1.20-32), see Prosser. For a possible link to Montaigne’s “Of Diverting and Diversions,” see Paster. 2 See Grady (2000, 133) and Ellrodt (37) on developing standards for ‘verifiable’ allusive connections between The Tempest and the Essais, including the Montaigne scholar Pierre Villey’s assertion about determining an allusion’s legitimacy: “a hundred ciphers add up to zero” (cited in Ellrodt 37). 3 On the conflict between strict, Ciceronian imitation and incorporative, Erasmian imitation, see Greene (181-9). N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 18 allusion that has long been applied to analysis of intertextuality in The Tempest and other Renaissance texts thus validates only the rote borrowing that such early modern humanists disparaged, while it elides the incorporative imitation that they extolled. In fact, by limiting the scope of intertexual inquiry, current conceptions of allusion enshrine the value of the modern text’s ‘originality’ while devaluing and obscuring the possible meanings of what Michel Jeanneret has called “the linguistic and stylistic hotch-potch” (270-3) of the imitative early modern text, reducing copia to copying and imitatio to slavish repetition. 4 I will argue here that the detrimental effects of this modern critical practice are compounded in the case of The Tempest because the play - in what amounts to a complex tissue of unrecognized allusions - incorporatively imitates a text that explicitly addresses imitatio and its stakes: John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s essay “Of the Institution and Education of Children.” 5 Montaigne’s essay is characteristic of early modern writing about imitatio in combining questions of textual interrelations with questions of education. 6 Only “indiscreet writers,” the essayist suggests, stoop to “intermingle and wrest in whole sentences taken from ancient Authors, supposing by such filching-theft to purchase honour and reputation to themselves” (108). Such wholesale textual recapitulation signals not only an incomplete understanding of the original material, but also an unquestioning acceptance of textual authority and a servility of mind. By contrast, Montaigne claims that writers who “alter, transforme, and confound” textual “peeces borrowed of others” in order “to shape out of them […] worke, altogether [their] owne” (114) demonstrate both a more thorough understanding of the texts they engage and a healthy skepticism of textual authority that preserves their own “vigor and libertie” (113). For Montaigne, the relationship between scholar and texts is both corollary to and part of the relationship between student and teacher. When a tutor strives to impress upon a student the absolute “authoritie” (ibid.) of teacher and text, he perpetuates the philosophical error of dogmatic rashness (propeteia). 7 Instead, he should “make his scholler narrowly to sift all 4 On the devaluation of imitative writing through the critical terminology of allusion and intertextuality, see Machacek. On the incompatibility of imitatio with modern critical notions of originality, see Cave (76-7). 5 On the essay’s original composition, see Wiesmann (151). On John Florio’s 1603 translation of the Essais and its transmission in England, see Boutcher (2002, 260). 6 Greene notes that “Imitatio was a literary technique that was also a pedagogical method and a critical battleground”(2). 7 “Dogmatic rashness” is Hamlin’s translation of Sextus Empiricus’ adaptation of the form of error Aristotle terms propeteia. Hamlin clarifies that, for Montaigne, “Assertion and dogmatism […] are signs of depravity, ignorance, [and] presumption. Indeed they are proof” (207). Propeteia, then, is a state of unexamined and rigid belief in the comprehensiveness of one’s own (or one’s text’s) “authoritie.” Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 19 things with discretion, and harbour nothing in his head by meere authoritie, or upon trust” (113). 8 In Montaigne’s view, then, to educate is not to impart authoritative knowledge, but to cultivate myriad-minded skeptical awareness - doubt. 9 Rote textual borrowing and dogmatic pedagogy are linked problems for the essayist, as both affirm unquestioned authority. In arguing for the relevance of Montaigne’s essay to The Tempest, I expand upon Paul Yachnin’s claim that Shakespeare was “deeply involved in a humanist incorporation of Montaigne” (159). Yachnin argues that both The Tempest and its long-established source text “Of the Caniballes” are “products of a formative entanglement” of “incorporation in terms of both intellectual digestion and marketplace appropriation” (170). However, The Tempest’s engagement with Montaigne’s “ideal of literary incorporation” (159) is even more vexed than Yachnin suggests. 10 Shakespeare’s play not only absorbs and creatively transmutes material from the essays scholars already acknowledge as its intertexts - “Of the Caniballes,” “Of Cruelty,” and perhaps “Of Diverting and Diversions” 11 - but also attempts to incorporate Montaigne’s ideal of textual assimilation itself. I would submit that The Tempest undertakes this (meta)intertextual engagement through a series of incorporative imitations of “Of the Institution and Education of Children.” To consider the possibility that The Tempest has absorbed aspects of this essay’s treatment of textual incorporation and education is to enrich our understanding of the play’s staging of the processes and problems of learning. 12 In particular, two figures that Montaigne critiques, the overly studious scholar-pupil and the choleric and punctilious tutor, may offer surprising insight into Prospero, The Tempest’s self-proclaimed “schoolmaster” (1.2.172). Links between these figures and Prospero suggest that his approach to edu- 8 Likewise, Montaigne recommends that a “diversitie of judgements be proposed unto” a student, such that, “if he can, he shall be able to distinguish the truth from falsehood, if not, he will remaine doubtfull” (113). As Hamlin explains, a Montaignian “tutor’s job is not to pronounce dogmatically, but to expose the pupil to a wide range of opinion” (201). 9 Hamlin contends that the philosophical “doubt” that Shakespeare would have encountered emphasized “judgmental suspension [epoché] in the face of diverse opinion […]. It was an antidote rather than a substitute for dogmatism” (199). Thus while Boutcher may well be right that “it makes more historical sense to associate [the Essais with the issues] surrounding […] human learning, than with a more abstractly conceived rise of skepticism,” we must remember that a Montaignian education is an education in skepticism (2003, 22). 10 Yachnin defines this ideal as “the responsibility laid upon readers of taking in and making part of themselves the words of another” (159). On the broader importance of “digestive metaphors” in the discourses of imitatio, see Pigman (7-9), Jeanneret (131-9). 11 See note 1 above. 12 Scholarship on education in The Tempest has tended to treat Prospero as a provider of knowledge with little to learn rather than as a recipient of instruction. See, for example, Winson (19-29); Carey-Webb (11-9); and Boutcher (2002, 262-4). N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 20 cation - whether his withdrawn bookishness, his testy demands for Miranda’s attention during his history lesson, or his emphasis on rote repetition in his instructions for Ariel - marks him in the early acts of the play as blinded by a self-deceiving dogmatism (propeteia). The Tempest presents an educator in need of instruction, a domineering pedant who must learn to doubt. In its later acts, then, the play dramatizes the process by which Prospero learns to forsake his narrow-minded and dogmatic rashness. Shakespeare reprises Montaigne’s discussions of imitatio’s textual and pedagogical valences to represent key events in Prospero’s learning process: his struggle with worldly ephemerality and theatricality in the wake of his masque’s disruption, his abjuration of his magic, and his acknowledgement of Caliban. Through these incorporative intertextual imitations, The Tempest stages a philosophical re-education in which Prospero comes to recognize the limitations of his own (and his book’s) authority and to embrace the myriadminded doubt so important to Montaignian learning. 13 In fact, the play finally not only represents, but also enacts a Montaignian education by exploiting the judgmental suspension created by theatrical spectacle in order to induce watching playgoers to incorporate the lesson that they have witnessed Prospero learn. “[A]ll dedicated / To closeness”: Prospero and bookish myopia The Tempest announces an interest in education and the relationship between scholars and books when Prospero relates to Miranda the circumstances surrounding the loss of his dukedom. A variety of historically studious rulers suggest analogues for Prospero; 14 however, his descriptions of himself “transported / And rapt in secret studies” (1.2.76-7) and “neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of [his] mind” (1.2.89-90) may also align him with Montaigne’s “over-indiscreet” (126) scholar. The essayist’s recommendations concerning overzealous study can enrich our understanding of the magician’s bookishness and its problematic results: Yet would I not have [a scholar] pent-up, […] [or] corrupted with keeping him fast-tied, and as it were labouring fourteene or fifteene houres a day poaring on his booke […] neither doe I thinke it fit, if at any time, by reason of some solitarie or melancholy complexion, he should be seene with an over-indiscreet application 13 This philosophical education (from propeteia to doubt) is related to but separate from the moral education (from vengeance to virtue) that traditional humanist readings of the play understand Prospero to undergo. 14 Kastan sees the politically troubled and bookish Rudolph II as a possible analogue for Prospero (98). Wilson argues for Sir Robert Dudley (221-2), while the Arden editors suggest King James I (2011, 39). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 21 given to his booke, it should be cherished in him; for, that doth often make him both unapt for civill conversation, and distracts him from better imployments. (126-7) Montaigne’s critique, like The Tempest, participates in a classically derived cultural conversation about the opposition of the active and contemplative lives. However, Montaigne’s engagement with this well-worn debate is informed by the essayist’s peculiar pedagogical approach. Montaigne encourages “civill conversation” because its social interchange fosters an exposure to differing opinions and a skepticism of personal (and textual) authority. “There is”, he writes, “a marvelous cleerenesse, or as I may terme it an enlightning of mans judgement drawne from the commerce of men, and by frequenting abroad in the world; we are all so contrived and compact in our selves, that our sight is made shorter by the length of our nose” (119). Thus when Montaigne describes the scholar “pent-up” and “fast-tied” while “labouring foureteene or fifteene houres a day poaring on his booke,” he suggests that the confinement of “over-indiscreet” (126-7) study cultivates a shortsighted, belligerent dogmatism founded on an erroneous belief in the infallibility of bookish authority. In The Tempest, the choice between active engagement and retired contemplation involves substantially higher stakes than the quotidian dilemma in Montaigne’s essay. After all, the “better imployment” that Prospero neglects is his civic duty as Duke, and “over-indiscreet application given to his booke” (ibid.) brings him magical power. Nonetheless, Montaigne’s insights about the ramifications of excessive study can still enhance our understanding of Prospero’s condition. While the magician surely intends the claim that he was “all dedicated / To closeness” (1.2.89-90) to mean that he was committed to seclusion and secret study, the word “closeness” also connotes a closed or shut up condition and perhaps a severe and narrow rigor as well. 15 Although Prospero claims that his withdrawn studiousness contributed to the “bettering of [his] mind” (1.2.90), The Tempest suggests that “closeness” and “bettering” may not be so readily reconcilable. Rather, the magician’s fondness for “closeness” may imply - like the “pent-up” and “fast-tied” condition of Montaigne’s “over-indiscreet” (126-7) scholar - that the blinkeredness of excessive study contributes to a corresponding narrowness of mind. 16 15 The OED defines “closeness” as “secrecy” or “concealment” and as “retirement” or “seclusion,” but also as a “closed or shut up condition.” Indeed, via the adjective “close” in the sense of “narrow” or straight,” the word might also connote a “strict,” “rigorous,” or “severe” comportment. 16 For a glimpse of “Prospero’s always off-stage book,” see Mowat (2001, 1). N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 22 “[T]utors not so careful”: Prospero’s choleric instruction of Miranda Ordering Miranda to “Sit still and hear” (1.2.170), Prospero concludes his story of usurpation and exile with a concise summary of the life that they have shared together on the island. His account stresses education above all else: Here in this island we arrived, and here Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit Than other princes can that have more time For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful. (1.2.171-4) These lines advance Prospero’s tale in time so that it nearly reaches to the play’s present moment, but they also suggest that the narrative is less a story than a history lesson. Indeed, in the first scene in which he appears, Prospero delivers three such lessons: one to Miranda, one to Ariel, and one to Caliban. Considering each of these interactions in turn reveals how the play relies on Montaignian notions of education to suggest that the self-proclaimed “schoolmaster” (1.2.172) is himself “not so careful” (1.2.174) a tutor as he supposes. 17 If the tale that Prospero tells Miranda aligns him with Montaigne’s overzealous scholar, the way in which he tells it aligns him with the essayist’s pedantic instructor. Prospero’s order that Miranda “Sit still and hear” (1.2.170) is the last of many similar utterances. He begins his history lesson by insisting, “The very minute bids thee ope thine ear,” followed immediately by a command to “Obey and be attentive” (1.2.37-8). Thereafter, Prospero interrupts his narrative on five more occasions (six counting his final order) to demand Miranda’s attention: “I pray thee mark me”; “Dost thou attend me? ”; “Thou attend’st not! ”; “I pray thee, mark me”; “Dost thou hear? ” (1.2.67; 78; 87; 88; 106). While the scene might be played so that Prospero checks real inattentiveness on Miranda’s part, his daughter’s replies - “Sir, most heedfully”; “O, good sir, I do”; and, most emphatically, “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness” (1.2.78; 88; 106) - surely suggest she is listening. Prospero’s testy demands for attention thus must convey something about the magician himself, and perhaps more than “increasing agitation as he recalls the circumstances of Antonio’s treachery” (The Tempest, Vaughan and Vaughan 176). Montaigne offers a warning about vociferous teachers that could supplement our understanding of Prospero’s behavior. His essay counsels against “carelesly cast[ing]-off” one’s children “to the heedlesse choler, or melan- 17 Reading Prospero as a schoolmaster figure reinforces the idea that his domineering behavior towards his pupils serves to emphasize his flaws. As Bushnell notes, it was a commonplace in early modern educational discourse that such behavior indicated a serious flaw in a teacher (30). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 23 choly humour of the hasty Schoole-master” (126) or employing tutors that “never cease brawling in their schollers eares (as if they were still pouring in a tonell)” (112). This advice is a matter not of sentimentality but of practicality. The choleric schoolmaster and the brawling tutor betray precisely the error of dogmatic rashness that Montaigne would have his pupils question; the excessive volume and verbal aggression of “brawling” suggests a conviction (or at least an effort to establish) that their own authority is unquestionable, while the attempt to convey information “as if they were still pouring in a tonell” (112) implies a belief that the information conveyed is likewise authoritative, an absolute beyond which inquiry is unnecessary. The pedagogical approach of such educators would seem to have much in common with Prospero’s own didactic bent. After all, the magician tells Miranda, “The very minute bids thee ope thine ear” (1.2.37), and he then proceeds by “pouring in” his lengthy history lesson, punctuated by “brawling” insistences that she miss not a word. Moreover, like Montaigne’s bad tutor, Prospero also appears utterly confident of the information he intends to convey. Indeed, when he prefaces his lesson by addressing Miranda as “my daughter, who / Art ignorant of what thou art, naught knowing / Of whence I am” (1.2.17-9), he implies that his lesson’s content will invalidate even her understanding of her own identity. Prospero’s account of the past might thus be understood as not just an awkward exposition, but also a clever bit of characterization suggesting the magician’s similarities to the very negligent tutors Montaigne disparages. 18 “To th’syllable”: Prospero, Ariel, and the danger of strict imitation Montaigne supplements his counsel against “brawling” tutors with a cautionary word about teachers who insist that their students “follow their booke” and “repeat what hath beene told them before” (112). He laments that such emphasis on rigid, non-transformative imitatio makes students’ minds “move at others pleasure, as tyed and forced to serve the fantasies of others” and warns that when students are thus “brought under by authoritie, and forced to stoope to the lure of [a tutor’s] bare lesson,” their “vigor and libertie is cleane extinct” (112-3). The damage done by enforced recapitulation is related to the damage done by excessive bookishness, but more extreme. Like the scholar “pent-up” with and “fast-tied” to his book, the student “tyed” by the constraints of rote imitation suffers a reductive circumscription of mind “under” an unquestioned textual “authoritie.” However, whereas dispropor- 18 Montaigne also disparages teachers who “undertake with one selfe-same lesson, and like maner of education, to direct many spirits of divers formes and different humours” (112). Prospero, of course, strives “to direct” diverse “spirits” of a different kind. N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 24 tionate studiousness creates a myopic dogmatism, repetition leaves the student “blind, senselesse, and without spirit” (114). As Montaigne puts it, “in barring [a student] of libertie to doe any thing of himselfe, we make him thereby more servile and more coward” (ibid.). Tellingly, Prospero stresses the importance of rigid imitation during several exchanges with Ariel in The Tempest’s first three acts. The magician greets the spirit’s first appearance in the play by asking, “Hast thou, spirit, / Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee? ” (1.2.193-4, emphasis added). Likewise, after listening to Ariel’s account of the storm, Prospero notes approvingly that his “charge / Exactly is performed” (1.2.237-8). Moreover, Prospero later reminds Ariel to “exactly do / All points of [the magician’s] command” (1.2.500-1) if the spirit would be freed. While it is true that in these cases Prospero does not necessarily demand that Ariel literally repeat words, the spirit’s replies - “To every article” (1.2.195) and “To th’syllable” (1.2.501) - blur the distinction between performing scripted actions and repeating set words. 19 Of course, Prospero also calls upon Ariel to perform literal linguistic repetitions. After Ariel plays the harpy in act three, Prospero praises the “grace” of the spirit’s performance, but also beams, “Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated / In what thou hadst to say” (3.3.85-6). Perhaps more tellingly, when Ariel makes a timid attempt to “remember” the magician that he has “promised” the spirit freedom (1.2.243), Prospero responds with a second lesson in which he demands his servant rehearse a history of their original meeting. “Speak; tell me” (1.2.260), he demands, and the account he expects the spirit to produce is clearly preestablished, as Prospero complains that it is a narrative he “must / Once in a month recount” (1.2.262-3). The magician’s reiterated insistences that Ariel follow his orders exactly and repeat his words verbatim thus might suggest a dangerous pedantry. Moreover, Ariel’s condition might be fruitfully regarded as a dramatization of Montaigne’s discussion of the harm wrought by a pedagogical program that stresses slavish imitation. The rehearsal of Prospero’s prescribed version of their shared history accomplishes a striking deflation in Ariel. As the retelling proceeds, the spirit is reduced to utter passivity, every cowed reply - “No”; “I do not, sir”; “No, sir”; “Sir, in Algiers”; “Ay, sir”; “Yes, Caliban, her son”; “I thank thee, master” (1.2.252; 257; 260; 261; 268; 284; 293) - an indicator that the process renders Ariel “more servile and more coward” (Montaigne 114). Finally, the lesson concludes with Ariel’s lackluster expression of submission, “Pardon, master, / I will be correspondent to command / And do my spriting gently” (1.2.296-8), a statement that reveals a being whose “vigor and libertie” are at least very nearly “cleare extinct”— a spirit 19 For a relevant account of the performative manifestations of textual imitatio in Tudor classrooms, see Potter. Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 25 “without spirit” (Montaigne 112-4). In insisting on the retelling, Prospero provides more than a simple reminder; he solidifies a “history” that emphasizes his own role in Ariel’s past liberation, closing off any other interpretation and thus more firmly establishing the spirit’s present enslavement. While Ariel’s current condition may be an improvement upon the narrow confines of Sycorax’s “cloven pine” (1.2.277), the spirit remains constrained by the less tangible confines of Prospero’s imagination, “forced to serve the fantasies of [an]other” (Montaigne 112-3). A man in the hail: Prospero and propeteia The preceding accounts of Prospero’s exchanges with Miranda and Ariel coupled with the well-established postcolonial critique of Prospero’s efforts to educate Caliban should strongly suggest that the lessons Prospero enforces on the island’s other inhabitants in the play’s early acts betray the educator’s own dogmatic rashness (propeteia). Even if Prospero’s attempts to instruct derive from noble motives, The Tempest implies that such efforts may be twisted to tyranny so long as the magician fails to recognize the limitations of his learning. Perhaps the most striking evidence that Prospero suffers from a Montaignian version of the philosophical error of propeteia is the tempest with which The Tempest begins. Montaigne sums up the philosophical fault of propeteia in a memorable aphoristic phrase involving tumultuous weather: “He on whose head it haileth, thinks all the Hemispheare besides to be in a storme and tempest” (120). The man in the hail embodies the error that a Montaignian education would correct. He is unable to conceive of an experience outside of his own, and that shortcoming prompts him erroneously to deem his own limited experience authoritative and universal. Montaigne completes the thought when he returns to the image of the storm later and asks, “Is it not [Philosophy], that cleereth all stormes of the mind? ” (124). Thus Montaigne figures the propeteia that the man in the hail exhibits in responding to the literal, exterior storm that surrounds him as itself tantamount to a metaphorical, internal tempest. Shakespeare’s Prospero might be understood to incorporate Montaigne’s man in the hail. In act one, scene one, Prospero calls down a tempest not on his own head, but on the heads of those on board the ship. In act one, scene two, he reveals that he is nonetheless a victim of the man in the hail’s error, as he cannot recognize - as Miranda does - that there is mental “harm done” (1.2.15) to those on board regardless of the fact that he knows the storm is illusory and will cause no physical injury. Consequently, Prospero betrays that the same learning that allows him to summon the tempest also leaves him “compact” (Montaigne 119) in himself, his mind circumscribed by his N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 26 own prodigious learnedness. Though he is not within the exterior magical tempest he has summoned, he has within his head a storm of the mind that only a philosophical re-education can abate. 20 Only in the play’s later acts does Prospero begin to understand the fallibility of his own (and his book’s) authority. Then, ironically enough, it is the very students Prospero subjects to his dogmatic pedagogy who ultimately, and sometimes inadvertently, help their instructor learn to doubt. The interrupted masque as inverse lesson The play’s most spectacular inverse lesson occurs when Caliban’s insurrection interrupts Prospero’s masque. Taken together, the masque and its disruption dramatize both the awesome power and the painful insufficiency of Prospero’s learning. The spectacle that the magician directs his spirits to perform is plainly intended both to showcase the powers his own education has produced and to instruct Miranda and Ferdinand. Conversely, the rebellion that interrupts the masque is possible in the first place because Prospero’s pedagogical program is not as all-encompassing as the magician believes it to be. That a former pupil seeks the magician’s murder is a testament to this fact, if not a case in point. Indeed, even as the attack draws nearer, Prospero rages that his past efforts to instruct Caliban are “all, all lost, quite lost! ” (4.1.190), and the speech seems a non sequitur unless it suggests that the magician himself understands the actions that Caliban attempts in terms of his failed education. 21 By forcing Prospero to consider the disparity between his masque (a would-be vehicle of instruction) and his servant (a onetime beneficiary of his tutelage), Caliban’s actions thus prompt the magician to confront the limitations of his learning. Incorporative imitations of Montaigne’s essay within Prospero’s famous “revels” speech reinforce that Prospero grapples with a dawning recognition of his own propeteia in the wake of his interrupted masque: You do look, my son, in a moved sort, As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and 20 Montaigne’s “stormes of the mind” might be added to the “intricate, and intricately linked, set of infracontexts” (30) that Mowat indentifies as relevant to The Tempest’s storm (2000). 21 Prospero connects Caliban’s actions to a failed education, but initially blames that failure on Caliban’s uneducable and demonic “nature,” not on his own teaching (4.1.188-92). However, in his famously ambiguous acknowledgement of his servant, Prospero may reassess the role his instruction played in forming Caliban’s character (see my discussion of Caliban and Prospero’s acknowledgement below). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 27 Are melted into air, into thin air; And - like the baseless fabric of this vision - The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.146-58) The relevant passage from Montaigne’s essay warrants consideration at some length: This great universe […] is the true looking-glasse wherein we must looke, if we will know whether we be of a good stamp, or in the right byase […] So many strange humours, sundrie sects, varying judgements, diverse opinions, different lawes, and fantasticall customes teach us to judge rightly of ours, and instruct our judgement to acknowledge his imperfections and naturall weaknesse, […] The pride and fiercenesse of so many strange and gorgeous shewes: the pride-puft majestie of so many courts, and of their greatnesse, ought to confirme and assure our sight, undauntedly to beare the affronts and thunder-claps of ours, without seeling our eyes: So many thousands of men, low-laide in their graves afore us, may encourage us, not to fear, or be dismaied to go meet so good companie in the other world; and so of all things else. Our life (said Pithagoras) drawes neare unto the great and populous assemblies of the Olympike games, wherein some […] there are (and those be not the worst) that seek after no other good, but to marke, how, wherefore, and to what end, all things are done: and to be spectators or observers of other mens lives and actions, that so they may the better judge and direct their owne. (120-1) Textual links between the two works are few but present. The essay’s “great universe,” “gorgeous shewes,” and “Our life” may find reprise in the play’s “great globe” (4.1.153), “gorgeous palaces” (4.1.152), and “our little life” (4.1.157). Furthermore, the “pride-puft majestie” of the essay’s “courts” seem to possess a rhythmic (and perhaps a metonymic) resonance with the play’s “cloud-capped towers” (4.1.152). Additionally, a line that appears just before this long excerpt - “this worlds vast-frame is neere unto a dissolution” (Montaigne 119) - anticipates the central image (and especially the verb) of Prospero’s “the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve” (4.1.153-4). Moreover, connections between the rhetorical movements of the two passages also suggest that The Tempest may incorporate aspects of Montaigne’s essay. While the juxtaposition of a spectacle with lived experience prompts Prospero to contemplate human smallness and limitation, contemplation of human smallness and limitation brings Montaigne to juxtapose life with a spectacle. During the course of the revels speech, Prospero comes to N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 28 “acknowledge his [judgment’s] imperfections and naturall weaknesse” (Montaigne 120) by comparing his condition with that of the airy actors of the shattered masque much as Montaigne’s “spectators and observers” learn to “better judge and direct their owne” lives and actions by taking in the multiplicity of lives and actions on display at the “Olympike games” (ibid.). In each case, spectacle is instructive because it takes one out of oneself and thereby brings one both to recognize the potential validity of the eye of the other and to “acknowledge” that one’s own convictions may not be authoritative, as they are flawed by the distortions of personal and cultural prejudice. Fittingly, Prospero concludes his oration with a confession that his “old brain is troubled” and a plea that his daughter and her betrothed “Bear with [his] weakness” and “infirmity” while he walks “A turn or two […] / To still [his] beating mind” (4.1.159-63). His self-descriptions bespeak his effort to abate his internal storm, to grapple with the realization that his learning may not comprehend an authoritative worldview. 22 This philosophical lesson concerning the abandonment of propeteia for a myriad-minded doubt opens the way for the often-examined moral lesson in which Ariel helps the magician choose the “rarer action” of virtue over vengeance (5.1.16-30). 23 “I’ll drown my book”: dramatizing the abjuration of pedantry When, in the wake of these lessons, Prospero renounces his magic, The Tempest repeatedly links that renunciation to matters of imitatio. First, the very speech in which Prospero abjures the magical aspects of his erudition is also perhaps the most glaring instance of textual borrowing in the play: a now well-established and then readily recognizable paraphrase of Ovid taken from the mouth of the sorceress Medea. 24 Scholars have long sought to parse the significance of the speech’s Ovidian intertextual engagement. Some focus on the speech’s dramatic significance and suggest that Prospero signals through the allusion his rejection of black magic for white, of all magic for life, or of the demonic and vengeful feminine other for the godly and forgiving masculine self. 25 Others treat the metatextual implications of the speech, 22 Prospero’s “beating mind” at 4.1.163 recalls Miranda’s plea from 1.2.175-7: “now I pray you, sir, / For still ‘tis beating in my mind, your reason / For raising this sea-storm? ” Thus Shakespeare links an external storm with “stormes of the mind” in much the same manner as Montaigne (see note 20 above). 23 I pass over this second inverse lesson, as Kirsch treats in depth its connection to Montaigne’s essay “Of Cruelty.” 24 See Carroll for an account of the Medea speech’s sources (n. 283) and cultural recognizability (237-8). 25 See Carroll (237) and Bate (252) on various critical approaches to the Medea speech. Carroll contends that Prospero renounces “not only the black magic always associated with transformation, but the artistic dream of controlling transformation at all” (240). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 29 positing that, through the allusion, Shakespeare bids farewell to a favorite source text or even attempts to “put Ovid in his place” (Caroll 236-7; Lyne 160). 26 Montaigne’s essay may offer a way to fruitfully complicate these critical approaches to Prospero’s Medean speech. In the essayist’s discussion of writers who borrow from others’ texts, a less than subtle “filching-theft” (108) from a work about Medea features prominently. Montaigne scorns “The Philosopher Chrisippus,” who was wont to foist-in amongst his bookes, not only whole sentences and other longlong discourses, but whole bookes of other Authors, as in one, he brought in Euripides his Medea [so that] if one should draw from out his bookes, what he had stolen from others, his paper would remaine blanke. (108) Shakespeare’s intertextual borrowing from Ovid’s Medea (via Golding) might be understood to involve as well a complex and playful engagement with Montaigne’s discussion of Chrisippus’ borrowing from Euripides’ Medea. 27 In filching the entirety of “Euripides his Medea,” Montaigne suggests, Chrisippus betrays through his unthinking importation of text a servility and smallness of mind. By borrowing from Golding’s and Ovid’s Medea, however, The Tempest may convey quite the opposite. It has been argued both that Prospero performs the expulsion of his Medean/ Sycoraxian other and that Shakespeare strives to outdo or bid farewell to Ovid/ Golding when the magician voices the appropriated words of the Medean speech. If the identities of the character (Medea) and the author (Ovid) from whom Shakespeare borrowed the lines for Prospero’s speech might inform its significance, so too might the speech’s recognizable status as a borrowing. As Michel Jeanneret notes, in some instances of imitatio, “the referential element is combined with a reflective element” (259); 28 in other words, the reprise references not only the spur, but also the practice of imitation itself. Indeed, any such “reflective element” could only be emphasized when the spur in question deals explicitly with issues of textual interrelation. Thus when, with a winking nod toward Montaigne’s brazen plagiarist Chrisippus, Prospero abjures the necromantic powers of Medea - powers Thomas Greene has linked to imitatio and the resurrection of past texts (cf. 32-3; 37-8; 92-3) - The Tempest may also enact an abjuration of unincorporated textual borrowing itself in a bravura piece of intertextual and (meta)intertextual play. Such a dream of control is also, of course, the fundamental fantasy of the dogmatic pedagogue. 26 Carroll (236-7) detects a farewell to Ovid, while Lyne (160) suggests a more competitive stance. 27 Bate suggests strong diachronic intertextual connections between the three writers when he claims that “Euripides taught Ovid what Ovid taught Shakespeare” (239). 28 For more on the “reflective” aspect of imitatio, see Greene (16-7). N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 30 Moreover, Ariel’s song celebrating imminent freedom also dramatizes the abjuration of pedantry and Montaigne’s ideal of transformative imitatio. “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” (5.1.88) may obliquely reprise Montaigne’s version of a well-worn trope for textual borrowing and incorporation: the bee gathering pollen to make honey. 29 Montaigne notes that “Bees doe here and there sucke this, and cull that flower, but afterward they produce the hony, which is peculiarly their owne” in order to argue that the student who has “borrowed of others […] may lawfully alter, transform, and confound [the pieces they have borrowed], to shape out of them a perfect peece of worke, altogether his owne” (114). The essayist prefers the creative incorporation and individualized invention involved in this metaphorical honey-making because it feeds a pupil’s “understanding power,” while mere rote learning, Montaigne maintains, leaves a pupil “blind, senseless, and without spirit” and “bar[s] him of libertie to doe any thing of himselfe” (114). Thus Ariel’s bee song and the liberty it anticipates might be understood to reprise Montaigne’s bee metaphor and its emphasis on the freedom fostered by transformative imitatio and heuristic learning. “This misshapen knave”: books, deformed sons, and Caliban One other trope for imitative writing that appears in Montaigne’s essay may hold relevance for The Tempest. Montaigne opens his essay with an extended metaphor in which he plays with the well-established topos of the book as son: I never knew father, how crooked and deformed soever his sonne were, that would either altogether cast him off, or not acknowledge him for his owne: and yet […] it may not be said, but he plainly perceiveth his defects, and hath a feeling of his imperfections. But so it is, he is his owne. So it is in my selfe. I see better than any man else, that what I have set downe, is nought but the fond imaginations of him, who in his youth hath tasted nothing but the paring, and seen but superficies of true learning: whereof he hath retained but a generall and shapelesse forme. (107) Montaigne does not figure his text as a conventional child of the mind who will allow the author/ father immortality by guaranteeing everlasting fame. 30 Rather, he represents his book as a figure nearly antithetical to that perfect ideal: a “sonne” both “crooked and deformed” whose existence does not guarantee renown but instead necessitates an acknowledgement of shortcoming. Indeed, the essayist links the “defects” and “imperfections” of his 29 On the extensive classical tradition that used the bees’ production of honey as a trope for imitation and textual incorporation, see Pigman (4-7) and Greene (98-9). 30 On the topos of the book as child who guarantees the author/ father immortality and fame, see Curtius (132-4). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 31 text/ son directly to his own flawed learning as author/ father. He identifies his shortcomings as deriving from a failure to properly incorporate text; having “tasted nothing but the paring” in his studies, he possesses but the “superficies of true learning,” if even that. Consequently, to “acknowledge” his text/ son “for his owne” is to recognize and admit that its deformity mirrors, even manifests, the “shapelesse forme” of the incomplete learning that he as author/ father “hath retained.” Understanding The Tempest to incorporate and reprise Montaigne’s lively version of this traditional topos could do much to enrich certain aspects of Prospero and Caliban, particularly their vexed relationship with one another. In some respects, the “savage and deformed” Caliban (according to “Names of the Actors”, Vaughan and Vaughan 2011, 162) could be understood to render monstrously literal the vehicle of Montaigne’s metaphor, a “crooked and deformed” “sonne” (107), even as the familial ties involved are otherwise transformed: Caliban is not Prospero’s offspring, but he is the child of the magician’s problematic other, Sycorax. 31 Likewise, the play may also absorb the tenor of the essayist’s metaphor. Prospero’s book is the primary tool with which the magician seeks to reshape the “misshapen” (5.1.268) Caliban. In fact, the pedagogical relationship that links Prospero and Caliban as instructor and pupil in some ways combines aspects of the connection between author and book and characteristics of the bond between father and son. To consider whether The Tempest incorporates and reprises the beginning of Montaigne’s essay is thus to open the possibility that what the Arden editors call Caliban’s “woefully imprecise” (2011, 33) deformity is to some extent connected to the defective education that Prospero provided. Indeed, the essayist’s insistence that an author/ father must always “acknowledge” his book/ son “for his owne” (Montaigne 107) might illuminate Prospero’s famously enigmatic declaration “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.275-6). Prospero may not only grudgingly admit that his instruction does, in fact, bear some responsibility for Caliban’s “canker[ed]” mind (4.1.192), but also reluctantly recognize that his former pupil’s “disproportioned[ness]” (5.1.291) mirrors and manifests his own disproportioned learning. Caliban might thus be understood to embody Shakespeare’s textual incorporation of Montaigne at its most creatively self-reflexive. The playwright cannibalizes and incorporates the very image that the essayist uses to represent his text - the “deformed sonne” - and then winkingly “acknowledges” (Montaigne 107) the deed by incorporating as well the essayist’s mon- 31 The description of Caliban as “A saluage and deformed slaue” may be the scrivener Ralph Crane’s “interpretations of what he saw in performance rather than Shakespeare’s descriptions of what he envisioned, although they could be both” (Vaughan and Vaughan 2011, 127). N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 32 strous figure of textual incorporation - the cannibal 32 - in his character’s masticated name. Epilogue and epoché : theater and learning to doubt Montaigne concludes “Of the Institution and Education of Children” with a lengthy discussion of the educational efficacy of stage plays. The essayist lambasts those who “disalow such kindes of recreations” and “refuse good and honest Comedians, or (as we call them) Players, to enter our good townes” (139-40). He reasons that Politike and wel ordered common-wealths endevor rather carefully to unite and assemble their Citizens together; as in serious offices of devotion, so in honest exercises of recreation. Common societie and loving friendship is thereby cherished and increased. […] And if I might beare sway, I would thinke it reasonable, that […] in populous and frequented cities, there should be Theatres and places appointed for such spectacles; as a diverting of worse inconveniences, and secret actions. […] There is no better way than to allure the affection, and to entice the appetite: otherwise a man shall breed but asses laden with Bookes. With jerkes of rods they have their satchels full of learning given them to keepe. Which to doe well, one must not only harbor in himselfe, but wed and mary the same with his minde. (140) The same properties that grant stage plays social and political utility, Montaigne suggests, also give them pedagogical potential. According to the essayist, plays work to counteract the “inconveniences” of social unrest and the “secret actions” of political sedition by cultivating qualities of “Common societie and loving friendship.” In fostering those same qualities, theater also combats dogmatic rashness (propeteia). After all, if there is, as the essayist avers, an “enlightning of mans judgement” to be “drawne from the commerce of men,” then playgoers are particularly well situated to embrace a myriad-minded skepticism of singular authority; they both engage in interpersonal exchanges with one another, and - like the observers in Montaigne’s description of “the Olympike games” (121) - reflect on a multiplicity of “lives and actions” presented in the spectacle before them “so they may the better judge and direct their owne” (ibid.). For Montaigne, stage plays thus offer an education antithetical to the pedantic instruction carried out with “jerkes of rods” (140). Where the pedant “brawls” to enforce rote repetition and a singular authority, stage plays strive “to allure” (ibid.) and present by their very structure a multiplicity of perspectives and vying authorities. Where the pedant’s pupil confronts in essential solitude a nonhuman and unitary text, 32 On the cannibal as Montaigne’s focal figure for reflecting on “literary incorporation,” see Yachnin (166). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 33 the playgoer consumes through playful social interchange a text sundered and embodied by actors. Perhaps most importantly, the pedant’s methods and the pupil’s means of consumption fail to force any learning more profound than reiteration and thus “breed but asses laden with Bookes” (ibid.); stage plays, however, can foster the ideal of textual incorporation by “entice[ing] the appetite” of playgoers to “wed and marry” (ibid.) the theatrical text before them with their minds. Montaigne thus presents the theater as an ideal vehicle for skeptical education. Prospero’s epilogue emphasizes The Tempest’s potential as just such a vehicle of playful instruction. The magician’s words echo many of the Montaignian concepts with which Shakespeare’s play is so intimately involved: Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. […] As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. (EPILOGUE 1-20) When audience members watch The Tempest, they agree to suspend their disbelief and to consider the action on stage, in some sense, real. Nonetheless, they are simultaneously aware, of course, that the spectacle before them is a contrivance. An epilogue - existing as it does in a liminal position between both of these perspectives - approximates wonderfully the philosophical stance of judgmental suspension (epoché) so crucial to Montaigne’s pedagogical approach. 33 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Shakespeare exploits the precarious position of Prospero’s epilogue to turn one of The Tempest’s most Montaignian conceits upon the audience. Through a slew of bondage-related imagery evoked by words like “confined,” “release,” “bands,” and “free,” the speech pointedly recalls the idea that imposing one’s own viewpoint on another as rigidly authoritative is an act akin to enslavement. The Tempest thus implies that the viewer who insists on an absolute distinction between the world represented on the stage and the wider world beyond the theater suffers from precisely the dogmatic rashness (propeteia) that plagues Prospero for much of the play. Maintaining such a distinction, then, amounts to working a metaphorical “spell” that both enforces this sort of bondage on the 33 See note 9 above. N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 34 former magus and preserves the viewer’s own misconceptions. When Prospero solicits applause, he asks the audience to signal not only approval, but also understanding. The former magician entreats playgoers to neither accept the play as unimpeachable, nor dismiss it as merely theater. Rather, he reminds them of his own re-education and queries whether its essential lessons might apply to them as well, whether they too might be blinkered by an erroneous conviction of their own authority in maintaining so rigid a separation between what transpires within The Globe and what passes upon “the great globe itself” (4.1.153). The Tempest thus attempts to enact a playful, Montaignian education; it strives to entice the appetites of playgoers so that they might incorporate what they have seen, and thus depart, like the “spectators or observers” in the essayist’s “Of the Institution and Education of Children,” having learned from the “lives and actions” staged before them to “better judge and direct their owne” - having learned to doubt. Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 35 Works Cited Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Boutcher, Warren. “Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the Continental Book and the Case of Montaigne’s Essais.” Reassessing Tudor Humanism. Ed. Jonathan Woolfson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 243-76. . “Marginal Commentaries: The Cultural Transmission of Montaigne’s Essais in Shakespeare’s England.” Shakespeare et Montaigne: Vers un Nouvel Humanisme. Eds Pierre Kapitaniak and Jean-Marie Maguin. Paris: Société Française Shakespeare and Société Internationale des Amis de Montaigne, 2003. 13-27. Bushnell, Rebecca. A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. Carey-Webb, Allen. “National and Colonial Education in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” Early Modern Literary Studies 5.1 (1999): 1-39. Carroll, William C. The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. New York: Pantheon Books, 1953. Ellrodt, Robert. “Self-Consciousness in Montaigne and Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 37-50. Gooyer, Alan de. “‘Their senses I’ll restore’: Montaigne and The Tempest Reconsidered.” The Tempest: Critical Essays. Ed. Patrick M. Murphy. New York: Routledge, 2001. 509-31. Grady, Hugh. “Shakespeare’s Links to Machiavelli and Montaigne: Constructing Intellectual Modernity in Early Modern Europe.” Comparative Literature 52.2 (2000): 119-42. . “Afterword: Montaigne and Shakespeare in Changing Cultural Paradigms.” The Shakespeare International Yearbook 6: Special Section, Shakespeare and Montaigne Revisited. Ed. Peter Holbrook. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. 170-81. Greene, Thomas. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. Hamlin, William. “What Did Montaigne’s Skepticism Mean to Shakespeare and his Contemporaries? ” Montaigne Studies 17 (2005): 195-210. Jeanneret, Michel. A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance. Transl. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Kastan, David Scott. “‘The Duke of Milan and his brave son’: dynastic politics in The Tempest.” Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Eds. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. New York: G.K. Hall, 1998. 91-103. Kirsch, Arthur. “Virtue, Vice, and Compassion in Montaigne and The Tempest.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 37 (1997): 337-52. N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 36 Lyne, Raphael. “Ovid, Golding, and the ‘Rough Magic’ of The Tempest.” Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems. Ed. A.B. Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 150-64. Machacek, Gregory. “Allusion.” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 522-36. Montaigne, Michel de. The Essayes of Montaigne: John Florio’s Translation. Ed. by J.I.M. Stewart. New York: The Modern Library, 1933. Mowat, Barbara. “‘Knowing I loved my books’: Reading The Tempest Intertextually.” The Tempest and its Travels. Eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. 27-36. . “Prospero’s Book.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 1-33. OED Online. “closeness, n.” 2012. Oxford UP. <http: / / dictionary. oed.com/ > (last accessed 8 June 2012). Paster, Gail Kern. “Montaigne, Dido, and The Tempest: ‘How Came that Widow in? ’” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 91-4. Pigman III, G.W. “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly 33.1 (1980): 1-32. Potter, Ursula. “Performing Arts in the Tudor Classroom.” Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare 1485-1590: New Directions for Research, Criticism, and Pedagogy. Eds. L. Kermode and J. Scott-Warren. New York: Palgrave, 2004. 143-65. Prosser, Eleanor. “Shakespeare, Montaigne, and the ‘Rarer Action.’” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 251-64. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Taylor, George. Shakespeare’s Debt to Montaigne. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1925. Wiesmann, Marc-André. “Female ‘Patronage’ of a Sixteenth-Century Text: Diane de Foix and Michel de Montaigne.” The Search for a Patron in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Eds. David G. Wilkins and Rebecca L. Wilkins. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. 145-56. Wilson, Richard. Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theater, Religion and Resistance. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. Winson, Patricia. “‘A Double Spirit of Teaching’: What Shakespeare’s Teachers Teach Us.” Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 1 (1997): 1-31. Yachnin, Paul. “Eating Montaigne.” Reading Renaissance Ethics. Ed. Marshall Grossman. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2007. 157-72. A NDREW M ORAN In medias res, at work and prayer: Augustine and The Tempest In “Reading The Tempest,” Russ McDonald rightly cautions against ‘blunt’ political interpretations and instead traces the effect that the play’s poetry has on its audience: The effect of the style throughout is to place the auditor in an intermediate state, and that region of indeterminacy is a version of the various other kinds of liminality associated with the text […]. The poetry seduces the audience into a state of stylistic suspension, an intuitive zone between sleep and wake. (27) I would like to continue McDonald’s reflection on an “intermediate state” - which should, however, be distinguished from “indeterminacy” - by noting that the play has the auditor identify with characters through the shared experience of intermediacy. Ferdinand, who in his youth, good nature, and openness to wonder seems like an ideal audience member, will experience such an in-between state when he hears Ariel’s music. Even before he and Miranda enjoy Prospero’s masque in act four, Ferdinand finds himself in a mode of dream-like intermediacy through magical sounds (1.2.376-408). He first appears while charmed by music. Ariel’s opening lyric alternates between catalectic tetrameter and a monosyllabic dimeter full of emphatic dentals, placing the prince between two rhythms and two senses of time, one of movement and expectation, one of immediacy and completion: Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands; Curtsied when you have, and kissed The wild waves whist; Foot it featly here and there, And sweet sprites bear The burden. (1.2.376-81) The song calls him to take hands, kiss, and dance, portending the joys of a future wedding feast, which ceremony has long been read by Christian allegorists as a type of final beatitude. But Ariel’s song then leads Ferdinand from the “yellow sands” (1.2.376) of Elysium 1 to imagine the depths of the sea where his father is apparently drowned. The lyrics imaginatively situate 1 In a footnote (2011, 177) Vaughan and Vaughan suggest that this passage may allude to Aeneas’ visit to the yellow sands of the Elysian Fields (Aeneid 6.640-4). A NDREW M ORAN 38 Ferdinand between joy and grief, even between eternal life and death, just as its burden places him within a range of pitches. He hears low growls and high cries, “[t]he watch dogs bark, bow-wow” and “[t]he strain of strutting chanticleer / Cry cock a diddle dow” (1.2.384-7). 2 The effect leaves Ferdinand in a condition of wonder, confusion, and intermediacy: “Where should this music be? I’th’ air, or th’earth? ” (1.2.388). Ferdinand then encounters “the goddess / On whom these airs attend” (1.2.422-3), Miranda, and Prospero, seemingly a black magician, and again finds himself in a middle position. His sufferings - “My father’s loss, the weakness which I feel, / The wreck of all my friends, [and] this man’s threats” (1.2.488-9) - stand in contrast to (and are more than made up for by) the sight of Miranda. Yet he knows not who she and her father are nor how they have arrived on the island, and only later will learn their story. In being cast confusedly into the middle of an action, Ferdinand’s experience once again parallels the audience’s. The play opens with the affecting drama of the shipwreck, with thunder and lightning, with shouts and anger, with a host of unknown characters facing the terror of immediate death. Only in the following scene, through Prospero’s belabored story for Miranda of their past, will the audience receive the exposition and be allowed the emotional tranquility necessary to make sense of things. The play thus begins in medias res, in imitation of The Aeneid. The epic too begins with a storm in the Mediterranean and a shipwreck, after which the hero moves a beautiful woman to feel pity with the long story of his exile and travels before the action returns to the present. In The Tempest, however, in medias res is more than a narrative convention: it is the condition of human existence, for the characters and, through our identification with them, for us, the audience. We find ourselves contemplating binaries and antitheses and placed between rival perspectives, with univocal explanations revealed as insufficient. Prospero, for example, telling Miranda of their arrival on the island, must correct her logical fallacy. She asks, “What foul play had we that we came from thence? / Or blessed wast we did? ,” to which he answers, “Both, both” (1.2.60-1). Both/ and rather than either/ or is the set of correlative conjunctions appropriate to the play, as on Prospero’s island as well as in Gonzalo’s commonwealth “by contraries” are all things executed (2.1.148-9). Prospero is both the wise and loving father and the vindictive slave-master. Caliban is both a savage and a poet, speaking with “backward” and “forward” voices (2.2.89-90). The wisest characters, recognizing an essential duality that reveals the need for harmonizing, embrace paradox and conjoin opposites. Gonzalo, who would be a king without sovereignty (2.1.157), tells Alonso to weigh sorrow with comfort (2.1.8-9); for Ferdinand it is “fresh 2 Alonso later hears the winds sing his trespass and the thunder, “[t]hat deep and dreadful organpipe,” “bass” it (3.3.97-9). In medias res, at work and prayer: Augustine and The Tempest 39 morning” (3.1.33) when Miranda is “by at night” (3.1.34) as his prison is “space enough” (1.2.493); Prospero explains that the infant Miranda “raised in [him] / An undergoing stomach to bear up” against his sufferings (1.2.156-7; italics throughout mine). In addition, the descriptions of the island contravene any fixed perspective, as repeatedly characters see in it only a reflection of themselves. The drunkard Trinculo describes its cloudy skies as “a foul bombard that would shed his liquor” (2.2.21); for Caliban, both beastly and poetical, it is a place of pricks and bites (2.2.10-12) yet also of “twangling instruments” and soporific voices that lull him into dreams of heavenly bounty (3.2.137-43). The genial Adrian and Gonzalo find it pleasant, the surly Antonio and Sebastian barren (2.2.37-57). Thus, McDonald understandably emphasizes the play’s ambiguity: The Tempest “demonstrat[es] the impossibility of significational certainty and creat[es] an atmosphere of hermeneutic instability”(18). 3 Yet intermediacy does not necessitate indeterminacy, and the presence of rival perspectives does not always mean uncertainty. The Tempest may not be so entirely ambiguous. At the least, one argument, even before it occurs, is clearly resolved. Ariel’s comment on the state of the survivors’ clothes - “On their sustaining garments not a blemish, / But fresher than before” (1.2.218- 9) - settles in Gonzalo’s favor his later argument with Antonio and Sebastian (2.1.60-106). I will argue that this disagreement and their contrasting responses to the storm at sea allude to Reformation-era arguments about Baptism and justification. A religious interpretation is not irrelevant to a play about the intermediacy of the human condition since these controversies were at heart anthropological, not theological, arguments about human nature, not God, and about the human condition within salvation history - within time, itself a kind of middle state. The play’s camouflaged reenactments of religious disputes are the occasion for a broader reflection on being in medias res and on responding to that condition, a reflection that is grounded in the writings of St. Augustine, whose influence is evident even in the play’s geography, the island’s placement somewhere between Tunis, Milan, and Naples. I thus suggest that Shakespeare is both responding to Early Modern theological disputes and drawing upon an allegorical tradition that traces back to Patristic exegesis. While religious and allegorical readings often prove reductive, to recognize these contexts neither contravenes nor occludes The Tempest’s delightful peculiarity and its moral and psychological complexity, as I hope is evident in the analysis of the relationship between Prospero and Caliban, but rather adds to the play’s heady mix. Just as Shakespeare molds a sui generis Falstaff out of motley stuff - medieval spiri- 3 Likewise, Vaughan and Vaughan write of Shakespeare’s “rhetorical strategy of exploring different, often opposite, perspectives, never settling on a definite view” (2011, 61). A NDREW M ORAN 40 tual allegories and Machiavellian dicta, Oldcastle’s proto-Protestantism and Gargantua’s ebullient Humanism - so too does he in The Tempest conjure a dream world with its own colors, textures, and sounds out of a magician’s bag packed with not only Florio and Strachey but also doctrines and figures. * If only because of his insistence, Gonzalo’s disagreement with Antonio and Sebastian about the condition of their garments seems significant. Four times he asserts that his garments after their drenching in the sea are as fresh as when first worn (2.1.63-6; 70; 97-8; 103). Gonzalo is, of course, “a spendthrift […] of his tongue” (2.1.26), a garrulous old man who not only is optimistic in himself but seeks to be the cause of hope in other men, and so maybe one should read his still harping about his garments as simply reflective of his character. Moreover, the hope he is trying to instill in Alonso may seem quite general, in the possibility of renewal after their catastrophe. The act of being cleansed by and arising out of water can work as a universal symbol of revitalization, as in The Odyssey, when Odysseus on leaving Calypso’s island is ducked under the water, weighed down by the tunic the goddess had given him, before emerging naked from the sea onto Scheria, where his life will begin anew (Homer 5.319-463). In The Tempest, however, the wet clothes are not a burden but “sustaining” (1.2.218), saving the drowning men from death, which suggests a more specific Christian allusion to ‘the garment of salvation,’ B aptism. In addition, the two perspectives on the condition of their clothes after immersion are analogous to competing doctrinal understandings of Baptism’s effects, with Gonzalo speaking like a Catholic and Antonio and Sebastian like Protestants. Gonzalo is delighted that “our garments being, as they were, drenched in the sea, hold notwithstanding their freshness and gloss, being rather newdyed than stained with salt water” (2.1.63-6). His words sound much like the teachings on Baptism in the 1566 Catechism of the Council of Trent, better known as The Roman Catechism, which outlines the sacrament’s various effects. The third effect of Baptism is “the grace of regeneration,” which is like “a brilliant light that effaces all those stains which obscure the luster of the soul, investing it with increased brightness and beauty” (McHugh and Callan 187-8). Gonzalo claims that the garment is not “stained” but glossy, as if infused with color, “new-dyed,” which further alludes both to Baptism being a dying with Christ so as to be resurrected with Him (Romans 6: 4), and to the fourth effect, the infusion of virtues into the soul. The Roman Catechism distinguishes Catholic from Protestant teaching on Baptism by emphasizing the cleansing of the stains of sin and the soul’s moral regeneration. The white garment worn in the ceremony, for example, “symbolizes the glory of the In medias res, at work and prayer: Augustine and The Tempest 41 resurrection to which we are born by Baptism, the brightness and beauty with which the soul, when purified from the stains of sin, is invested in Baptism, and the innocence and integrity which the person who has received Baptism should preserve through life” (McHugh and Callan 208). In its explanation of the first effect, the remission of original sin and actual guilt, the Catechism most explicitly rejects Reformed doctrine, reminding its readers that the Council of Trent pronounces “anathema against those who […] should dare to assert that although sin is forgiven in Baptism, it is not entirely removed or totally eradicated, but is cut away in such a manner as to leave its roots still fixed in the soul” (ibid. 193-4). Antonio and Sebastian’s replies indicate that they believe that the stains have not been “entirely removed or totally eradicated” from their garments: A NTONIO If but one of his pockets could speak, would it not say he lies? S EBASTIAN Ay, or very falsely pocket up his report. (2.1.67-8). Their understanding, that the pockets are stained, that the stains remain internally even after the garments have been washed, corresponds to Protestant teaching on the inhering presence of sin after Baptism. John Calvin in Institutes of the Christian Religion, for example, while he does write of “purification” and “regeneration,” does not find that the soul becomes bright and beautiful from Baptism nor that it receives an infusion of virtue. Instead, Calvin asserts that the corruption engendered by original sin remains after Baptism, which serves as “an initiatory sign that we are admitted to the fellowship of the Church” and frees souls from the guilt of sin through the imputation of Christ’s righteousness (Calvin 4.15.10). 4 Baptism delivers God’s elect from “the giltinesse of sinne [and not] the very matter of sinne […] [Sin] ceaseth only to reigne and not so dwell in them” (ibid. 3.3.11). Through Baptism the soul appears clean to God and thus no longer bears the guilt of sin, but it is not made “fresh,” to use Ariel and Gonzalo’s word, and instead is left “so thoroughly soaked in poison of sinne, that it can breathe out nothing but corrupt stink” (ibid. 2.5.19). Or, to switch from Calvin’s dominant metaphor of corruption to one favored by Lutheran writers, it is left stained or spotted. The Formula of Concord (1580), for example, rejects and condemns “the view that this blemish [of original sin] may be removed as readily as a spot can be washed from the face or color from the wall” 4 Calvin continues, stressing the forgiveness of sin through Baptism, as opposed to any transformation of the soul: “The faithful are certified by Baptism that this damnation is taken away, and driven from them: for as much as (as we have already said) the Lord doth by this signe promise us that ful and perfect forgevenesse is granted both of the fault which should have been imputed to us, and of the pain whiche we should have suffered for the faulte.” A NDREW M ORAN 42 (Tappert 468). 5 Antonio and Sebastian’s four references to “pockets” and to “a pox” (2.1.67; 69; 78; 92) after Gonzalo’s initial assertion may be a reminder of the little pocks, the indelible blemishes, which they believe give the lie to Gonzalo’s claim about his garment. Sebastian’s curses the Boatswain with a “pox” (1.1.39), and in their judgment of him he and Antonio are again at variance with Gonzalo, and again with doctrinal implications. Foreshadowing the later argument about Baptism, whether a stain remains after drenching, and contrasting with Sebastian’s “pox,” in tone but also in significance, Gonzalo jocularly insists that the Boatswain “hath no drowning mark upon him - his complexion is perfect gallows” (1.1.28-9). They more obviously differ, however, as to whether the Boatswain can save the ship by doing the work the Master has assigned him. Gonzalo, as always, seeks to buck up the spirits of fearful men with humor, but both before and after Sebastian and Antonio vilify the Boatswain, he declares his confidence in him (cf. 1.1.27-32; 45-7). Antonio, however, even before the vituperation, implies trust only in the Master (cf. 1.1.12), and later blames the crew for their seemingly impending deaths (cf. 1.1.55-7). The Boatswain’s frustration with the royal party’s intrusion and subsequent insults draws attention to his and his crew’s work: “You mar our labour” (1.1.13); “if you can command these elements to silence and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more” (1.1.21-3); “They are louder than the weather or our office” (1.1.35-6); “Work you, then” (1.1.41). The Boatswain is memorable for his loose tongue and cheekiness in standing up to his social betters. But maybe most striking is his willingness to do his work, his vitality and ebullience in doing it - “Heigh, my hearts; cheerly cheerly, my hearts! ” (1.1.5-6) - and his persistence, despite the royal party’s interference. Indeed, The Tempest begins with the Boatswain responding to the Master’s appeal that he go to work to keep the ship from running aground. That is, he is to cooperate with the Master by doing a work that may contribute to his and others’ salvation. 6 5 The passage continues: “For original sin is not a sin which man commits; it inheres in the nature, substance and essence of man in such a way that even if no evil thought would ever arise in the heart of corrupted man, no idle word were spoken, or no wicked act or deed took place, nevertheless man’s nature is corrupted through original sin, innate in us through our sinful seed and the source of all other, actual sins.” The “Solid Declaration” of The Formula of Concord also asserts that Original Sin is a “spot or blemish” that cannot be removed (art. I, 5). 6 The Winter’s Tale, in which Julio Romano supposedly creates the statue of Hermione, too seemingly treats the topic of completing the work of the master. Giorgio Vasari in Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects makes much of Giulio Romano’s status as Rafael’s favorite pupil. His master at his death left as his heirs Giulio and Gioven Francesco “on the condition that they should finish the works begun by him; and they carried the greater part of these to completion with honour” (119). In medias res, at work and prayer: Augustine and The Tempest 43 For a playwright working after Luther, Calvin, and the Council of Trent, in the midst of a 150 year period of wide-ranging disruption in large part caused by disagreement about whether good works contribute to the soul’s salvation and justification, this emphasis on work is theologically suggestive. The Reformed teaching on Baptism, in opposition to the Catholic teaching that the soul is actually cleansed of original sin and that the remaining inclination to sin is not sin itself, is the grounding for the teaching on justification, which declares that the soul because of the inhering darkness of sin cannot cooperate with prevenient grace and participate in its own justification, and so is dependent solely on an extrinsic, forensic justification. Good works still have value 7 but are in no way salvific. Luther, for example, explains that no “good works contribute to making a man righteous. Like Abraham’s circumcision, they are only outward signs proving that his righteousness is contained in his faith” (Dillenberger 27). This Lutheran solafideism the Roman Catholic Church rejected at the Council of Trent and asserted instead in the “Decree on Justification” that one may participate in one’s own justification: “they who had been cut off from God by sin may be disposed through his quickening and helping grace to convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace” (Rahner 386). 8 The decree goes on to explain the manner of human cooperation, good works, so that “advancing from virtue to virtue […], faith cooperating with good works, [the justified] increase in that justice received through the grace of Christ (James 2: 22) and are further justified,” that is, sanctified (Rahner 390-1). * The Tempest’s representation of doctrinal disputes, its possible sympathy with Catholic teaching on Baptism and justification through Ariel’s confirmation of the good-natured Gonzalo’s 9 claim about his garments, and antipathy 7 The Augsburg Confession allows that works enable Christians “to exercise [their] faith, to give testimony, and to render thanks” (Art. 4). But they in no way serve one’s justification. See Tappert, 133. 8 The passage continues, asserting that, “while God touches the heart of man through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, man himself neither does absolutely nothing while receiving that inspiration, since he can also reject it, nor yet is he able by his own free will and without the grace of God to move himself to justice in his sight” (ibid.). 9 Gonzalo’s name and playfulness may also identify him with Catholicism, specifically with the Humanist movement of Erasmus and Thomas More. Gonzalo comes from the Italian gonzo, meaning “fool,” and in his wise or “merry fooling” (2.1.178) there is something of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. So too in his intentionally impractical commonwealth there is much of the Utopia, by a More who liked to employ a Latinate form of his name, “Morus,” a homophone for moros, the Greek for “fool.” The following is admittedly tenuous, but the joyful, jesting, chatty, and pious “good Gonzalo” (5.1.68) A NDREW M ORAN 44 toward Reformed doctrine through the unwarranted contemptuousness of Antonio and Sebastian, provides a new perspective on Ferdinand and Caliban: the former responds rightly to the condition of being in medias res, and the latter’s depravity hints at a critique of Protestant anthropology. Like the Boatswain, Ferdinand and Caliban are laborers, both in the service of Prospero, but with diametrically opposed attitudes toward their work. 10 Ferdinand, who after his labors is blessed by Prospero with his daughter’s hand in marriage, because of her associates work with happiness and love: “There be some sports are painful, and their labour / Delight in them sets off. […] / [Miranda] makes my labours pleasures. […] / [S]weet thoughts [of her] do even refresh my labours / Most busilest when I do it” (3.1.1-15). 11 His work is not simply an Adamic curse, as it is for Caliban after his original sin of attempted rape, but serves a higher end, love, and so is ennobling - “Some kinds of baseness / Are nobly undergone” (3.1.2-3) - even elevating, as good deeds potentially are according to Tridentine doctrine. Yet Miranda then enters to tell Ferdinand not to labor only: Alas now, pray you, Work not so hard. I would the lightning had Burnt up those logs that you are enjoined to pile! Pray set it down and rest you. When this burns, ‘Twill weep for having wearied you. My father Is hard at study; pray now, rest yourself. […] I’ll bear your logs the while. Pray give me that; (3.1.15-20; 24, emphasis added) 12 She encourages Ferdinand to rest, but the repetition is a reminder of something more, and he does then speak of praying (3.1.35) and offer a prayer (3.1.68), as does the hidden Prospero (3.1.75-6). 13 St. Augustine, contra has much in common with another prominent Catholic Humanist, “Pippo Buono,” good Phil, St. Philip Neri (1515-95), whom Shakespeare may have known about through Paleotto’s De Bono Senectutis (1595), which praises him as the “example of what old age may be” (Capecelatro 254). Or Shakespeare may have known him in person: if Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel is right, that the “Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensis” who stayed at the English College in Rome in the 1580s, during “the lost years” (60-72), is Shakespeare, then he would have lived across an alley from San Girolamo, where Philip hosted prayer meetings and offered spiritual guidance to young men. 10 Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan also note that Caliban and Ferdinand both are log-bearers but are distinct in that the latter “even enjoys his work” (1991, 17). 11 There may be another hint of a blessing for doing good deeds in the mariners receiving “a charm joined to their suffered labour” (1.2.231). Ariel too wants a reward for his labor (1.2.242-3) and at the play’s end receives it. 12 Kristin Fisher, in a graduate seminar at the University of Dallas, May 2009, first pointed out to me the passage’s repetition of “pray.” 13 Tom McAlindon also finds the frequent prayers significant and not merely a matter of “power, authority, and subjectification” (336). He writes that “the language of prayer in In medias res, at work and prayer: Augustine and The Tempest 45 Pelagius, asserted that works alone are not salvific (cf. Augustine of Hippo 1992 3-21), and The Tempest too stresses dependence on divine grace, especially through prayer. Even if there had been no interference from the royal party, the Boatswain’s efforts can only do so much, and with the ship apparently doomed Gonzalo chooses to join the “King and prince at prayers” (1.1.52), before ending the opening scene with an echo of the Lord’s Prayer (1.1.67). The mariners too turn to prayer, and to chiasmus: “All lost! To prayers, to prayers! All lost! ” (1.1.50). In the middle of the figure is the call to prayers; likewise, the play intimates that in the middle condition of human existence, particularly in the midst of dangers, the right response is to work and especially to pray. For Caliban work is a curse, to which he responds with cursing (1.2.322- 5). New Historicist interpretations have seized upon Caliban’s cursing, not unreasonably, but maybe it can be read more largely, as his response to being cursed with Adamic toil and with depravity. Preceding Prospero’s demand for labor, preceding Caliban’s name, is an insult - “What ho, slave! Caliban, / Thou earth, thou” (1.2.314-5) - and the barrage of slurs - “poisonous slave, got by the devil himself,” “tortoise,” “Hag-seed,” “malice” (1.2.317-68) - is a kind of curse, on a supposedly irredeemable nature. Prospero’s assumption, that Caliban is “[a] devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (4.1.188-9), operates as a potent curse, not only prompting Caliban’s impotent ones but also preventing a potentially nobler nature from being realized. Prospero errs: nurture can stick, evident in Caliban’s learning Prospero’s language, which he speaks lyrically. He possesses not only a “backward voice” that curses but also a “forward voice” that “speak[s] well,” revealing a fullness to his humanity (2.2.81-95). Caliban certainly is carnal, violently lusting after Miranda and worshipping a god, the butler, who only offers him the “butt” (3.2.1). 14 His impurity is expressed through his association with unwholesome liquids, such as Stephano’s liquor, a “filthy-mantled pool” (4.1.182), 15 “horse piss” (4.1.199), “infections […] / From bogs, fens, The Tempest is overwhelmingly focused on the travelers’ consciousness of their creatural weakness and dependence and on their desire to overcome misfortune” (350). 14 According to J. Madison Davis and A. Daniel Frankforter, Stephano’s name may derive from Neapolitan slang for the stomach (893). In Trinculo one hears the Italian obscenity culo. But in this play that represents the redeemability of human things and the harmony of high and low, the body is not to be despised. Prospero and Miranda are saved by “providence divine” working through a “rotten carcass of a butt” (1.2.159; 146). 15 The word “mantled,” while literally referring to a covering of slime (Vaughan and Vaughan 2011, 256), also hints at a type of garment. Without a Baptism for which the white garment signifies actual cleansing, Caliban is left with a filthy mantle. In contrast, note that the Boatswain at the play’s end sounds like Gonzalo when he says that he and the mariners “in all [their] trim, freshly beheld” their ship (5.1.236). Vaughan and Vaughan suggest that “trim” refers to their garments (2011, 279). A NDREW M ORAN 46 flats” (2.2.1-2), and “wicked dew” brushed with a black feather (1.2.322-5). But maybe Caliban is smelly and filthy because after his fall from an Edenic innocence Prospero keeps him from the “fresh springs” (1.2.339). The image hearkens back to the argument about Baptism and also to Augustine’s Confessions: Prospero does not offer Caliban “the spring water of friendship” but instead leaves him in a stream muddied by “the filth of concupiscence” (Augustine of Hippo 1991 3.1). Without refreshing, cleansing waters, imprisoned in “this hard rock,” where, Caliban says, “you sty me” (1.2.331-45), the islander remains stained by sin, 16 which sinfulness is reconfirmed and further encouraged by Prospero’s representation of Caliban: Prospero always sees and always makes Caliban see the latter’s iniquity so that it, like a sty, like Horatio’s “mote […] to trouble the mind’s eye” (Hamlet 1.1.115), forever obstructs their vision. But Caliban, with his poet’s tongue and heavenly visions, is capable of more than baseness and carnality, and when offered Prospero’s forgiveness through the doing of a good work, decorating his cell - “As you look / To have my pardon, trim it handsomely” - he laments being “a thrice-double ass” and chooses to “seek for grace” (5.1.293-4; 296). Maybe the fullness of Caliban’s humanity, his potential for elevation and degradation, can be best understood through the application of the play’s most salient word to him: Stephano says that he is a “brave monster” (2.2.183). That he is a “monster” already indicates that he is compounded of multiple elements, like the monsters of classical mythology, part human, part bestial. Stephano’s adjective also unintentionally implies duality, as does Miranda’s wonder at the people of the “brave new world” (5.1.183): they and Caliban are “splendid,” but “brave” likely derives from the Latin for “crooked,” pravus, itself the source of “depraved” (Harper). 17 As would argue Calvin, Caliban is indeed depraved, “misshapen” (5.1.268), “disproportioned in his manners / As in his shape” (5.1.291-2). But not totally so. His doubleness - both depraved and brave, carnal and spiritual, base and yet capable of higher things even after his falling into sin, which is evident in his speech, his yearning for heavenly blessings, and his final choice to pursue grace and wisdom - indicates that his soul is capable of being cleansed, as was Gonzalo’s “doublet” (2.1.103). The Tempest intimates that an anthropology that does not recognize this doubleness, the “both, both” (1.2.61), that does 16 Would it be hyperbolic to suggest that the image of spots and stains is as important as any image in Shakespeare’s corpus? Those who believe that spots can never come clean are led into either error (Leonatus about his daughter Hero and Othello, Leontes, and Posthumus Leonatus about their wives), madness (Lady Macbeth, the aforementioned jealous husbands), or misery (Hamlet). 17 The Online Etymological Dictionary judges less likely Ernest Weekley’s possibility, barbarus, “in the sense of wild, indomitable” (Weekley 194), which would be applicable to the barbarian Caliban and the not always civilized Europeans. In medias res, at work and prayer: Augustine and The Tempest 47 not acknowledge the full range of human possibilities, but instead univocally expresses only one aspect of human nature, such as depravity, is erroneous. * Having twice experienced betrayal and rapacity, for his dukedom and his daughter, Prospero is tempted to think human beings unregenerate and assume their depravity, the thought of which perturbs him. He “starts suddenly” upon remembering the drunkards’ conspiracy (4.1.139 SD) and becomes so agitated while speaking of his brother’s treachery that he is short with his ever-sympathetic daughter (cf. 1.2.78-106). So too is he irascible with the loyal Ariel, whom he accuses of ingratitude (cf. 1.2.150-1). For all his good intentions, Prospero is quick to spy, or to imagine, human failings and then fall into a tyrannical rage. Only in resisting the temptation to fixate on sin can Prospero resist the temptation to tyranny and complete his work. While the accusations of tyranny come from a bitter (cf. 1.2.342-5) and then inebriated Caliban (cf. 2.2.159), Prospero’s behavior, and not only with his resentful slave, justifies the charge. In contrast to conversation as The Tempest’s expression of love and friendship - Prospero on giving his daughter to Ferdinand tells him “Sit then and talk with her” (4.1.32), and after forgiving his enemies he invites them to spend the evening in his cell exchanging stories - its most powerful image of tyranny is the attempt to silence another, and in this respect Prospero is as guilty as are Sebastian and Antonio. They seek to make the Boatswain’s mouth “cold” (1.1.51) through insults pertaining to speech: “A pox o’your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog”; “insolent noisemaker”; “wide-chopped rascal” (1.1.39-40; 42-43; 56). And when they attempt to silence Adrian and Gonzalo through mockery, they again object to the very act of speaking: “Fie, what a spendthrift he is of his tongue! ” (2.1.26). Likewise, Prospero threatens Ariel if he “more murmur’st” (1.2.294) and objects to Miranda’s defense of Ferdinand: “Silence! One word more / Shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee” (1.2.477-8). Yes, Prospero here is playing the role of tyrant, but it is one he takes on easily, and repeatedly in response to what he judges perfidy. The classical philosophers, such as Plato, identified the tyrant as the man whose inability to control his appetites led to lawlessness and aggression, but Shakepeare creates tyrants whose violence stems from an overly harsh anthropology, Richard III for example, whose hatred for his own crooked form, his literal depravity, he projects on to the world, and Leontes, whose obsession with the pervasiveness and inevitability of concupiscence leads him to imagine spots on his sheets and on his wife. Prospero, thinking on Caliban’s ugliness of mind and body, decides to “plague” him and his fellows, “[e]ven to roaring,” and sends spirit-dogs named “Fury” and “Tyrant” A NDREW M ORAN 48 (4.1.192-3; 257). His triumphant proclamation, “At this hour / Lies at my mercy all mine enemies” (4.1.262-3), indicates that he no less than the sinister Antonio and Sebastian and the ludicrous Stephano is in thrall to libido dominandi, ‘the lust for domination,’ which in The City of God Augustine identifies as the most pervasive and vicious form of concupiscence. 18 Prospero, of course, does aim at noble ends and does reject tyranny. From his first lines he promises that no harm will be done (cf. 1.2.15) and seeks after not only his daughter’s happiness but also the spiritual regeneration of his enemies through penitence and amendment (cf. 3.3.81-2). But before he finally forgives them he undergoes a psychomachia during which his good intentions are at variance with his tyrannical rage when oppressed by thoughts of sin. He only achieves peace of soul, and brings such peace to others, by recommitting himself to his original plan of mercy after Ariel reminds him of “the good old Lord Gonzalo” and Prospero’s own humanity (5.1.15-20). The example of human goodness, paired with the numerous examples of viciousness, reminds Prospero of the range and middling condition of human nature, which range he can see even in his own ability then to choose “virtue” rather than “vengeance” (5.1.28). Prospero’s psychomachia ends with his affirming a more optimistic assessment of human possibilities - again, an assessment corresponding to Roman Catholic and not Reformed anthropology. Now he can complete his good work, the right ordering of souls through the staging of spectacles, but for him, as for the mariners during the storm, work alone is not salvific, and he ends in prayer: And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. (Epilogue 15-20) 19 * Prospero will again be the duke of Milan, or to use its Latin name, Mediolanum - the city ‘in the middle of the plain.’ Prospero gives up his seemingly divine powers to accept the middling condition of human nature and return to Milan, a quotidian middle stage in his journey from the seminuminous island to his namesake Proserpina’s kingdom, to the grave (cf. 18 John Cox also finds this phrase applicable to the play, for him in Antonio and Stephano’s shared immediate thought on seeing Caliban to exploit him (84-5). 19 Richard Wilson judges the epilogue “the most positive affirmation ever made on the English Renaissance stage of the Catholic belief in the power of intercessory prayer to the Saints and Virgin” (206). In medias res, at work and prayer: Augustine and The Tempest 49 5.1.312). There is another source for the protagonist’s name, one that points to the philosophical and theological teachings - including the claim that time is an intermediate state - informing The Tempest. Though little recognized, 20 the connections between the play’s themes and the writings of St. Prosper of Aquitaine, the first prominent disciple of St. Augustine, are striking. His poem On The Providence of God explains that though the present time is a “tempest of evils,” God works through time to make “whatever is harmful become beneficial” (1989 5; 11). Prosper’s account of providence accords with what Prospero teaches Miranda (cf. 1.2.59-63; 159) and with what Alonso, Ferdinand, and Gonzalo proclaim when their sufferings on the island culminate in joy (cf. 5.1.178-9; 189; 201-4). In light of Caliban’s ultimate desire for grace, Prosper’s The Call of All Nations, which considers in part whether the barbarians are open to grace and salvation, seems relevant: there are in the remotest parts of the world some nations who have not yet seen the light of the grace of the Saviour. But we have no doubt that in God’s hidden judgment, for them also a time of calling has been appointed, when they will hear and accept the Gospel which now remains unknown to them. Even now they receive that measure of general help which heaven has always bestowed on all men. (1952, 121) Prosper is best known for a specific phrase, “lex orandi, lex credendi” (loosely, ‘the law of prayer is the law of belief’), which too is pertinent to a play in which prayers as well as curses express deepest beliefs and which ends with Prospero’s claim about the necessity of prayer. 21 In the history of Christianity, however, Prosper of Aquitaine is most important as the layman who popularized Augustine’s doctrine of grace and “devoted a major part of his life to defending and spreading Augustine’s teachings,” through works such as The Defense of St. Augustine and through versifying extracts of his writings (McHugh 685-6). 20 So far as I know, only a two page article by Joan Barbara Gorin has treated the character’s relation to the theologian. I disagree with her assertion that Prospero’s offer of forgiveness is not related to good works (cf. 5.1.294), but find valuable her connection between Prospero’s universal forgiveness and the theologian’s abandonment of Augustinian predestination for a view of God’s redemptive will as universal. 21 The full passage is from Article 8 of the “Official Pronouncements of the Apostolic See on Divine Grace and Free Will”: “Let us next look also at the sacred prayers which in keeping with the apostolic tradition our priests offer after one norm the world over in every Catholic church. Let the rule of prayer lay down the rule of faith” (Prosper of Aquitaine 1963, 183). Kenneth Marchetti in a graduate seminar at the University of Dallas’s Rome Campus, June 2010, suggested the relevance of this phrase. A NDREW M ORAN 50 The lay poet Shakespeare is not versifying extracts but throughout The Tempest he draws on Augustine’s insights. 22 Distinctly Augustinian are the play’s treatments of the lust for domination, prayer, Baptism, and intermediacy, as well as large topics beyond the scope of this essay but worth noting, such as memory (the subject of book ten of The Confessions) and charity. The latter, for example, for Augustine the very end of human action, is Prospero’s aim too, as he establishes bonds of amity to unite former enemies. Only the remembrance of Gonzalo’s charity, George Slover argues, inspires Prospero to complete the charitable plan he had intended originally. Even Stephano’s drunken malapropism affirms this principle: “Every man shift for all the rest, and let no man take care for himself, for all is but fortune” (5.1.256-7). 23 Love inspires Ferdinand’s prayers and labors, 24 and its absence provokes Caliban’s curses and sloth. The Tempest emphasizes ora et labora and connects them, such as in the Boatswain’s seemingly insignificant “I pray now” (1.1.11) when he tells Alonso not to interfere with his work. Indeed, the paradoxical juxtaposition of human dependence and human activity, the sense that providence guides the affairs of men and yet at the same time human works are decisive, yet another ‘both, both,’ is one of The Tempest’s most striking notes, maybe more noticeable in it than in any other great work of Western literature. Augustine too supposedly linked prayer and work - ‘pray as if everything depends on God, work as if everything depends on you’ - though the adage cannot be found in any of his works and has a semi-Pelagian flavor. The dispute between Augustine and Pelagius began with the former’s insistence on the necessity of prayer, and it is in the final turn to prayer in the epilogue that the playwright, like another Prosper, seems most indebted to the theologian. Though the spots have been washed away, as Gonzalo had argued, Augustine explains that prayer is still necessary: For who among us denies that the sins of all men have been remitted through baptism and that all the faithful arise without spot or wrinkle from the bath of regeneration. […] [I]t is now being brought about by God’s mercy and truth that the holy Church is being led to that perfect state in which it is to remain for eternity without spot and wrinkle […]. But between the baptismal waters, through which all past spots and wrinkles are removed, and the Kingdom in which the Church will remain forever without spot or wrinkle, there is this intermediate time 22 James Walter also discerns the influence of Augustine. The Tempest draws from the Confessions to provide “an allegory of the interpretive process” (61), while revising “Augustine’s more abstract reflections on the work of Providence in human life” (62). 23 Robert Hapgood also finds Stephano’s bumbling significant: “he has stumbled into a fine summary of the spirit of fellowship that inspires the finale” (433). 24 Patrick Grant argues that Ferdinand’s courtship of Miranda represents the triumph of an Augustinian sense of charity, allied with chastity, over cupidity. In medias res, at work and prayer: Augustine and The Tempest 51 of prayer, when it is necessary to say, ‘Forgive us our debts.’ (Augustine of Hippo 1992, 139) The Tempest’s stress on the transitoriness of earthly existence and fleeting images of a life beyond it establish an Augustinian sense of “intermediate time.” Through speech (Gonzalo’s golden age and Caliban’s dream) and performance (Ariel’s banquet and Prospero’s masque), the audience briefly is reminded of and even imaginatively experiences a world of joy and justice, peace and plenty, as if the loftiest human desires could indeed be satisfied. But of course they aren’t: “with a quaint device the banquet vanishes” (3.3.52 SD). Caliban wakes up to servitude; Prospero remembers the conspiracy; Antonio and Sebastian laugh at the obvious impracticability of Gonzalo’s commonwealth. But his description of an ideal society is not “an idle pastime” and his claim of “merry fooling” not “a face-saving strategy (a lame attempt at sprezzatura)” (Hunt 166). Rather, the wise fool deliberately presents to his audience a vision of things that is “nothing,” that does not correspond to this world, to “minister occasion” (2.1.174) to them, to allow them to laugh, yes, but also to speculate on the existence of something outside their quotidian existence. It is a secular vision of unspoiled nature drawn from Montaigne, but Antonio and Sebastian’s unchecked assumption that there will be no marriage (2.1.166-7) hints at Matthew 22: 30, Jesus’ assertion that in the Resurrection there will be no marrying nor giving in marriage. Likewise, Prospero’s famous revels speech, which Stephen Greenblatt rightly characterizes as a “sublime vision of emptiness” (145), not only serves to nullify the richness of the masque but also proclaims that temporal existence is a nothing, and so allows the possibility that, by contrast, that which is outside time is the true something wherein one would find the vision of fullness. The passage is often read as nihilistic, and certainly the consciousness of ephemerality may be a premise for skepticism. But that is not the case for Augustine nor, I argue, in the play. Rather, Prospero’s reflections on “this insubstantial pageant” (4.1.155), the other visionary speeches, the staging of theophanies, and especially Prospero’s prayer and preparation for death cumulatively make present, though not abiding and definable, a sense of eternity. This is not to say that The Tempest is radically otherworldly. After his vision of emptiness, Prospero returns to his plan to provide for his daughter’s happiness and reestablish himself in Milan, though his contempt for Caliban’s depravity and maybe too his troubled contemplation of mutability initially make him fierce. That passes when he forgives his enemies, and during the subsequent joy of the reunion Alonso and Gonzalo utter blessings and praises from within the holy circle that meet with the response “amen” (5.1.204), Alonso’s heightened by the preceding literal rendering “Be it so” (5.1.215). Their response is from the liturgy, at which, according to the traditional understanding, heaven and earth are one. This too passes, with the A NDREW M ORAN 52 arrival of the Master and Boatswain and then Caliban and his confederates, yet unlike the previous liminal moments, which ended abruptly and discordantly, this time the joy abides. The audience is gently returned to Augustine’s intermediate time after Baptism, back to a world of sin and death but also goodness and grace, and so potentially a foretaste of Augustine’s “Kingdom” (Augustine of Hippo 1992 139). The play’s geography also points to an Augustinian and more generally Christian eschatology. While “the scholarly consensus [is] that the most important books this play echoes were written by Virgil, Ovid, Montaigne, and Strachey” (Mowat 28), Augustine’s Confessions is more influential than any of these in its informing the play’s anthropology and theology, which find expression in the movement between The Tempest’s various cities. In part because of the references to Carthage and Italy, much has been made of The Tempest’s Virgilian echoes. But The Aeneid ends tragically, in a nascent imperial city without love, bound only by law and duty, if that, as even the seeming Stoic exemplar Aeneas proves himself incapable of governing violent passions. There is no possibility of change but at best control, whereas Augustine’s Confessions, like The Tempest, is a story of transformation into a new life and of continued journeying. The additional travels in the play, such as Prospero’s to Milan, Augustine’s city of conversion, and his preparation for an expected final journey to the grave, overlay an Augustinian and Christian map on the Virgilian and pagan one. Christian hope supplants The Aeneid’s pagan pessimism. Both The Aeneid and The Confessions tell of journeys from North Africa to Italy, but it is Augustine, not Aeneas, who also travels from Italy to North Africa, as does the royal party for Claribel’s wedding to Tunis. Everything in the play, including the drenching of their garments, follows from that southerly, downward movement. It is an image of the Incarnation: Clear Beauty marries Twoness, God to a human nature which the play continually represents as twofold. Sebastian complains that the princess marries an African (2.1.126), but since the time of the Church Fathers black characters in the Bible, especially the black Bride in the Song of Solomon, have been read as types of the Church and of the soul redeemed by Baptism (cf. Devisse 149-205). 25 That Claribel’s spouse is of Tunis is doubly suggestive because “[t]his Tunis, sir, was Carthage” (2.1.84). Renaissance allegorists, such as Cristoforo Landino, had interpreted The Aeneid’s Carthage 25 Origen, for example, writes that the beautiful black Bride has “drawn near to him who is the image of God, the first-born of all creation, the radiance of God’s glory and the perfect copy of his nature,” and, as Devisse explains, she has been made beautiful, even white, through the light shed by the spiritual Sun, whatever her appearance (cf. 15-6). Ambrose reads the apostle John, reclining on the Lord’s breast (John 13: 23), as himself like the Bride: his flesh has become black from the dust of the world picked up during the struggle against sin, but his soul has been made beautiful because of Baptism, which “removes the blackness of sin” (27). In medias res, at work and prayer: Augustine and The Tempest 53 - Augustine’s “cauldron of illicit loves” (Augustine of Hippo 1991 3.1) - as emblematic of the concupiscent soul (cf. Hamilton 30). But in the play the fallen human soul becomes something new, just as the old Carthage gives way to Tunis, the new city, and is not merely saved by grace, as the Reformers would put it, but sacramentally transformed, suffering “a sea-change / Into something rich and strange” (1.2.401-2). Even the most bestial of men, Caliban, “the thing of darkness” (5.1.275), is transfigured. 26 The Tempest begins with the characters coming from somewhere, the marriage of Tunis and Claribel. And it ends with them going somewhere. Again, intermediacy and indeterminacy should not be conflated; there is a terminus for the characters. It is back in Italy, but the characters and audience, still in the middle state of movement and expectation, do not experience that time of completion, though through the joyful reunion may have some incomplete sense of it. In considering the play’s representation of Reformation-era religious controversy I have been led into an even more embarrassingly retrograde allegorical reading than first intended, one that coincidentally corresponds to the first two of the three ‘spiritual’ levels of a text according to typological exegesis. Augustine was the first master in the Western church of this method which Dante explained in his famous letter to Can Grande. The first two levels pertain to Baptism and good works: the allegorical (in the narrowest sense of that term), having to do with redemption done by Christ, as through Baptism, for example; and the tropological, having to do with a person’s works during “the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the state of grace” (Capozzi 41). Maybe the play’s unrepresented terminus, Naples, from the Greek Neapolis, can best be understood according to the third sense, the anagogical, having to do with the final state of the soul enjoying “the liberty of eternal glory” (Dante Alighieri 347-8). As in the Book of Revelation, the wedding feast is to take place in the New City. 26 Matthew Mehan in a graduate seminar at the University of Dallas, May 2009, suggested that Ariel’s tabor (3.2.124; 152; 4.1.175) is a reminder of Mount Tabor, the site of the Transfiguration. A NDREW M ORAN 54 Works Cited Augustine of Hippo. The Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. 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New York: Newman Press, 1963. . De Providentia Dei. Trans. Miroslav Marcovich. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989. Rahner, Karl, SJ. Ed. The Teaching of the Catholic Church. New York: Alba House, 1966. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Arden Second Series. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Methuen, 1982. . The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Slover, George. “An Analogical Reading of The Tempest”. Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 175-206. Tappert, Theodore G. Trans. The Book of Concord, Art.I. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959. Antitheses 5,9. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. 2 vols. Trans. Gaston du C. de Veres. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1966. Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason. Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Critical History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Walter, James. “From Tempest to Epilogue: Augustine’s Allegory in Shakespeare’s Drama”. PMLA 98.1 (Jan. 1983): 60-76. Weekley, Ernest. An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. Vol 1. New York: Dover, 1967. Wilson, Richard. Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance. New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. J OHN M UCCIOLO The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick the Elector of Palatine at Whitehall Palace, 1612-1613 There are few certainties we can claim for Shakespeare’s life or his plays. When the plays were composed or performed has been grist for the scholarly mill, and still there is little about these matters we know for sure. 1 But that the King’s Men performed Shakespeare’s The Tempest 2 at the behest of the Court of King James I during the Court’s 1612-1613 season is as close to a fact about Shakespeare as we can obtain. The Tempest at court, 1612-1613: its first recorded performance Records indicate that The Tempest, among other plays, was performed at Whitehall Palace. Not only do we know this, we also know for what purpose it was played: to celebrate the betrothal ceremonies of James’s daughter Elizabeth to Frederick, Elector of the Rhineland Palatinate, culminating in their wedding ceremony on February 14, 1613. So sometime between December 1612 and May 1613 (when their marriage revels ended), we know King James, his royal family, his courtly entourage, and others with access to Court viewed The Tempest. 3 This paper will suggest that the play’s 1612-1613 theatrical, political, and poetical milieu may provide us with new insights. Indeed, this Court Tempest offers an opportunity unusual in Shakespeare studies: to surmise from eye-witness accounts how an actual, though 1 “Shakespeare probably wrote The Tempest between the arrival of those accounts [of a 1610 English shipwreck] and the play’s first recorded performance about a year later. According to a rare surviving record of performances on 1 November 1611 (‘Hallomas nyght’), Shakespeare’s acting company ‘presented att Whitehall before the kings Majestie a play Called the Tempest.’ During the winter of 1612-13, The Tempest had a second royal performance as part of the festivities celebrating Princess Elizabeth’s betrothal to the Elector Palatine” (Chambers 1923, 1.490-4; also cf. Kermode xvii-xxiv). 2 All references to speeches in Shakespeare’s The Tempest are from the Vaughan and Vaughan edition (2011); James’s political speeches are from Sommerville (1994) and cited as KJ. 3 Kermode (xxii) citing Chambers (1923, 2.342): “Item paid to John Hemings [...] for presenting before the Princes Highnes the Lady Elizabeth and the Prince Pallatyne Elector fowerteene severall playes, viz […] The Tempest”. J OHN M UCCIOLO 58 extraordinary, spectator, King James I, at Whitehall Palace, during 1612-1613 - with his known personal and public predilections - might have viewed it. This perspective provides a window into The Tempest at the moment of production. The theatrical milieu Plays and entertainments in 1612-1613 could have been performed in any number of areas in Whitehall Palace. But large-scale entertainments, like The Tempest, were probably performed either at the old Banqueting House (1606- 1619) or the Great Hall (Kernan 18). Whatever the venue, the King, the royal family, and his entourage, viewed the plays and other entertainments from a special raised platform called “the State” (ibid.). Where “the State” was placed varied according to the Hall. Whatever the Hall, the royals and their guests occupied an elevated platform. Although there is scant evidence to determine precisely where in Whitehall “the State” was located (cf. Kernan 18-19), what little we know is quite suggestive. The King sat on a raised stage, where he could best hear the performance. While the “great stage” was erected at one end of the old Banqueting House, the King’s “stage” served as “the King’s dais”; it was a “dais with the Chair of State set under the great window of the south wall which always formed the directive centre of the hall” (Palme 151, 182). 4 The lines of perspective, then, “ran together in the King’s eye, so the acting, the songs, and the dances were also directed toward him. It was to the King that heralds and actors turned at highpoints of the spectacle” (Palme 152). So “only from where he [the King] sat did the stage illusion work to perfection” (Palme 151). From this, we can surmise that King James, at Whitehall, was conspicuously positioned to hear plays and entertainments presented there. Records also indicate that it was equally important for the King to be seen as it was for him to hear the play. Here it is worth retelling a commonplace account of King James’s seating arrangement at entertainments: In 1605 King James paid a visit to Oxford, and the university undertook to entertain him with four plays. A stage was constructed in Christ Church hall, and for the first time in England drama was produced with perspective sets and moveable scenery […]. The location of the royal seat was determined by the law of optics. However, according to a contemporary account, when representatives arrived from court to oversee the arrangements for the performance, they ‘utterly dislike the stage at Christ Church, and above all, the place appointed for the chair of 4 Thomas Campion and Inigo Jones staged The Lord’s Masque (cf. Nichols 97) on the wedding night and that since Inigo Jones introduced perspective in England after 1605 (cf. Orgel 1975, 10), the king’s seat was probably arranged with due consideration to the royal perspective. The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick 59 Estate, because it was no higher, and the King so placed that the auditory could see but his cheek only.’ The university’s vice-chancellor undertook to explain ‘that by the art of perspective the King should behold all better than if he sat higher.’ But the courtiers remained adamant, and ‘in the end, the place was removed, and sett in the midst of the Hall, but too far from the stage […] the king complained that he could not hear the play. (Orgel 1975, 14) If, as this anecdote suggests, placement of “the State” sometimes conflicted with the King’s ability to hear the play, it was important, particularly when the King was away from Court, that the King be positioned where he could best be seen. So there seems to have been two possible viewing dynamics at entertainments the King attended: a location where the King could best hear the play and where the other spectators could best see him. These dynamics - especially James’s complaint at Oxford that he could not hear the play - suggest that the King was not a disinterested observer. It is a common misperception that James was, at best, an uninvolved spectator at plays and entertainments. 5 We know otherwise. Eyewitness accounts show that King James was of two minds about attending theatrical performances. He seems to have been uninterested in shows that had no direct bearing on issues of concern to him. That James was often boorish during a play’s production seems understandable, especially if the circumstances were oppressive: for example, a five-hour “performance of a Latin play, Ajax Flagellifer, performed at Christ Church Hall, Oxford, on the evening of August 28, 1605, ‘The king was very weary before he came thither, but much more wearied by it and spoke many words of dislike’” (Kernan 189; Nichols 550). The very next night the king fell asleep at a performance of the comedy Vertumnus, which did not end until one o’clock in the morning. When he awoke, he showed his disapproval by saying, “‘I marvel what they think me to be! ’” (Kernan 189; Nichols 552). These anecdotes suggest that if the entertainment was of little interest to him or the physical circumstances of the Hall were uncomfortable, the King paid little or no attention to it. But when he attended plays that addressed topics of interest to him, as reports indicate, James was fully engaged, and even enthusiastic, even if the performance ran for five hours. The Ignoramus by George Ruggles, for example, which included a caricature of Sir Edward Coke, who defended the Common Law against the King’s prerogative, drew roars of laughter from the King, and even though this play lasted for five hours, the King shouted “Plaudite” to congratulate the author on his satirical depiction of Coke (Kernan 191-92). This eye-witness evidence suggests that James enjoyed entertainments that addressed his own concerns, not necessarily Shakespeare’s concerns or those of any other playwright. 5 See Kernan (188-201) for a synopsis of James’s varying responses to entertainments. J OHN M UCCIOLO 60 So what issues raised in The Tempest might engage the King? By posing this question, I am not suggesting that The Tempest was composed, or recomposed (see Kermode xvii ff.), for the occasion of Elizabeth’s betrothal. At this time, we cannot know this. Nor am I suggesting that the King was particularly enthused about the play. We have no record of his response, and we only suppose he attended its performance; we only know it was played twice at Court, once during the betrothal festivities. And, after all, Othello was also performed during the 1612-1613 season, and except for the coincidence of James’s and Iago’s name or the contemporary threat of Turks, Othello seems to have little to do with James’s interests. What I am suggesting is that the King’s interests and the play’s topics may share a resemblance, and perhaps the 1613 production of the play even elicited a ‘Plaudite’ from the King if he were present and particularly engaged. A political milieu: James and the commons At the time The Tempest was performed at Court, King James was avidly engaged in a dispute over the extent of his monarchical prerogative. 6 During the 1610 Parliament, especially, debate in the Commons about the King’s “imposition” of tariffs to raise funds for his household expenses (which included money to pay for Courtly entertainments such as The Tempest) “led to questions about command of the King and assent of Parliament” (Wormald 37). This ideological conflict between a subject’s liberty and King James’s prerogative raged through the rest of James’s reign. 7 In 1610 James Whitelocke, a skillful rhetorician who opposed impositions, granted, from the floor of Parliament, that the “king out of parliament” exercised many prerogatives, but, he added, the “king in parliament” exercised even greater powers, such as, the “power to make laws,” the “power to judge without appeal,” and, to the point, “this right of imposing” tariffs (Christianson 80- 81). On the other hand, in 1610 Lancelot Andrewes complained that things were so bad that every “tongue is walking and every pen busy, to touch them and their rights which they are to have, and their duties they are to do [...] men [Puritan preachers] indeed of tumultuous spirits [...] taking every opportunity to attack and insult over the rights of princes” (Lake 120). This dispute about impositions, among other such matters, rested on two essential questions: Who had the original claim to rule - the people or the king? And, 6 See Sommerville (1994, xv-xxviii) for a incisive reassessment of this topic and the “revisionist” approach to it. 7 This dispute, among other disagreements, culminated in the 1649 beheading of Charles on a scaffold set up in front of James’s rebuilt Banqueting Hall, where The Tempest had been performed in 1611 and 1613. The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick 61 its attendant question, if the king derived his powers directly from God, and not from old laws [or the people/ Parliament], could the king then infringe any purely human law if he judged it to be necessary? (cf. Sommerville 1991, 57). King James’s position on these two questions can be ascertained in his speeches to Parliament, especially his Speech of 1610 (KJ 179-202). If the main purpose of this speech was to secure funds “for supporting of my state and necessities” (KJ 180), James justified his request for this money within the context of his notion of a king’s double prerogative. That is, James assured Parliament, especially the Commons, that on this matter he had no “Intention” of exercising his absolute kingly power, and that he planned “to continue still my gouernment according to [...] the Lawes of this Kingdome” (KJ 180). To explain why he would choose to limit the extent of his prerogative, James employed, what I shall call, the “settled state” topos (KJ 182): As wee liued in a setled state of a Kingdome which was gouerned by his owne fundamentall Lawes and Orders, that according thereunto, they were now (being assembled for this purpose in Parliament) to consider how to helpe such a King as now they had; And that according to the ancient forme, and order established in this Kingdome: putting so, a difference betweene the general power of a King in Diuinity, and the settled and established State of the Crowne, and Kingdome” (KJ 182). Essentially, James means that in a “settled” state, the king governs according to his own fundamental laws. There is, however, a difference between a king’s exercise of his prerogative in this “settled state” and the king’s exercise of his power “in Diuinity” (KJ 182). That is, while in a “settled state” the king rules according to his own law; in “Diuinity,” the king rules with extraordinary, god-like powers: And the like power [God’s] haue Kings: they make and vnmake their subiects: they have power of raising, and casting downe: of life, and of death” (KJ 181). Here it is important to note that James reminds Parliament that, acting “in Diuinity,” he, alone, may condemn a man to death. Although he feels it necessary to assert his god-like power, James reiterates his willingness to rule according to his own laws. But before repeating the “settled state” topos, James reminds Parliament of his antecedent, “the state of kings in their first originall”: But now in these our times we are to distinguish betweene the state of kings in their first originall, and betweene the state of setled Kings and Monarches, that do at this time govern in civill Kingdomes [...] in the first originall of Kings, whereof some has their beginning by Conquest, and some by election of the people, their wills at that time serued for Law; Yet how soone Kingdomes began to be setled in civilitie and policie, then did kings set downe their minds by Lawes, which are properly made by the king onely; but at the rogation of the people, the Kings grant being obtained thereunto [...] euery iust King in a setled Kingdome is bound to J OHN M UCCIOLO 62 obserue that paction made to his people by his Lawes, in framing his gouernment agreeable thereunto (KJ 183). If “in their first originall,” kings’ “wills at that time serued for Law”; the king in a “settled state” is bound by those laws of his own making. Here, James reassures Parliament that despite the “great difference betweene a Kings gouernment in a setled State, and what Kings in their originall power might doe” (KJ 183), he is, as “euery iust King in a setled Kingdome is,” “bound to obseure that paction made to his people by his Lawes” (KJ 183). James’s use of this “setled state” topos, in contrast to the concept of a king in his “originall state,” appears in several of James’s speeches. It can be found in James’s earlier “The Trew Law of Free Monarchies” (1598), which was reprinted in London on the occasion of his coronation (1603). In “Trew Law” James used the “settled state” topos to counter the “seditious writers” (Continental Catholics), who “would perswade vs, that the Lawes and state of our countrey were established before the admitting of a king” (KJ 73). According to James, in its “originall state,” Scotland was “scantly inhabited, but by very few, and they as barbarous and scant of ciuilitie”(KJ 73): A wise king comming in among barbares, first established the estate and forme of gouernement, and thereafter made lawes by himselfe, and his successours according thereto (KJ 73). In his “originall state,” the king uses his extraordinary powers to “forme a gouernment” and to make “lawes by himselfe.” However, in the “setled state,” according to James, “a good king will not onely delight to rule his subiects by the lawe, but euen will conforme himselfe in his owne actions thervnto” (KJ 75). “Trew Law,” then, contains an early, though fully formed, version of the “setled state” topos. This topos also appears in a speech James delivered in Star Chamber in 1616. Arguing against Coke about the relationship between royal power and the Common Law, James used the “settled state” topos to explain the origins of the office of judges: In all well setled Monarchies, where Law is established formerly and orderly, there Iudgement is deferred from the King to his subordinate Magistrates; not that the King takes it from himselfe, but giues it vnto them. (KJ 205) As he did in 1610, James uses the “settled state” topos to counter Coke’s claim that the King’s prerogative was defined by the Common Law of the land (cf. Sommerville 1986, xxii). These iterations of the “settled state” topos, to whatever purpose James puts it, comprise three parts: first, in the “originall state” the King’s will is law; second, in situ, the king creates his own laws and policies; third, in a “settled state” the just king is delighted to choose to rule according to his The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick 63 processors’ laws. In these speeches, when James makes a distinction between “originall” and “settled” States, he defines his prerogative as limited only by his own and his ancestor’s Laws; and, in this way, he rejects the Commons’ complaint that he has placed himself above the Law. There was much dissention in the Commons regarding James’s conception of the monarchy. For example, Chamberlain reports that it “strained so high and made so transcendent” the royal prerogative, that it “bred generally much discomfort,” so much so that he wished that “this speech might never come in print” (Thomsan 1.303). Just prior to The Tempest’s performance at Court, and because of political fallout from this dispute about impositions between James and the Commons, James prorogued the Parliament he had called five months earlier, in July 1610. Within this tumultuous political context The Tempest was composed and was performed twice at Court (1611-1612, 1612- 1613). In light of James’s view of a king’s prerogative, as it is delineated in his political writing and speeches - (Trew Law 1598), “A Speech” (1610), and his Speech to the Star Chamber (1616) - how would James receive Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as performed at Court, 1612-1613? From his elevated “state” in the Banqueting House, James might have recognized in Prospero’s use of his “art” an exemplar of a King in his “orignall power.” Prospero’s exercise of his “so potent art” (5.1.50) and his abjuration of it (cf. 5.1.51) compare to James’s notion in his Speech to parliament of 1610 that “it is a great difference betweene a Kings gouernment in a settled State and what kings in their originall power might doe” (KJ 184). But what, according to James, might a king do in his “originall power”? Similarly, what might “a Kings gouerment in a settled State” look like? In this next section of my essay, I shall compare the attributes of James’s conception of a king’s power with that of Prospero’s “so potent art” (5.1.50). James’s “Kings in their first originall power”: kings “are called Gods” In his 1610 Speech to parliament, James identifies “three principall similitudes that illustrate the State of MONARCHIE” (KJ 181). Pertinent to this paper are the first similitude, that Kings “are called Gods” (ibid.); and the second, that Kings are also compared to “Fathers of families” (ibid.). It is the purpose of this section of my essay to suggest that The Tempest reflects James’s conception of a king in his “first originall”: that “Kings are not onely Gods Lieutenants vpon earth, and sit vpon Gods throne, but euen by God himselfe they are called Gods” (ibid.); further, in their “resemblance of Divine power vpon earth” (ibid.), kings share the Attributes to God” (ibid.). That is, like God, Kings have the power to J OHN M UCCIOLO 64 make and vnmake their subiects: they have pouer of raising, and casting downe: of life, and of death: Iudges ouer all their subiects and in all causes, and yet accomptable to none but God onely. They haue power to exalt low things, and abase high things (ibid.). In addition, because of the likeness of a king’s power to God’s, the king can require from his subjects his “due”: both the affection of the soule, and the seruice of the body of his subiects” (ibid.). This similitude between God’s attributes and a king’s has three main elements. Kings are Gods on earth, King exercise God-like power over their subjects, and Kings are “due” the affection and service of their subjects. This, then, is James’s conception when a king’s power is “in Abstracto,” when it is “most trew in Diuinitie” (ibid.), or when a king is in his “first originall power.” When, in 1613, James and his Court viewed The Tempest, could they have heard in the play’s speeches the King’s notion of the “state of Monarchie”? Does Prospero’s use of his “art” compare to James’s first similitude: that kings “exercise a manner or resemblance of Diuine power vpon earth” (ibid.)? To answer these questions, I shall juxtapose relevant speeches from The Tempest with James’s statements about the “state of Monarchie”. In The Tempest, Prospero’s magical “art” (5.1.50) seems to parallel James’s notion of a king’s “Divine power on earth.” On viewing a ship foundering in Prospero’s sea-storm, Miranda complains that only a “god of power” (1.2.10) could abate the storm. Similarly, Prospero reminds Ariel that his “art” “did free thee” (1.2.251) from the “torment” inflicted on him by the supernatural “foul witch Sycorax” (1.2.258): “mine art, / When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape / The pine and let thee out” (1.2.291-93). In addition, Caliban - although he claims that “This island’s mine by [the supernatural] Sycorax, my mother” (1.2.332) - reluctantly admits that Prospero’s “art is of such power / It would control my dam’s [supernatural] god Setebos, / And make a vassal of him” (1.2.373-75). Ferdinand too speculates that the music played by Ariel, Prospero’s deputy, is that of “Some god o’th’island” (1.2.390) and that “This is no mortal business nor no sound / That the earth owes” (1.2.407-08). Gonzalo describes the conspirator’s “preservation” as a “miracle” (2.1.6). Warning King Alonzo and Gonzalo that Sebastian and Antonio had attempted to kill them, Ariel comments, “My master through his art foresees the danger” (2.1.298). And the “good” Gonzalo hears Ariel’s warning the efficacy of supernatural aid, “Now, good angels preserve the King! ” (2.1.308). The play’s characters, except for the cynical Sebastian and Antonio, attribute their strange experiences to a “god of power” (1.2.10). Indeed, Prospero’s “art” - like James’s God-like powers - is effected by his “brave spirit” Ariel (1.2.206) to amaze and perturb his enemies. When, for example, Prospero asks Ariel about the effect of the sea-storm on the ship’s The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick 65 passengers, “Hast thou, spirit, / Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee? ” (1.2.193-94), Ariel’s response details how he amazed the passengers: I boarded the King’s ship: now on the beak, Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin I flamed amazement. Sometime I’d divide And burn in many places - on the topmast, The yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly, Then meet and join. (1.2.196-201) Further emphasizing Prospero’s god-like power, Ariel compares his own flame - “I flame distinctly” (1.2.200) - to that of the Roman deities, Jove and Neptune: Jove’s lightning, the precursors O’ th’ dreadful thunderclaps, more momentary And sight-outrunning were not; the fire and cracks Of sulphurous roaring, the most mighty Neptune Seem to besiege and make his bold waves tremble, Yea, his dread trident shake. (1.2.201-206) Ariel’s awesome display of Prospero’s ‘art’ causes the passengers to react in amazement: Not a soul But felt a fever of the mad and played Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel; Then all afire with me, the King’s son Ferdinand, With hair up-staring (then like reeds, not hair) Was the first man that leapt, cried ‘Hell is empty, And all the devils are here’. (1.2.208-14) Fever, madness, and desperation comprise the passengers’ terrified reaction to Ariel’s dreadful enactment of Prospero’s ‘art.’ And Prospero’s God-like capacity to cause wonder in other characters recurs through the play. Prospero’s supernatural power amazes other characters in his second spectacle, the Banquet/ Harpy scene (3.3). As in the storm scene, Prospero and Ariel’s conjuration amaze Alonzo, Gonzalo, Antonio, and Sebastian. At this time, Ariel accomplishes a triple vanishing. First, the “strange shapes” “vanished strangely” (3.3.18, s.d.; 3.3.39); second, “the banquet vanishes” (3.3.52, s.d.); and, finally, the Harpy “vanishes in thunder” (3.3.82, s.d.). Just as the ship’s passengers react desperately to the play’s opening storm, so Alonzo, Antonio, and Sebastian - according to Gonzalo - “All three of them are desperate” (3.3.105). In a speech that recalls how Ariel “flamed amazement” (1.2.198) aboard the foundering ship, Prospero similarly asserts: “My high charms work, / And these, mine enemies, are all knit up / In their dis- J OHN M UCCIOLO 66 tractions. They now are in my power; / And in these fits I leave them” (3.3.88-91). As in the opening storm scene, Gonzalo describes Prospero’s display of his “art” in divine terms. Later in the play, Gonzalo asks Alonzo, “I’ th’name of something holy, sir, why stand you / In this strange stare? ” (3.3.93-94). Finally, Prospero’s “powers” (3.3.73) take on the connotations of divine retribution: the usurpers are “three men of sin” (3.3.53) guilty of “Ling’ring perdition” (3.3.77). This pattern emerges again when Prospero, through his extraordinary art, ‘amazes’ his potential assassins, Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. When Ariel reports that the drunkards - Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo - are “So full of valour that they smote the air / For breathing in their faces, beat the ground / For kissing of their feet” (4.1.172-74). Prospero recalls his ironic depiction of the subverters Alonzo, Antonio, and Sebastian, men “of such-like valour” (3.3.59); they who “may as well / Wound the loud winds, or with bemockedat stabs / Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish / One dowle that’s in my plume” (3.3.62-65). While Prospero distracts the aristocratic usurpers with an elaborate series of magical appearances and vanishings, he instructs Ariel to decoy the drunken conspirators with worthless clothing, “[t]he trumpery in my house: go bring it hither, / For stale to catch these thieves” (4.1.186-88). Like the overtones of divine retribution in Ariel’s “three men of sin” speech (3.3.53-82), Prospero’s “Spirits” (4.1.254, s.d.) punish the drunkards: Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them Than pard or cat o’ mountain. (4.1.258-61) With Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano punished - “hunted soundly” (4.1.262) - now does Prospero’s “project gather to a head. / My charms crack not; my spirits obey” (5.1.1-2). Prospero’s supernatural power, then, distracts his enemies: “The King, / His brother and yours abide all three distracted […] / Your charm so strongly works ‘em” (5.1.11-12; 17), and amazes his friend Gonzalo: “All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement / Inhabits here. Some heavenly power guide us / Out of this fearful country.” (5.1.104-06). Through the play, then, Prospero’s art is similar to divine power. Viewing Prospero’s art producing amazement may have reminded the 1613 Jacobean Court audience of King James’s similar claim to a quasi-divine authority. If Prospero’s art amazes his prisoners, it also requires them to ‘follow’ his ducal governance. In addition to an embedded stage direction, the word ‘follow,’ as used in the play, may connote a political meaning congruent with James’s idea that his subjects are “like men at the Chesse” (KJ 181). Prospero’s art requires Ariel to be “correspondent to command” (1.2.297) and Caliban to acquiesce, “I must obey” (1.2.373). In addition, when the royal The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick 67 audience first hears Ferdinand asking, “Where should this music be? ” (1.2.388), he has been following Ariel’s “sweet air” (1.2.394): “Thence I have followed it / (Or it hath drawn me, rather)” (1.2.394-95). Aware that Prospero deputizes Ariel to lead Ferdinand, the audience also knows that Prospero himself requires Ferdinand to “Follow me” (1.2.460) and “Follow! ” (1.2.465). Ferdinand has no choice but to follow Prospero because, as Ferdinand laments, “Mine enemy [Prospero] has more power” (1.2.467). Just as Prospero’s art leads Ferdinand to follow, so it leads the usurpers and the good Gonzalo to “Follow, I pray you” (3.3.110). Thus Prospero’s God-like ducal power controls all other characters. In this way, Prospero’s magical art enthralls the play’s other characters. The servant Ariel is “correspondent to command,” (1.2.297) and the slave Caliban “must obey” (1.2.373); the lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda, are, by Prospero’s devise, “in either’s power” (1.2.451); and Gonzalo, Adrian, and the conspirators - King Alonzo, Sebastian, and Antonio - are “now in my [Prospero’s] power” (3.3.90). By Act 3, Prospero declares that “mine enemies […] are all […] in my power” (3.3.89-90). Through Acts 1 to 4, Prospero, like James’s “originall” (KJ 183) king, exacts obedience from his enemies. King in a settled Kingdome (KJ 183) Transcendency of either side unknowne Princes with men usinge noe other artes But by good dealing, to obtaine good heats. (Greville, Treatise, 1.2.4-6) The action of the first four acts of the play might be seen to resemble James’s conception of “Kings in their first original.” Prospero’s “roaring” against his enemies compares to the “roaring” of the royal Jacobean lion with a terrible and quasi-divine authority (McIlwain 39). Even to his own daughter, Prospero seems irascible. And only twice in the play does Prospero temporarily relinquish his God-like power. Both occur when he shows affection for his kin. First, he responds to his daughter’s piteous distress at the sight of those aboard the foundering ship: “Lend thy hand / And pluck my magic garment from me. So, / Lie there my art” (1.2.23-25). In Act 5, too, Prospero’s affections lead him to abjure “my so potent art” (5.1.50). Act 5 opens with what seems a catalog of the successes of Prospero’s “so potent art” (ibid.): “my project gather[s] to a head. / My charms crack not; my spirits obey” (5.1.1-2). Ariel echoes Prospero’s accomplishments: the conspirators “cannot budge till your release” (5.1.11) since Prospero’s “charm so strongly works ‘em” (5.1.17). These speeches at once demonstrate the dynamic capacity of Prospero’s art to regain his dukedom and to quell sedition; and, at the same time, they presage Prospero’s abjuration of his ‘rough J OHN M UCCIOLO 68 magic’: “The sole drift of my purpose doth extend / Not a frown further” (5.1.29-30). In Act 5, a pivotal moment in the play, Prospero is moved by Ariel’s affection for the prisoners - “if you now beheld them, your affections / Would become tender” (5.1.18-19) and “Mine [affections] would, sir, were I human” (5.1.19). Prospero, “kindlier moved” (5.1.24), responds, “And mine [affections] shall” (5.1.20). Ariel’s “feeling / Of their afflictions” (5.1.21-22) is the impetus for Prospero’s abjuration. First, Prospero identifies with his prisoner’s suffering - “and shall not myself / (One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, / Passion as they) be kindlier moved than thou [Ariel] art? ” (5.1.23- 24). Then, when Prospero abandons his vengeance - with ”my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury / Do I take part” (5.1.26-27) - he chooses rather the “rarer action” which is “In virtue” (5.1.27-28). If the word ‘virtue’ here connotes clemency, Prospero’s mercy seems prompted by his affection for his kind, a feeling which is only possible because, at this point in the play, Prospero’s realpolitik permits it: “They being penitent, / The sole drift of my purpose doth extend / Not a frown further. Go, release them, Ariel” (5.1.28-30). Prospero’s clement gesture compares to James’s conception of a king’s mercy (Speech to parliament 1610): To winke at faults, and not to suffer them to bee discouered, is no Honour, nor Mercy in a King, neither is he euer thanked for it; It onely argues his dullness: But to forgiue faults after they are confessed, or tried, is Mercie (KJ 200). Prefacing his abjuration of his art, Prospero delivers a spectacularly dramatic rendering of the awesome power of “Kings in their first original,” the “Ye elves” speech (5.1.33-50). In this valedictory speech to his ministering spirits, Prospero “roars”: “I have bedimmed / The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, / And ‘twixt the green sea and azured vault / Set roaring war” (5.1.41-44). This roar recalls other instances when Prospero employs his “art” (5.1.50): the roar of the opening storm (1.1), the lion’s roar (2.1.313), and the roaring (4.1.261) of Caliban and his fellow conspirators. And in what seems a celebration of his art, Prospero recalls his magical capacity to employ the spirit world to serve his ends: Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back; You demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime Is to make midnight-mushrooms, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew, by whose aid - Weak masters though ye be - I have bedimmed The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick 69 Set roaring war; to the dread-rattling thunder Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak With his own bolt: the strong-based promontory Have I made shake, and by spurs plucked up The pine and cedar; graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, ope’d and let’em forth By my so potent art. (5.1.33-50) It has been argued that this speech is a “skillfully managed piece of Renaissance imitation” of Ovid’s Medea speeches, and that, as such, it is an allusion to the pagan world of white and black magic (Bate 251-252). But this speech’s source does not necessarily determine its meaning. For the purposes of this paper, the pertinent question is: What might the 1613 royal audience have heard in this speech? We may compare the topics of this speech - Prospero’s commanding spirits and raising sea-storms - to King James’s idea that Kings “make and vnmake their subiects: they have pouer of raising, and casting downe: of life, and of death: Iudges over all their subiects and in all causes” (KJ 181). In light of Prospero’s magnificent oral display of princely power, what accounts for his ‘abjuration of his art’? But this rough magic I here abjure; and when I have required Some heavenly music (which even now I do) To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book (5.1.50-57) Certainly, Prospero’s speech abjuring his art is not the speech of “Kings in their original”; rather, it seems to mark the transition from the power of “Kings in their first originall” to that of a King in a “settled state.” Unlike the “original” King, “whereof some had their beginning by Conquest and some by election of the people, their wills at the time serued for Law; yet how some Kingdomes began to be settled in civilitie and policie, then did Kings set downe their minds by Lawes which are properly made by the King onely; but at the rogation of the people, the Kings grant being obtained thereunto” (KJ 183). A king in a “settled state” is “bound to obserue that paction made to his people by his Lawes” (ibid.). And that “paction” defines those “points of Meum and tuum”: “either concerning the Kings Prerogative or the possessions of Subiects” (KJ 185). In a “settled state,” then, there is a pact between James and his subjects, which both must attend to. In The Tempest, too, the governance of a king in a “settled state” resembles Prospero’s attitude toward and treatment of other characters during Act 5. Once Prospero relinquishes his magical art, he no longer occupies his privi- J OHN M UCCIOLO 70 leged stage position. In fact, when Prospero observes Ariel leading with “solemn music” the “charmed” courtiers into a circle (5.1.57, s.d.), it is the final time in the play Prospero has used his art against any of the other characters. Once the courtiers have followed Ariel into the circle, Prospero’s “Charm dissolves apace” (5.1.64) and “Their understanding / Begins to swell” (5.1.79-80). If in Acts 1-4, Prospero, by the power of his art, controls the conspirators; now, in Act 5, Prospero, having abjured his art, reveals himself to his enemies: “I will discase me and myself present / As I was sometime Milan” (5.1.85-86). Here, a resemblance emerges between Prospero’s revealing himself to his enemies and James’s Cor Regis in oculis opuli: “a Mirror, or Christall, as through the transparantnesse thereof, you may see the heart of your King” (KJ 179). James reveals his “heart” because he is a king “gouerning in a settled state.” But without the coercive power of his “art,” Prospero chooses to engage his subjects and peers, as he must have when he was in Milan; much as James spoke to his Parliament “as an Englishman” (KJ 182); and, ultimately, as a “just King in a settled Kingdome… bound to obserue that paction made to his people” (KJ 183). Like a king governing in a “settled state,” Prospero first embraces King Alonso: “I embrace thy body, / And to thee and thy company I bid / A hearty welcome” (5.1.109-111). He then embraces his “noble friend” Gonzalo: ”Let me embrace thine age, whose honour cannot / Be measured or confined” (5.1.121-22). And he ambivalently forgives his usurping brother Antonio: For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive Thy rankest fault - all of them; and require My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know Thou must restore. (5.1.130-134) Through Act 5, Prospero reveals himself to Alonso and Gonzalo; Sebastian and Antonio; the Mariners; and Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano. He comes face to face with his subjects, distinguishing between what is his (Meum) and what is theirs (tuum). In his 1610 Speech to parliament, King James occupies a similar position to his subjects in the “settled state” of England. At the Banqueting House performance, James and his royal entourage might have noticed this resemblance. A royal milieu It has been conjectured that Prospero’s masque, which he conjures for Ferdinand and Miranda’s betrothal ceremony, had been added by Shakespeare on the occasion of the 1613 royal nuptials of Elizabeth and Frederick at White- The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick 71 hall Palace. 8 Whether or not Shakespeare added this scene for this occasion is unknowable, but dramatizing a betrothal masque during the festivities of Miranda and Frederick’s betrothal must have had a special effect on this royal couple. It might also have had a special significance for James. At once King and Elizabeth’s father, James might have had a special view of the play at this occasion. And since James also identified himself as “Parens patriae, the politique father of his people” (KJ 181), his double role - father of Elizabeth and father of his people - compares to Prospero’s double role - Miranda’s father and Duke of Milan. Early in Act 1, Prospero asserts he is Miranda’s “no greater father” (1.2.21), who was once “Thy father Duke of Milan and / A prince of power” (1.2.54-55). Through the play, Prospero assumes two opposing attitudes toward his daughter. He authoritatively addresses Miranda: “Be collected; / No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart / There’s no harm done” (1.2.13-15); “No harm! ” (1.2.15); “Dost thou attend me? (1.2.78); “Thou attend’st not! ” (1.2.87); “I pray thee, mark me” (1.2.88); and “Dost thou hear? ” (1.2.106). Prospero’s imperative remarks are intermixed with his remarks of affection for Miranda: “I have done nothing but in care of thee, / Of thee, my dear one, thee my daughter” (1.2.16-17); Miranda is “my dear one, thee my daughter” (1.2.17). To Miranda’s worry that “Alack, what trouble was I then to you? ” (1.2.151-52), Prospero’s responds lovingly: O, a cherubin Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile, Infused with a fortitude from heaven, When I have decked the sea with drops full salt, Under my burdened groaned, which raised in me An undergoing stomach to bear up Against what should ensue. (1.2.152-158). Prospero’s tone toward Miranda, then, oscillates between that of ducal authority and fatherly care. When Prospero actually arranges a royal match between his daughter and Ferdinand, the audience learns that Prospero’s irascibility is a pretense. Prospero is, in fact, gleeful at the prospect of Miranda and Ferdinand’s royal match, “At the first sight / They have changed eyes” (1.2.441-2). But Prospero is also Miranda’s father, and, in order to protract the “swift business” (1.2.451) of Miranda’s infatuation with Ferdinand, he attempts to dispel her wonder: “No, wench, it eats and sleeps and hath such senses / As we have” (1.2.413-14); “Speak not you for him; he’s a traitor” (1.2.461); “My 8 “Claims such as Dover Wilson’s and Irwin Smith’s that the masque is an addition intended to make The Tempest suitable to the royal wedding are based on pure speculation [...] The question is effectively disposed of by Kermode, xxii-xxiv” (Orgel 1987, 44, n. 1). J OHN M UCCIOLO 72 foot my tutor? ” (1.2.470); and, “Silence! One word more / Shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee. What, / An advocate for an imposter? Hush” (1.2.476-78). In these exchanges, Prospero speaks with the imperiousness of a Duke and the care of a father. From what we know of the relationship among King James, Princess Elizabeth, and Frederick, it was affectionate. Elizabeth was fortunate “in finding against the odds a husband to whom she was affectionately drawn” (Parry 100). There was across England a “general enthusiasm” for the match because “Parliament and the people approved the marriage as a firm sign that James was developing a forward policy of Protestant commitment in Europe” (Parry 95). Even the Catholic Queen Anne, who disapproved of this Protestant match, relented “at the last moment and came to the ceremony of state” (Parry 97). After the nuptials, the King visited the newly-weds: The next morning the King went to visit these young turtles that were coupled on St. Valentine’s day, and did strictly examine him whether he were his true son-inlaw, and was sufficiently assured (Thomsan 74). Contributing to the Court celebration of a match consummated on St. Valentine’s Day, John Donne offered a sexually explicit “Epithalamion”: “But now she’is laid; What though shee bee? / Yet there are more delayes, For, where is he? / He comes, and passes through Spheare after Spheare, / First her sheetes, then her Armes, then any where” (5.79-82). Along with such randy imaginings of the royal couple’s nuptial consummation, there was also a “mood of graciousness, more appropriate to the betrothal time” (Parry 100). Suitably, the sentiment of Princess Elizabeth’s letter to her father, written as she left the country with her husband, is what we would expect a newly-married daughter leaving for a strange land to write to her father: “My heart, which was pressed and astounded at my departure, now permits my eyes to weep their privation of the sight of the most precious object, which they could have beheld in the world” (Rosenberg 51). In this mood of filial affection, made poignant by the recent loss of Prince Henry, it may be that Elizabeth and Frederick may have seen themselves reflected in the mirror of their dramatic counterparts, Miranda and Ferdinand. What effect their speeches may have had on the royal couple is, of course, speculative, but the masque-like interlude must have offered a special pleasure to the royal betrothed, as it did to Ferdinand and Miranda, and as it must have done for those spectators watching the royal audience listen to it. Especially apropos of the occasion, it would seem, is Prospero’s gracious presentation of Miranda to Ferdinand (4.1.1-33). Prospero’s speech is rich with a diction traditionally associated with the betrothal ceremony. There is the economic vocabulary of the dowry, with words such as, “compensation”; “amends”; “I tender to thy hand”; “ratify”; The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick 73 “my rich gift” (4.1.1-8). Woven into this economic language of the dowry are other betrothal commonplaces: the necessary curtailment of the couples desire, “All thy vexations / Were but trials of thy love” (4.1.5-6); the father’s giving away his daughter, “I / have given you here a third of mine own life, / Or that for which I live” (4.1.3-4); and the father’s praise of his daughter, “Do not smile at me that I boast her off, / For thou shalt find she will outstrip all praise / And make it halt behind her” (4.1.9-11). In the second stanza, Prospero asserts that Miranda’s own person is her best dowry. Miranda is a “gift”; “thine [Ferdinand’s] own acquisition / Worthily purchased” (4.1.13-14). The gracious tone of this recounting of Miranda’s worth changes, however, when Prospero requires Ferdinand to “take my daughter” (4.1.14). The sexual overtones of the word ‘take’ (‘raptus’ connoting ‘to seize’ sexually) are Prospero’s warning that, “too light winning / Make the prize light” (1.2.452-53). He admonishes Ferdinand not to “break her virgin-knot before / All sanctimonious ceremonies may / With full and holy rite be ministered” (4.1.15-17); that “No sweet aspersions shall the heavens let fall”; and that “barren hate, / Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew / The union of your bed with weeds so loathly / That you shall hate it both” (4.1.18-20). Within the discourse associated with the topics of a dowry and pre-marital chastity, Prospero offers Ferdinand, Miranda’s hand in marriage. We can only imagine the royal couple, and James, caught up in the fatherly concerns of Prospero’s dowry speech. The symmetry of his speech’s two, eleven-line stanzas is enjambed with Ferdinand’s gracious responses, and Prospero’s modulation between austerity and beneficence. This speech may have been heard by the royal audience as an expression of fatherly admonition against impatience and care for his daughter. A critical milieu In this essay, I have situated Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the context of its 1612-1613 Whitehall performance, with reference to its theatrical, political, and royal milieu. In doing so, I have attempted to avoid the pitfalls of an allegorical reading of the play. Prospero is not James; Ferdinand is not the Elector Frederick; and Miranda is not the Princess Elizabeth. Instead, I have attempted to establish a connection between the fictional and actual royal betrothals. In effect, I have extended the critical reach of other historically sensitive readings of the play. One critic, for example, makes the poignant observation that “Alonso’s sadness at having apparently lost his son and married his daughter to a foreign prince might well have seemed a virtual mirror of the [royal] situation” (Kastan 96-97). Surely, Alonzo’s apparent loss J OHN M UCCIOLO 74 of Ferdinand might have tolled a sad note for the royal family, who had just prematurely lost Prince Henry. While I agree that “it is naïve to understand every contemporary echo as either singular or deferential” (Palfrey 6), I think that too often this critical stance engages what we cannot know, and, in so doing, dismisses what we can know as “privileging the court over the more popular and populous franchise” (ibid.). That kind of reading neglects the play’s theatrical provenance. We know that the play was performed before the King at Whitehall during the 1612-1613 betrothal celebrations of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector of Palatine. From this fact, I think it is reasonable, even instructive to ask what might the royal audience, and those viewing the royal audience, have understood on the occasion of that performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Tempest and the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick 75 Works Cited Akrigg, G.P.V. The Jacobean Pagent or the Court of King James I. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962. . Ed. Letters of King James VI & I. 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Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1998. Thomsan, Elizabeth. Ed. The Chamberlain Letters. USA: Capricorn Books Edition, 1966. Willson, David Harris. King James VI & I. New York: Oxford UP, 1956. Wormald, Jenny. “James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: the Scottish context and the English translation”. The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. Ed. Linda Levy Peck. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 36-54. N ATASCHA W ANNINGER Fertility and witchcraft in The Tempest and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch Shakespeare’s Tempest is a play obsessed with questions of matrimony, procreation and legitimate offspring. Opening with a voyage occasioned by a royal wedding, the stage action ends with the announcement of another marriage which is expected not only to bring about reconciliation for longstanding enmities but also to produce “fair issue” (4.1.24), i.e. children as the genealogical guarantee of a strong and fertile new dynastic line. This, most likely, is the reason why the founding father of this final union, who presents his daughter to the chosen bridegroom as his “gift” (4.1.13), has guarded her and her pure body with such remarkable insistence that he would still admonish his son-in-law, even as he offers him his wife-to-be, strictly not to “break her virgin-knot” (4.1.15) before all nuptial rites have been performed; otherwise, he threatens, “barren hate” is to “bestrew / The union of your beds with weeds” (4.1.19-21). If it is through marriage and children that Prospero achieves his aim, barrenness would have been his greatest curse. Control over female bodies and fertility, therefore, appears to be the chief way to exercise, or maintain, patriarchal power. Yet Shakespeare’s play also reminds us that such power often finds its limits. Miranda’s earlier question “are not you my father? ” (1.2.55) and, even more so, Prospero’s hopeful answer “Thy mother was a piece of virtue” (1.2.56) may be taken to suggest that, for all his scholarship and magic, Prospero can never be quite sure of his own fatherhood; female sexuality lies outside his reach. Above all, this point is brought home through the absent presence of Sycorax, the so-called ‘witch’. Her voice is never heard in the entire play and yet her offspring Caliban constantly reminds us not just of her fertility but also of the strange obscurity surrounding this character that has often given reason for debate. This paper sets out to continue this debate by looking at issues of witchcraft and fertility in Renaissance texts and contexts. For this purpose I shall explore Shakespeare’s The Tempest in relation to Thomas Middleton’s The Witch, another play of the same company generally believed to have been written a few years later. Some background is provided by two major tracts on witchcraft, the Malleus maleficarum and King James’ Daemonologie. The main question to pursue is how issues of fertility and magic are portrayed in these stage plays and what functions these might have in the larger frame- N ATASCHA W ANNINGER 80 work of Renaissance gender politics. With regard to The Tempest it has already been noted that “one is immediately struck by its obsession with themes of chastity and fertility, which occur in its figurative language as well as in its literal events” (Thompson 236). I would like to show that in both plays, in fact, these themes occur on four different levels: first, on the level of language, second in terms of the bodies of the magical parents, third through means that induce or restrict fertility and fourth in the staging of children and (symbolic) births. To better understand these issues, a short historical overview on fertility and magic may be useful. Boundaries of bodies and magical means: fertility and witchcraft in the Renaissance Life for Renaissance women, as a rule, was pretty firmly set. After maidenhood came marriage, which was centred around the house and the production and raising of children. Many women also spent a large part of their lives as widows, because women generally lived longer and it was easier and more attractive for men to remarry (Gélis 1991, xiii). In the Renaissance concept of the human microcosm replicating nature’s macrocosm (Gélis 1991, 7), the position of the pregnant mother was most complicated. Herself a microcosm, she contained another microcosm within. This notion is taken up in The Witch by Francisca when Isabella asks her whether she is alone and she, in an aside, responds: “No, there’s another with me, though you see’t not” (Witch 2.1.62). In the macrocosm, the human body underwent a cycle: at conception it sprang from Mother Earth, to which it returned after death (Gélis 1989, 309). Infertility, however, interrupted this natural cycle of life and had severe consequences: it could cause economic difficulties for the family (Purkiss 99), raise religious concerns that the couple might be “outside of Charity” (Krämer/ Sprenger 2.376), be a legal reason for divorce and turn a husband into a cuckold who was thought responsible for his wife’s adultery (McLaren 2007, 58-63). On top of that, infertility could cause personal grief, as expressed by Shakespeare’s Macbeth when he contemplates his and Banquo’s position in the face of the witches’ prophecy: Then prophet-like They hailed him father to a line of kings. Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown, And put a barren sceptre in my gripe Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand, No son of mine succeeding; if’t be so, For Banquo’s issues have I filed my mind, For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered, Put rancours in the vessel of my peace Fertility and Witchcraft in The Tempest and Middleton’s The Witch 81 Only for them, and mine eternal jewel Given to the common enemy of man, To make them kings, the seeds of Banquo king. (3.1.58-69; my emphasis) For all these reasons, it is clear that the necessity of enhancing fertility was of great importance. However, the serious risks of childbirth and of being, like the Touchwoods in Middleton’s The Chaste Maid in Cheapside, “too fruitful for [...] barren fortunes” (2.1.8) presented strong reasons for limiting fertility. According to Renaissance beliefs, human fertility could mainly be affected in three different ways: The first method was through the mechanics of sex, especially position and timing. For a successful pregnancy, it was essential that couples limited themselves to the missionary position and an averagely active sex life, so as not to weaken the seed or “overuse the womb” (McLaren 1984, 33-45). In terms of timing, spring, new moon and the days following a woman’s period were thought to increase the chances of having a boy (Gélis 1991, 38-39). A second method concentrated on changing the physical and chemical conditions of the body itself or the humours within. To adapt these, bleedings, purges and diets were recommended (McLaren 1984, 33-34). The remedy and the normal condition of the affected organ generally resembled each other in texture and temperature. For this reason, women with wombs thought to be too dry were advised to eat moist meats and leafy vegetables (McLaren 1984, 34). But the efficacy of a remedy might also be revealed through ‘sympathetic magic’ or ‘signatures’, i.e. secret correspondences between the human body and the natural world evident in physical resemblance (McCann 51). For example, impotent men were advised to take a dose of boiled orchid roots, which look similar to testicles (Gélis 1991, 7). The methods for contraception and abortion, however, were very much like each other because the foetus was not thought to be alive until quickening (Gélis 1991, 49). A third method was the use of rituals, charms and amulets which could either restrict or promote fertility. Parts of non-reproductive organisms, such as mules, were particularly popular as contraceptives (McCann 51-52). “Natural temples”, stones, trees or springs were also thought to transfer nature’s fertile power onto the body (Gélis 1989, 309). Overall, the similarities between a wife’s and a witch’s technique of influencing fertility are patently obvious. The typical antithesis to the mother, and accordingly to Mother Earth, was the witch as the symbol of complete destruction. She was seen as a serious threat to food supplies, as she would steal or spoil milk and cheese or destroy crops and livestock by conjuring up storms (Hayes 179). Furthermore, witchcraft was often directed against children, especially those still unborn (Willis 108). Nevertheless, ever since antiquity people believed that witches could also promote fertility, especially through love spells N ATASCHA W ANNINGER 82 (McMahon 75-96) 1 . The witch was therefore a paradox representing the “antimother” (Purkiss 100), whilst also sharing qualities with the mother. For example, the witch had ‘replacement children’, i.e. demonic imps who would feed on her body through the so-called ‘witch mark’ and could assist her in her demonic plans, but could also free themselves from the witch’s control and turn against her (Willis 111-112). Additionally, mother’s milk, believed to be a purified form of the blood the foetus had been feeding on, was one of the clearest connections between the mother and the witch, since premilk produced during pregnancy was known as witch’s milk (Purkiss 131). Another witch-like power of young mothers was their ability to (accidentally) change the appearance of their children by acts of their imagination, since a child was thought to acquire the characteristics of the animal or creature they had been thinking about or dreaming of (Schwarz 299-300). In terms of such abilities attributed to women, women do not just acquire power through the devil (Denike 14), but they were actually thought to be quite powerful without any such help. Thus, they posed a major threat to any patriarchal line of genealogy, as their control over the child was mostly unclear and out of reach. Patriarchal society, therefore, had to devise ways to reassert control over the production of progeny. Since direct access to any unborn child was hardly possible, the female was to be controlled by enclosing her within the house (Piazza 168-169), so as to protect her against anything witch-like, which remained outside and was defined by its missing boundaries and ability to shapeshift (Purkiss 119). During pregnancy, the enclosure of women became even more intense, as the mother-to-be would withdraw completely from public life and was surrounded exclusively by women, namely the midwife and the ‘gossips’ who were part of the informal village network (Willis 108). Magical rituals offered additional protection (Purkiss 101). After the delivery, the mother only returned to the community step by step. What lies behind these safety procedures was the fear that witches might gain access to mother and child in their most vulnerable condition. Yet the actual means taken against witches’ influence were themselves magical. Karpinska has pointed out the powerful potential of pregnancy, since “the ‘two become one’ of marriage is reversed within the female body where ‘one becomes two’” (438). What mothers did in giving birth, then, is essentially a classic magic trick which men must fail to understand or to control. Thus, the 1 The claim that witches' power over fertility originated in the 12th century is still widespread (e.g. Cotton 320), but Rider has pointed out that even the first Medieval statement on this topic stems from archbishop Hincmar of Rheims writing in the late 9 th century (53). Fertility and Witchcraft in The Tempest and Middleton’s The Witch 83 male struggle for enclosure was also doomed to fail since the enclosed mother could be seen to represent the ostracised witch. All the same, the part of men in this process was not entirely clear. The womb could also signify an attractive concept of self-identification for men. Drawing on Galen’s writings, the Renaissance imagined the womb as the inside-out version of male sexual organs surrounded by membranes (Laqueur 63-69). At the same time, the womb was thought to possess animallike qualities, e.g. to be able to smell and move around the body, causing mental illnesses such as hysteria (Laqueur 108). The womb and its coldness therefore affected the mental ability of women, as Maus puts it: “What makes women fertile - what makes them women - also makes them stupid” (90). Nevertheless, the womb was also imagined a container of unuttered and hidden thoughts, granting them a sort of freedom to unfold (Maus 93-96). The image of the pregnant female body was therefore taken up for the production of literature and writing as a form of male pregnancy, linking text and female body (Maus 98). As will be shown, this trope of male pregnancy is also relevant for the interpretation of the two plays at hand. Prosperous language: writing magical fertility What is striking in The Tempest is that its most prominent fertility scenes - namely the storm and the masque - clearly involve magic. That magic and fertility strongly implicate each other may be attributed to the fact that they are both generative powers. While the OED defines fertility as “fruitfulness, productiveness” (2003b a; my emphasis), magic can refer to “an inexplicable and remarkable influence producing surprising results” (2003b 2; my emphasis). The practice of magic is therefore tantamount to an act of fertility, whether its result may be constructive or destructive. The Tempest immediately broaches issues of fertility and magic in its opening scene with the conjured up storm. As Wells has remarked, the ship represents a microcosm of the whole play, “in which symbol is important, in which anything that is heard or seen has significance beyond the mundane” (350). The ship is said to be “as leaky as an unstanched wench” (1.1.46-47), suggesting parallels between the microcosms of woman and ship. When Wells remarks that the king’s submission to the captain’s commands recalls the bowing down to medical expertise (350), we can take this even further. As has often been noted, “leaky” may refer to sexual incontinence (Vaughan and Vaughan 147), but it is also refers to the female body, especially that of a expectant mother which is “more ‘leaky’, permeable and problematic than the bodies of men” (Purkiss 99). “Unstanched”, if not read in terms of menstrual bleeding (Thompson 237), but in the sense of blood accompanying birth, underlines the imagery of a delivery. The boatswain’s insistence to N ATASCHA W ANNINGER 84 leave “our labour” (1.1.13) with all its “howling” and “stinking pitch” (1.1.35; 1.2.3) to his crew is reminiscent of the clear division in the house between the female ‘experts’ who ensure an enclosed space to protect the child and the public male world. The way Shakespeare equates the microcosms of ship and mother can be represented in the following diagram: Figure1: Male and female spheres. Both the mother and the ship are placed in, and embedded by, well-defined and given spheres, i.e. the house and the water. House and water, in turn, are embedded in a larger sphere, the earth, which in the play is confined to the island. Earth and island are each contained in yet a larger sphere, the cosmos or, alternatively, the world of the play. At the heart of all these spheres we may locate the figure of the child or, respectively, the characters of the play. The parallel construction of these hierarchies is also evident from the gender order here at stake. Both mother/ ship and the natural world are traditionally marked as female 2 . Thus, three female spheres are enclosed by a greater male sphere, as both the cosmos and the play would have been envisaged in the Renaissance to be male domains; this holds true in particular for The Tempest where Prospero, the overarching patriarchal figure, takes the role of stagemanager (Bevington 221). Through this opening scene, then, Shakespeare’s play suggests and establishes a close correspondence between ship and womb, as enclosed spaces and tropes of productivity. In giving birth, mothers perform acts of bringing forth, just as the ship here may be seen to bring forth characters onto the stage and so conjure up the world of the play. In both cases, we thus face magic acts of delivery. 2 To this day, ships traditionally carry female names. Fertility and Witchcraft in The Tempest and Middleton’s The Witch 85 As Thompson has noted, the notion of a birthing sea is parodied both by Antonio and Ariel when they invoke the image of a birth by mouth rather than by the uterus (239). While Ariel tells them “the never-surfeited sea / Hath caused to belch up you” (3.3.55), Antonio describes the courtiers as “sea-swallowed, though some cast again” (2.1.251). Francisco’s report of how Ferdinand swam to land provides another instance in which the magical storm and the issue of fertility are related to each other. Francisco states how he saw him beat the surges under him And ride upon their backs. He trod the water, Whose enmity he flung aside, and breasted The surge most swoll’n that met him. His bold head ‘Bove the contentious waves he kept and oared Himself with his good arms in lusty stroke To th’ shore (2.1.115-121; my emphasis). Water, the stereotypical female element and fertility symbol (Gélis 1991, 26), is here seemingly broken in rape-like fashion by the same man whose sexual drive is later curbed by Prospero. However, Ferdinand’s overpowering male strength is doubtful, firstly because we only have Francisco’s report of the incident and secondly because it is really Ariel, and therefore Prospero, who ensure Ferdinand’s survival (1.2.221-224). In fact, Ferdinand ends up looking rather a fool for crying out dramatically: “Hell is empty, / And all the devils are here” (1.2.213-214) before jumping into the water, as the shore is “Close by” (1.2.216). In the same scene, it is again Antonio who, together with Sebastian, extends the concept of water and fertility to his conspiracy against Alonso. Starting from the imagery in Sebastian’s self-description “I am standing water” (2.1.221), the two proceed through several water-related metaphors 3 , until Sebastian refers to Antonio’s planned overthrow as a “matter […], and a birth, indeed, / Which throes thee much to yield” (2.1.230-231). This demonstrates the quasi-magical force attributed to water and its fertile power over the play as it drives the action on by developing a new strand of the plot. Just like a delivery, the idea of the overthrow, and therefore an essential element of the plot, only emerges bit by bit until it is finally revealed. They are indeed, as Antonio puts it, “to perform an act” (2.1.252). While fertility in The Tempest draws heavily on water imagery, The Witch mainly makes extensive use of two different images. The first is the elaborate use of the pun on nothing/ no thing, implying the absence of the penis (OED 2003b 2.11c). It is striking how maidens, especially Isabella, are described as 3 “ANTONIO I'll teach you how to flow. / SEBASTIAN Do so. To ebb / Hereditary sloth instructs me. / ANTONIO […] Ebbing men, indeed, / Most often do so near the bottom run / By their own fear or sloth.” (2.1.222-228) N ATASCHA W ANNINGER 86 knowing ‘nothing’ because they are still virgins. While Sebastian notes in an aside about Isabella’s behaviour that “I know what makes you waspish. […] / She’ll every day be angry now at nothing” (Witch 3.2.48-49), Hermio tells Isabella directly, “you know nothing” (Witch 5.1.128). Ironically, it is Isabella herself who tells the pregnant Francisca “you maids know nothing” (Witch 2.1.102). The pun is also used, however, when the sexual intercourse which had supposedly taken place between two of the characters turns out to be fictitious. Sebastian says to Isabella that they are “both undone for nothing” (Witch 5.1.133) after he abandons his plan to seduce her and after the news of Isabella’s ‘infidelity’ has reached the court. In another instance, Antonio, whom Sebastian suitably describes as being “no content” (Witch 2.1.205), confesses after his ‘murder’ of Gasper and Florida/ Isabella that he has “killed ‘em now for nothing” (Witch 4.3.98) when Francisca tells him of her intrigue. The second image describes the pregnant body in terms of weight, speed and travelling. When the letter arrives which asks Antonio to “send [his] sister down with all speed”, Antonio uses the same words in his order to Francisca, to which she responds in an aside, “I know down I must; / And good speed send me! ” (Witch 2.1.173-182). The imagery becomes clearest at Francisca’s “coming up again / After her shame was lighted” (Witch 3.2.68- 69), i.e. after her return following the pregnancy. Aberzanes, Isabella and Francisca discuss the “speed” to such an extent that it makes Francisca suspicious (Witch 3.2.75-76). The fact that, in the same scene, Isabella wishes Antonio “good speed” (Witch 3.2.171) on his journey, may indicate how through his impotence Antonio has become more effeminate. All in all, the imagery used here suggests a cycle in which the pregnant woman is brought down, first by the man and then by her pregnant body, only to be raised up again after the delivery. This recalls the Renaissance concept of earth and mankind in general. Both Shakespeare and Middleton therefore use traditional elements of fertility which are strongly associated with magic and womanhood. Magical bodies When looking at the parent characters in The Tempest and The Witch, a good starting point is perhaps their names. As Lévi-Strauss has shown, names are of great importance because they assign an individual their class and position within that class (172). In this respect, Prospero, Sycorax and Hecate’s names are particularly important. Prospero in Italian simply means ‘flourishing’, ‘favourable’ or indeed ‘prosperous’ (Vaughan and Vaughan 141). The etymology of Sycorax’s name is less certain, but most suggestions link her name with animals and witches like Circe and Medea (Warner 100-105). Concern- Fertility and Witchcraft in The Tempest and Middleton’s The Witch 87 ing Middleton’s central witch, one might indeed be tempted to ask, just like Daileader, “Who the hell is Hecate? ” (12). Since antiquity, Hecate appeared together with Diana and Persephone and was strongly associated with fertility, the moon and child-bearing (Wolf 33-40). Hecate was also, just like the “freckled whelp” Caliban (1.2.283), strongly associated with dogs (Grant and Hazel 199). The Hecate-Diana cult was vigorously attacked by the Church and the tripartite goddesses stylised as God’s enemy just like many other female pagan goddesses such as Circe, Medea and Calypso (Denike 21-23). What Prospero, Sycorax, Hecate share is their ability to transcend their human bodies. In the case of Prospero, this happens in two different ways. His first method is changing his clothes, as Prospero twice takes off his magician’s robe (1.2.24; 5.1.85) to separate himself from his role as a magician. He is the only character in The Tempest to change roles successfully. Whereas the noblemen remain in the same miraculously dried garments, Trinculo’s and Stephano’s dress-up is an unsuccessful attempt at changing roles, as the ‘rule’ of “King Stephano” (4.1.222) is of short duration. Prospero’s second method is a change of gender, suggested by the way in which his account of how he lost his dukedom to his brother appears to be a process of symbolic feminisation. While Antonio is “lorded” with Prospero’s power, - i.e. symbolically emasculated - which makes him “beget” his treason (1.2.94-97), Prospero shows no resistance and is cast out to sea where only Miranda’s “smile, / Infused with a fortitude from heaven” preserves him (1.2.153-154). Prospero here recalls the figure of the outcast mother, such as Hagar in the biblical narrative of Genesis, who only survives the harshness of nature with the help of God while the child will eventually find another country (Michel 101-102). Prospero’s feminisation is further stressed when he remembers how he “decked the sea with drops full salt, / Under my burden groaned, which raised in me / An undergoing stomach to bear up / Against what should ensue” (1.2.155-158). Besides crying, which in the Renaissance was widely perceived as a feminine disease (Vaught 163), Prospero’s description of the determination awakened within him draws on the trope of pregnancy, as the idea of his restoration begins to take shape. Here again, the connection between womb and mind becomes clear. It is only through the stagemanaging on the island that Prospero reverses his “substitution” (1.2.103) by the rival stage-manager Antonio (Johnson 688) and re-establishes his manliness. Clear though the relationship between Prospero’s magic of stagecraft and fertility might be, the bodies of Hecate and Sycorax are even more intriguing in this respect. Both represent the witch-whore who challenges the boundaries between human and animal - especially Sycorax, the “hag-seed” “got by the devil himself” (1.2.366 and 1.2.320). As Jordan has noted, the sexual desire attributed to a certain person depends on their social position (196- N ATASCHA W ANNINGER 88 197). Witches, being female and very much on the margins of society, are therefore perceived as particularly lustful. However, since witches extensively engage in sexual activity, they are also experts in the field and thus are the best consultants in all love matters. This is particularly evident in The Witch, where Almachildes is the client and the love interest at the same time. In fact, it is surprising just how good and how benign Middleton’s witches are at being consultants (Daileader 13). Quite in contrast to their usual depiction in demonologies, they never ask for payment, but only for respect for their art, as the Duchess finds out the hard way (Witch 5.2.14-36). In contrast to Middleton’s unusual witches is the odd couple of the “married maiden” Isabella and the “pregnant maiden” Francisca (Karpinska 436). They are both in a state that is unnatural for their current position in life. As was shown earlier, Francisca is characterised by her pregnancy’s heaviness or “ballast” which is set in contrast to Isabella’s “lightness” (Witch 2.3.6; 3.2.152). As has been noted, the women of the court, especially Francisca and the Duchess, are actually more witch-like than Hecate herself (Keller 43). Francisca, especially in her pregnancy, is extremely self-centred. Most of the remarks she makes about it are asides in which she expresses the difficult position the child has put her in, but does not express any concern for its well-being (e.g. Witch 2.1.113-114). She even goes so far as to blame her pregnancy fully on the fact that “These bastards come upon poor venturing gentlewomen ten to / one faster than legitimate children” (Witch 2.1.43-44). Furthermore, Keller points out that Francisca possibly contemplates infanticide, as her expressed need for a “yard of lawn” (Witch 2.1.121) might be interpreted here as meaning ‘burial ground’ (48). All in all, Francisca turns out to be more of a child-harming witch than Hecate. Although partly for her own pleasure, the latter at least keeps an eye on her son when he leaves his bed and assures him “Thou shalt have all when I die” (Witch 1.2.69), therefore granting her son his rightful inheritance, something that Francisca does not do. The question of witches’ motherhood is particularly interesting since Satanic conception is not attested to prior to the fifteenth century (Mackay in Krämer/ Sprenger 1.46-47). As Gilman points out (106), a witch pregnancy is at odds with King James’ Daemonologie since here demons are said to have “no seed proper to themselves, nor yet can they gender one with an other” (68). Furthermore, the seed that the demons steal from dead bodies is “wanting the naturall heate, and such other naturall operations, as is necessarie for working that effect [i.e. a pregnancy]” (James 68). However, the prominent witch tract Malleus maleficarum insists that human-demon intercourse is exactly the method witches use to increase their number (Krämer/ Sprenger 2.261). The demon, in the form of a succubus, collects semen from criminals and then, in the form of an incubus, directly releases it Fertility and Witchcraft in The Tempest and Middleton’s The Witch 89 into the witch or passes it on to another demon which fulfils this task (Krämer/ Sprenger 2.262). According to the Malleus, demons are even particularly careful to use sufficiently strong sperm, therefore rejecting sperm from nightly ejaculations, and to only release the sperm into fertile women to give the best chance of a pregnancy (Krämer/ Sprenger 2.262-263). In the case of Hecate and Sycorax, it is hard to say whether their pregnancies are due to the playwrights using poetic licence or whether these witches conceive naturally. In the case of Hecate, no father is ever named for her offspring and in the case of Sycorax, Caliban’s devilish heritage may simply be attributed to the “power of the storyteller”, i.e. to Prospero and his views (Lara 83). In this respect, it becomes clear that Hecate and Sycorax belong to a larger group of pregnant females whose story only appears briefly and fragmented through the “contact zone” of male discourse and whose bodies are used as a palimpsest by the dominant men to inscribe their story (McBride 306-307). For example, by forcing Ariel to recall Sycorax’s ‘tyranny’ Prospero establishes himself as the “noble master” (1.2.300). Although the witch receives an opportunity to speak for herself in Middleton, she only surfaces because Sebastian or Almachildes seek her out. The fact that Hecate has “had him thrice in the incubus already” (Witch 1.2.198), has no effect on Almachildes or the world of the court. Promoting and restricting fertility by magic Attempts to influence fertility are prominently staged in The Witch and The Tempest. Prospero’s masque and Hecate’s love charms have, however, rarely been analysed in the context of fertility. Recent research has emphasised that the masque here is a household rather than a Jacobean court masque. Household masques were performed for guests, or at special events and frequently featured the banishment of witchcraft and the display of “magical fecundity” (Knowles 120-121). In The Tempest it is not witchcraft itself which is to be banished through the masque but rather what Höfele has called “Calibanismus”, i.e. the tendency of humans to give in to their carnal, animalistic desires (72). The “hymen mania” of the Renaissance (Karpinska 437) requires Prospero to provide some means of delaying the benefits of fertility. All premarital sex is ostracised as “barren hate, / Sour-eyed disdain and discord” (4.1.19-20). Despite its effectiveness on the bridal couple, the employment of the masque is ambiguous. This is due to the fact that the masque’s generative power of theatre attempts to expel the generative power of passion, that “thing of darkness” which Prospero later has to “acknowledge” as his (5.1.275-276). It is doubtful whether his project would have succeeded with a daughter less docile than Miranda. N ATASCHA W ANNINGER 90 Of all the characters in The Tempest, Ceres is particularly important here, as she is the ancient goddess of fertility conjured up by magic. She is the “most bounteous lady, thy rich leas / Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and peas” (4.1.60-61) and therefore characterised especially by food attributes. The first five foods mentioned here were the most important grains of the time and therefore a vital source of nourishment for livestock and humans (Spencer 1220). Peas, on the other hand, were widely used in love divination and thought to promote fertility (Vickery 277). All this places her in contrast to Prospero’s self-description with which he ends the masque: “my old brain is troubled. / Be not disturbed with my infirmity” (4.1.159-160). While Prospero here presents himself as an ailing and withered old man, all of his spirits, especially Ceres, stand for life in full flower. This astonishing contradiction may indicate that Prosper is here using a flimsy excuse for ending the masque to prevent his threatening overthrow led by Caliban. Middleton’s witches, on the other hand, are also clearly characterised by images referring to fertility, but in their case they follow the traditional role as being destroyers of all things fertile. Their abilities include the power to “raise […] all your sudden ruinous storms / that shipwreck barks and tears up growing oaks, / […] destroy the young of all […] cattle” and “starve up generation […] / To strike barrenness in man or woman” (Witch 1.2.135-153). It is interesting that Hecate here lists a quality that Prospero also claims for himself, namely that of cracking open trees. This may serve to strengthen the arguments of the ‘antisentimental’ school of thought which has stressed Prospero’s darker side (Knowles 108-109). The witches also make use of traditional means to manipulate infertility, such as voodoo-like enchantments or placing a magical object in the house (Purkiss 97-98). They use typical ingredients in their potions such as infants’ blood or mandrakes and rely on the influence of the moon for their spells (Witch 3.3.23-30). For his lists of ingredients, Middleton drew heavily on Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (Purkiss 218). Despite all their powers, the witches “cannot disjoin wedlock” as “‘Tis of heaven’s fastening” (Witch 1.2.172-173). At this point, Middleton diverges from the Malleus maleficarum and the notions formulated there (Krämer/ Sprenger 2.376), but he is still well within the English Renaissance tradition (Corbin and Sedge, see Middleton, Witch, 224). But it is not only the witches who attempt to influence fertility. Antonio wants to cure his impotence with the help of “two cocks […] boiled to jelly” (Witch 2.1.11). In this sense, his behaviour is in line with Renaissance medical tradition because he uses a remedy which signifies exactly what he is missing, namely a ‘penis’ (OED 2003b 20). That the spell should cause impotence in Isabella’s case and allow Florida “the joy on’t and the fruitfulness” (Witch 3.2.188) is not as surprising as it may seem. Already the Malleus maleficarum mentions this phenomenon as a clear sign of magical impotence (Krämer/ Fertility and Witchcraft in The Tempest and Middleton’s The Witch 91 Sprenger 2.141). Almachildes’ love charm is also very typical for an era which attributed strong powers to seemingly harmless ribbons (Corbin and Sedge 229). Here, it is used very much for comic effect in the exchange between the love triangle of Amoretta, Duchess and Almachildes (esp. Witch 2.2.44-140). But what it also emphasises is that the differences between an enchanted woman and a woman pretending to be enchanted are hard to make out. When Amoretta seems to give in to Almachildes’ advances, he attributes this to the efficacy of the charm, while she is in fact only fulfilling her promise to “perform / In all that [she] vowed” (Witch 2.3.109-110, my emphasis). Another method of influencing fertility is mentioned by Francisca who fears that the Duke’s toast, which more resembles a potion, will “make [her] come / Some seven weeks sooner” (Witch 1.1.135-136). She also attributes a similar effect to “those egg-pies; they are meat that / help forward too fast” (Witch 2.1.50-51). It is significant that the provider of the pies, Aberzanes, is later shown serving up exactly such delicacies which Antonio attributes to his “kindness in excess” (Witch 2.1.149). Ironically, this remark reveals the difference that separates these men, the excessive fertility of the bachelor Aberzanes and the insufficient fertility of the husband Antonio. Therefore, the two mirror their partners Francisca and Isabella in that they are also in the wrong state for their position in life. Being a witch child and giving birth: staging magical fertility The first thing worth noting in respect to all the children born of witches or witch-like characters, such as Francisca, is that they are nearly all male. This is surprising since witches supposedly pass on their knowledge to their daughters (Purkiss 146). In fact, the only daughter appearing in the two plays considered here is Miranda. Another significant point is that all the children are raised by single parents 4 . In these plays, parent and child are therefore of the opposite sex and lacking the other parental figure. This seems to have the effect that certain characteristics of the parents are transferred onto their children. Miranda is the exception to this, as her main characteristic, her chastity, does not have a Renaissance equivalent for men (Schabert 139). Caliban and Firestone seem to have adopted the animalistic and sexual drive from their mothers though (Briggs 82). The fact that Caliban’s advice to Stephano to “bring forth brave brood” (3.2.105) with Miranda so much resembles his own intention to have “peopled […] this isle with Calibans” (1.2.351-352) makes it probable that he is genuinely attracted to Miranda and wants to use Stephano to possess her. Firestone’s sexuality is more complicated as he has several ‘love’ interests, including his mother (Witch 1.2.95-101). Furthermore, 4 Except of course for Francisca’s child who is to grow up without any parents at all. N ATASCHA W ANNINGER 92 for Firestone his mother is not his role model or legal claim to power at all, as is the case with Caliban (Lara 85), but rather a figure of hatred. As shown above, pregnancy in The Witch is particularly associated with weight. Aberzanes takes up this notion when he says, “you can swell a maid up / and rid her for ten pound. There’s the purse back again / Whate’er becomes of your money or your maid” (Witch 2.3.13-15). However, when he and Francisca run through their expenses on food for their trip, he soon begins to suspect “what ‘tis [...] to get children” (Witch 2.3.49). The swelling of the body has the opposite effect on the purse, as it does not become heavier but lighter. As “purse” can also refer to the scrotum, a pregnancy may imply not only the loss of sexual freedom for men (Corbin and Sedge 226), but also of sperm which is transferred onto the woman, making her heavier. This makes it clear why Aberzanes fails to “rid away a scape” 5 (Witch 2.3.9). The old midwife also wants to dispose of the newborn boy, as she tells him there is “No matter for the house” since she knows “the porch” of the baby’s new home (Witch 2.3.3). This just goes to show how bastard children are literally kept outside society (Belling 93). Along with the actual children born of magicians and witches, several symbolic births or rebirths take place both in The Tempest and The Witch. In The Tempest, no actual human pregnancy is staged, but the characters are freed from an enclosed space leading to some sort of revelation or change. These are both instances of a delivery, in the sense of an “action of setting free” (OED 2003a 1a) and “the fact of being delivered of, or act of bringing forth, offspring” (OED 2003a 2a). The first symbolic birth staged in The Tempest is Ariel’s. As Prospero reminds him, Sycorax did confine thee […] Into a cloven pine, within which rift Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain A dozen years, […] where thou didst vent thy groans As fast as millwheels strike. […] [T]hy groans Did make wolves howl and penetrate the breasts Of every-angry bears. […] It was mine art, When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape The pine and let thee out. (1.2.274-293) As Johnson has noted, Prospero’s language here “suggest[s] that his is an imprisonment within the womb, a torture inflicted by the island’s only real motherly presence” (690). A clear distinction between the ‘good’ brother 5 Note the pun of “a scape” meaning “escape”. Fertility and Witchcraft in The Tempest and Middleton’s The Witch 93 Ariel and the ‘bad’ brother Caliban is not possible, not only because Ariel is a shape-shifter (ibid.), but also because the stories of the two run parallel. Even in Prospero’s account, Caliban’s story is embraced by Ariel’s (1.2.274-285). The second symbolic birth, namely that of Trinculo, draws more heavily on the visual aspect of theatre than Ariel’s ‘delivery’. When Stephano first appears on stage, he sees the feet of Trinculo and his “bedfellow[...]” (2.2.39) dangling out from Caliban’s gaberdine. This initially leads him to believe that he has come across a four-legged monster or a devil. When he pulls Trinculo out by the “lesser legs”, he exclaims “Thou art very Trinculo indeed! How cam’st thou to be the siege of this mooncalf? Can he vent Trinculos? ” (2.2.102-105). Though the suggestion of excrement is also likely, this scene may just as well be interpreted in the context of a delivery, especially since Trinculo’s legs seem to be smaller than Caliban’s. While “vent” may indeed refer to urination and excretion (Vaughan and Vaughan 213), it may equally refer to issuing blood (OED 2003f 2.9a), words (OED 2003f 3a) or emotions (OED 2003f 1b). This allusion to delivery is indeed taken up in Peter Greenaway’s film version of The Tempest, in which both Trinculo and Stephano assume typical positions for a midwife and a mother giving birth (cf. Greenaway 0: 59: 45-1: 00: 08) 6 . Since there are no stage directions to suggest whether Trinculo and Caliban face each other under the gaberdine from opposite ends or whether they lie on top of each other facing in the same direction, it is hard to say whether this scene depicts a ‘natural’ birth by the uterus or if this is another mock birth via the mouth. In any case, this scene makes it clear how the newborn Trinculo magically appears on stage, as here Shakespeare uses one of the basic tricks of magic and stagecraft, namely that of disappearance and reappearance. The same trick is used later in the play when Prospero reveals Miranda and Ferdinand, whom his father supposed dead. It can also be found in The Witch during the unexpected rebirth of the Duke, as well as that of Florida and Gaspero. In all three cases the miraculous rebirth is revealed by one of the male characters (Prospero, the Governor and Hermio), which serves to indicate that men are very much in charge of stagecraft. The critical moment in these rebirths is the revelation that the ‘victims’ are in good health, as the potential and alleged murderers then undergo a dramatic change in character. Before Prospero lifts the final curtain in his last little play within the play, Alonso becomes teary-eyed when he imagines everything that the future had in store for Ferdinand and Miranda (5.1.149-152). The display of her husband’s body suddenly makes the Duchess regretful about her plotting (Witch 5.3.90-98), while the killing and his apparently approaching death prompts Antonio to confess his tricking Isabella into marrying him (Witch 5.1.59-64). 6 Stephano stands between Trinculo's raised legs and then grabs him by the feet to pull him out from under the gaberdine. N ATASCHA W ANNINGER 94 These rebirths are therefore fertile indeed for the play itself, because they provide new and unexpected twists and turns. In this respect, they demonstrate how stagecraft and fertility are entwined, as they “bring forth a wonder” (5.1.170) of new perspectives. Conclusion In this essay I have attempted to outline the significance and interrelations of three generative powers - magic, fertility and theatre - which are at work in The Tempest and The Witch. It should have become clear that magic - including that of witches - cannot be seen simply as a destructive force because it also possesses a strong productive side. What the magic of witches shares with the powers of fertility and theatre is its ability to make things or people suddenly appear and to produce an abrupt change. As was demonstrated, “magical fecundity” (Knowles 120-21) is expressed especially through its ‘magical means‘, verbal images and stage representations of pregnancies or deliveries. Means for promoting and restricting fertility are extensively employed both by magical and non-magical characters of both sexes. They use two of the three powers mentioned above to influence fertility by, firstly, attempting to influence the body and, secondly, using rituals, charms and amulets. The fact that the mechanics of sex are not discussed in the plays is hardly surprising for a Renaissance stage. It is perhaps worth pointing out that there are not only male attempts to enclose the female body (e.g. as Prospero does with Miranda), but also female attempts to influence male fertility (e.g. as the Duchess and Hecate try with Aberzanes in The Witch). However, the latter are almost exclusively initiated by witches and witch-like characters. Nevertheless, this just goes to show the inherent difficulty in differentiating between ‘witch‘ and ‘woman‘. As has been shown, parents of both genders identify with or are associated with female fertility in language and staging. A change in gender from male to female can either serve the purpose of depicting unmanly frailty (e.g. as in Prospero‘s experience at sea or Antonio‘s impotence in The Witch) or used for comedy (e.g. as in Trinculo‘s ‘birth‘). On the level of language, the use of puns and the imageries of water, birth by mouth and the heavily pregnant body are especially prevalent. In some cases, it is probable that even the movement of the actors onstage hinted at the topic of fertility. It should additionally have become clear that female fertility is also an attractive concept here because of its link to male literary productivity. Therefore, the play itself appears as a product of magical female/ male fertility. Fertility and Witchcraft in The Tempest and Middleton’s The Witch 95 Works Cited Belling, Catherine. “The Purchase of Fruitfulness: Assisted Conception and Reproductive Disability in a Seventeenth-Century Comedy”. Journal of Medical Humanities 26.2-3 (2005): 79-96. 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The king made his views on this point quite clear, for he is adamant “that it is no power inherent in the/ circles, or in the holiness of the name of God blasphemouslie vsed; nor in whatsoeuer rites or ceremonies at that time vsed; that either can raise any infernall spirit” (12). Whatever then may happen in an attempted, or alleged, act of magic, it cannot be as a result of the particular words or instruments involved but only through the uncontrollable involvement of a more powerful player in the act. This raises the question what effects, if any, should still be ascribed - or should ever be attributed - to verbal means and charms. When, to cite a relevant example, a player from the company of the King’s Men stood in front of his monarch in November 1611 and ended the performance by saying “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, / And what strength I have’s mine own” (Epilogue 1-2), 1 these words might well sound like some distant yet distinct echo of the learned debate over magic and the strength of words, over spells and “Spirits to enforce, art to enchant” (14), to which James himself contributes in his earlier treatise. The ending of this play he must have seen declares such magic powers to be done and gone, only to suggest, intriguingly, that they have now been transferred to spectators, in whose hands they henceforth lie. So if the conclusion of The Tempest leaves this issue inconclusive, we should reopen the case. What are, according to the list in Daemologie, the precise interconnections between item two and item three, i.e. magic words and deeds? And who can determine such relations? In this paper I would like to address this issue by pursuing quite a simple, perhaps simplistic, question: why, in The Tempest, do we never witness verbal acts of conjuring? As it happens, the play script does not contain any magic 1 All references are to this edition: The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare, third series, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. T OBIAS D ÖRING 100 formula; so whenever the central figure and magician sets out to perform his art, we may see him don his “magic garment” (1.2.24), use his “brave utensils” (3.2.96) or consult his famous and beloved “books” (1.2.166; 3.2.92), but we never actually hear him speak, uttering any of the spells or charms we would expect him use to bring about his magic. Throughout, the play gives ample evidence of Prospero’s verbal skills and power. The dramatic character with the most lines in this script, he gives frequent orders and commands, calls out to his subalterns, admonishes his daughter, berates Ferdinand and bullies all of them with calculated and effective words; he also serves as language teacher for the “freckled whelp” (1.2.283) and “thing most brutish” (1.2.358) on the island and so constantly reminds us how much linguistic competence and power are embodied in his role. In case we ever wondered how to do things with words, clearly Prospero would be the one to show us. His use of language, as we see it, makes a real difference in the world. And yet, the one and crucial way to change reality by verbal fiat, magic, is not performed by him through speech acts. Why? Why does he prefer to conjure silently or, more precisely, without words? In the most readily comparable case of stage magic, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus 2 a generation earlier, there is no such problem. In scene three we witness the German professor, frustrated by conventional teaching, powerfully trying out his recently learned skills of incantation. He draws the circle, spells the anagrams and contemplates the various occult signs before proceeding to utter a long and Latin verbal charm calling on all kinds of spirits and infernal creatures, soon indeed producing the desired effect: the devil appears, is promptly charged to change his shape, and also complies with this verbal order. Thrilled by what he calls the “virtue” in his words, Faustus congratulates himself: “Such is the force of magic and my spells” (A/ B 1.3.31; Marlowe 15; 64), thus emphasizing the linguistic matter at the heart of his entire enterprise; in the terms suggested by John Searle for the analysis of speech acts (1969), we can say that magic principally works through “perlocutionary force”. In The Tempest, by contrast, the only corresponding scene where Prospero draws a circle and calls upon the various spirits or “demipuppets” (5.1.36) who assist him in his art is the moment of his abjuration, not when he like Faustus would begin his incantations but when he ends them, once for all, drowning his books and breaking his staff. Up to this point, whenever Prospero has conjured we have never heard him speak. It is perfectly possible, of course, that any actor playing the role might extemporize appropriate words or produce some verbal utterances at these points, but for reasons which I hope will soon become apparent I am interested precisely in the absence of magic scripts that might be voiced or 2 I use the Norton Critical Edition (2005) comprising both the A-text and the B-text of this play. Learning to charm: on the virtue of words and the forgetting of language 101 realized in performance. Given the pre-eminence of words and language in the plot of Shakespeare’s play just as in the critical debates about it, especially in view of the colonial readings and postcolonial debates of The Tempest, 3 the curious absence of language at the most crucial junctures seems to be an issue to address. Or maybe not. It is surely difficult, if not impossible, to argue on the evidence of something missing in a play script. So perhaps the issue I raise is rather akin to such notorious questions as how many children has Lady Macbeth or the one about King Lear’s wife, characters that simply do not figure in the constellation of the Shakespearean play texts and should therefore not concern us. Yet the question about Prospero’s verbal charms is different because, firstly, there is the oft-noted relevance and on-stage presence of his occult books, assuming that these actually contain some signs or writing, and secondly because we often witness the effects they bring about. Beginning with the tempestuous scene of shipwreck at the outset, which we soon learn to have been worked by Prospero’s “art” (1.2.1.), continuing with the various acts by which Prospero enchants Miranda to sleep or Ferdinand to freeze or all his other adversaries to convenient silence, and culminating in the two grand magic spectacles of the banquet and the masque, we surely see what the magician’s charms can do even if we never hear them. “No tongue, all eyes. Be silent! ” (4.1.59): Prospero’s injunction at the start of the masque also seems to be a self-injunction against uttering the actual spells by which he must command the spirits. What does this suggest? I would like to speculate on this question, with reference to three points entitled, firstly, words and virtue, secondly noise and music, and thirdly the forgetting of language. My general idea is that this play shows us how language, and especially how Prospero’s language of magic and power, must try to do its work and work its charm in constant rivalry or struggle with the other sounds that can be heard most of the time. For this reason, I shall eventually draw on a modern study of this issue and try to relate some of its insights to the dramatic and historical material at hand. In Echolalias: On The Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen contemplates the status of words as both sound events and as conceptual structures, reflecting on their double nature and its consequences also for processes of language acquisition, with reference to linguistics and language philosophy since antiquity. In some ways, Heller-Roazen’s study might be seen to provide a philosophical context and historical qualification for Julia Kristeva’s oft-cited argument from the 1970s that the “normalized language”, as she called it (16), which we use in daily discourse is seriously limited by its exclusion, or repression, of the wider, deeper, fuller, and potentially more powerful physical dimensions 3 For a rich sampling and discussion of these debates, see for instance the essay collections edited by Vaughan and Vaughan and Hulme and Sherman. T OBIAS D ÖRING 102 embodied in language - what she calls “the semiotic” - which can still be experienced or intimated in poetry and its phonic powers, reaching beyond the symbolic and its mere purpose of signification. Opening her book with a Shakespeare quotation (from Hamlet’s central soliloquy; cf. 13), Kristeva also mentions early on that “magic” and “shamanism” just “the arts, religion, and rites” (16) are all part of the broader language practice that she seeks to make out, but she never follows this intriguing indication in her argument. To focus on Prospero’s magic art and his curiously silent use of charms and ritual language in The Tempest, may therefore also be a way to reflect on the longer history of Kristeva’s “revolution of poetic language” and to rethink the notions of what language may do on the stage. To the extent that Prospero’s spells are certainly performed and yet remain unspoken or unvoiced, they are and are not part of stage performance, that is to say, they are included in the play but excluded from mimetic enactment. In this way, Prospero’s unuttered charms occupy rather the same structural position as his unwanted counterpart and female adversary, Sycorax, the most notorious absent presence who clearly belongs to the play while not belonging to the repertoire of its voiced characters, a magic figure in the diegesis, not in the mimesis of the stage, whose story is reported, whose impact is presented but whose voice is never heard. How may we account for this? Words and virtue It has often been acknowledged that The Tempest explores issues of language, language acquisition, language imposition and the power of Renaissance eloquence, against the background of intense debates, in contemporary society, on cultural difference in the status of the word. At least since Stephen Greenblatt’s influential reading in the 1970s, the “encounter between a lettered and unlettered culture” that is staged here, above all, in the confrontation between Prospero and Caliban (568) has been a central point of interest, making Prospero’s books synonymous with Prospero’s power. But letters are not all that matters. It may have been less often noted that The Tempest also puts great emphasis on enunciation, i.e. on the phonic utterance of words and on the binding influence that voice production has on listeners. When Ferdinand declares, for instance, “Full many a lady / I have eyed with best regard, and many a time / Th’ harmony of their tongues hath into bondage / Brought my too diligent ear” (3.1.39-42), he confirms a connection between verbal delivery and personal submission, binding through speaking and serving through hearing - a functional bond from the sound of words to the behaviour of their hearer which may also underlie the master’s calling of his slaves: “Approach, my Ariel. Come” (1.2.188), “What ho, slave! Caliban, / Thou earth, thou: speak! ” (1.2.314-5) These are the typical interpellations by Learning to charm: on the virtue of words and the forgetting of language 103 which Prospero marks or makes his subalterns, thus pronouncing the very words of power which he, in the case of magic spells, withholds. What is at stake here is the question if and how the utterance of certain verbal formula might have actual effects that force others to respond in certain ways and so change the way things are. This is, to come back to the opening citation, what King James for instance disputes in his Daemonologie, and this is, in fact, one of the central issues in occult philosophy. The source book from which Marlowe’s Faustus learns his art and the author whom he takes as model for the “cunning” he aspires to (A-text, 1.1.117), is Cornelius Agrippa and his De occulta philosophia, 1533, where the question of words and the effects of their voicing is given due attention. In the seventeenth-century English version by John French the passage reads: Now a word is twofold, viz. internall, and uttered; An internall word is a conception of the mind, and motion of the soul, which is made without a voice. As in dreams we seem to speak, and dispute with our selves, and whilest we are awake we run over a whole speech silently. But an uttered word hath a certain act in the voice, and properties of locution, and is brought forth with the breath of a man, with opening of his mouth, and with the speech of his tongue, in which nature hath coupled the corporeall voice, and speech to the mind and understanding making that a declarer, and interpreter of the conception of our intellect to the hearers, And of this we now speak. Words therefore are the fittest medium betwixt the speaker and the hearer, carrying with them not only the conception of the mind, but also the virtue of the speaker with a certain efficacy unto the hearers, and this oftentimes with so great a power, that oftentimes they change not only the hearers, but los other bodies, and things that have no life. Now those words are of greater efficacy then others, which represent greater things, as intellectual, Celestiall, and supernaturall, as more expressly, so more mysteriously. Also those that come from a more worthy tongue, or from any of a more holy order: for these, as it were certain Signs, and representations, receive a power of Celestiall, and supercelestiall things, as from the vertue of things explained, of which they are the vehicular, so from a power put into them by the vertue of the speaker. (Agrippa 152) The same question of verbal efficacy is addressed also by Doctor Faustus when he, as quoted earlier, congratulates himself on the apparent “virtue” in his “heavenly words”, since he observes that the devil, like Ferdinand in loving bondage, seems to follow his commands with diligence. However, in the case of Faustus, the ensuing conversation with Mephisto rather raises severe doubts as to the force of verbal utterance. “Did not my conjuring speeches raise thee? Speak.” (A 1.3.45; B 1.3.43; cf. Marlowe 15; 64) This question should provide the key to determine the magician’s linguistic power, yet its answer is intriguingly uncertain, depending on what textual version we consult. In the A-text Mephistopheles declares “I came not hither of mine own accord” (A 1.3.44), in the B-text he declares “I came now hither T OBIAS D ÖRING 104 of mine own accord” (B 1.3.42; emphases added), thus raising radically different possibilities as to the nature, scope and force of the magician’s verbal act. Either the conjuring formula we heard is efficacious and can call the devil or he comes of his own accord or possibly also by a superior master’s bidding, in which case the ritual spell is just empty hocus-pocus: this is the Turing test for conjurers, and the shibboleth of magic. The line of difference here is crucial. In the contrast of lettered versus unlettered cultures, we are mainly looking at a difference between European societies and the societies they were discovering overseas. In the contrast of efficacious versus inefficacious words, we are looking at a difference within European societies, even within early modern English society and its confessional divides. For the question how much virtue lies in words and how their utterance may amount to the performance of some ritual act was, of course, answered differently by Protestants, who would deny this, as opposed to Catholics, who would allow it. As Clark explains (534), in essence “the Protestant accusation that Catholicism was a religion based on witchcraft arose from questioning the sense in which specific religious rituals could be said to be efficacious”. Mephisto’s claim of voluntary ascent in the B-text could therefore well confirm reformed theology and please Elizabethan spectators - except they might be worried by the fact that it should be the devil here, a notorious liar, who pronounces the official doctrine. But no matter how much credit we would give him, and how deeply we entangle ourselves in the paradoxes that ensue - as with the Cretan liar, we cannot determine the truth of his claim without running into contradictions - one thing is quite clear: every stage performance of this play that includes such incantations and has them acted out by players runs an enormous risk. What if the magic words were truly efficacious, after all, and truly produced actual consequences, right here in the playhouse? The well-known seventeenth-century anecdote about “certain players at Exeter” who gave Marlowe’s tragedy and, to their utmost horror, suddenly discovered that “there was one devell too many amongst them” on the stage (Marlowe 181), powerfully shows such a calamity. Against this background, we may see how much trouble is spared in The Tempest simply by not uttering any spells. Where the magic formula is not spoken, its charm cannot do any harm. So, the immediate answer to my question why this play cuts out all verbal acts of conjuring is generic. As a comedy moving towards happy resolution and reconciliation, unlike Doctor Faustus or Macbeth, The Tempest is meant to forgo such darker possibilities and avoid all such risks. Its benign version of “white magic”, 4 as it has come 4 This term is in itself tendentious and any clear distinction from “black magic” problematic; for a strong and strongly positive reading of Prospero’s occult powers and their cultural provenance, see Yates. Learning to charm: on the virtue of words and the forgetting of language 105 to be known, is guarded by silence so as to guard itself against potentially undesired effects. Yet this answer may just be too simple. In an article on “Language, Signs and Meaning”, first published in 1997, Thomas M. Greene considers early modern debates on language and identifies two major different language models, which he calls “disjunctive” as opposed to “conjunctive” and which he traces in some central fields like the Eucharist debate. While disjunctive theories assume a clear distinction between words and things just as between literal and figurative language, conjunctive theories assume that words are equivalent to things, can be substituted for them and indeed share their referent’s essence because they are, or may be, consubstantial (Greene 30-31). In a cautious, but decisive move, Greene then argues for a “rough homology” between this split in language theories and “the Catholic-Protestant” split (34), a homology which clearly helps explain the oft-noted cultural alliance between Catholic and magical practices just as the Protestant routine rejection of, yet endless fascination with, magical speech acts. “I conjure thee Sibylia by all the riall of words aforesaid, and by the vertues and powers, I charge and bind thee by the vertue thereof […], upon paine of everlasting condemnation, Fiat, fiat, fiat, Amen (Scot 338): what Reginald Scot here cites in his Discoverie of Witchcraft closely corresponds to Faustus’ incantations, and both offer strong examples of disjunctive language users challenging and trying out the magic spells of the conjunctive language which they, as Protestants, must principally reject. Yet their potential powers haunt them, just as they must haunt a playwright who likes to present his own dramatic art, metadramatically, through scenes of onstage play-acting and magic. For this purpose, as we know, Shakespeare’s Prospero never shies from wielding forceful words and so draws attention also to the fiat in the art of theatre. By means of stage performance and enactment, early modern theatre sets out to realize action in words and so always combines one with the other. So when Prospero in act five, when his “project” gathers to a head (5.1.1), declares that the “rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (5.1.27-8), he does not only echo a noble and key sentiment formulated in Montaigne’s essays 5 but, with the key word virtue, also give a metadramatic comment on the force of language used on stage. What is more, this issue about words and virtue, in the sense expressed by Scot’s or Faustus’ practice, finds a curious echo in the issue of the “virtue” practiced by Miranda’s mother, Prospero’s absent wife, who he says has given him her word that Miranda is indeed his daughter (1.2.57). Pater semper incertus, as the saying goes: the uncertain role of fatherhood must ground itself on the uncertain force of words. Since paternity can only be asserted by language and symbolic acts like naming, not be proved by 5 “Of Crueltie“, see the relevant note and explanatory comment in the Arden edition, Vaughan and Vaughan 264. T OBIAS D ÖRING 106 natural manifestations, it is circumscribed by the same trust and suspicion that surround the force of all conjunctive magic formula. Their use on stage, like the words of faithless wives, may easily turn out to be quite treacherous and produce unwanted issue. All virtue remains tenuous. Noise and music The unheard charms of magic in The Tempest are also relevant in that we hear so many other sounds, both natural and supernatural, throughout the entire play. From the howling of the storm and the roaring of the waves in the opening moments (1.1), through the “hollow burst of bellowing, / Like bulls, or rather lions”, the “din” of “earthquake” and strange “humming” that the Italian nobles note (2.1.312-28), from the “apes that mow and chatter” or the “adders” and their “hiss” that bother Caliban (2.2.9-14) right to his celebrated speech about the island’s many noises (3.2.135) - the text is, famously, so full of references to the acoustic richness of this play that every staging turns into a veritable sound performance. Yet on an island full of noises where a thousand twangling instruments forever hum about one’s ear, we immediately understand that the sounds of spoken language must struggle when trying to establish or communicate their meaning in this greater, composite soundscape. Whatever words are used and whatever scripts are voiced, their semantic valence and pragmatic force may well be taken over by the even greater force of all this noise. So whatever voice might manage to make itself articulate and meaningful in such an overpowering sonic space would have to force or forge the power of its words over and against the many other island voices which, according to the local’s testimony and to the visitors’ experience, rather tend to put people to sleep, robbing them of all communicative force. This, after all, appears to be a main effect of Prospero’s art: to consign others to stillness and to silence - we see this happen to Miranda, Ferdinand, Gonzalo, Alonso, Adrian, and Francisco - as if to clear the space for his own voice and language to be heard. The main way to achieve this is, again, an acoustic event: music and, especially, Ariel’s singing, which is repeatedly performed so as to effect some fundamental change: “What harmony is this? My good friends, hark! ” “Marvellous sweet music! ” (3.3.18-9) Music is indeed the play’s most frequent and most potent signifier for the work and force of magic, perhaps precisely because music is a sound event whose efficacy does not rest on referential functions and whose powers operate beyond signification. “Hark, hark! Bow-wow / The watch dogs bark, bow-wow” (1.2.383-4): as Ariel and the spirits sing these lines to work their charms on Ferdinand, they turn from verbal signification to sound imitation and from lexical items to onomatopoeia: “Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell. / Ding Learning to charm: on the virtue of words and the forgetting of language 107 dong. Hark, now I hear them. / Ding dong bell.” (1.2.403-5) Words become fully consubstantial with their designation as they are blending into the pure unsymbolic sound of music. Ferdinand, however, gets the drift when he remarks that these sounds, though “no mortal business” (1.2.407), remember his drowned father. In just this way, characters throughout The Tempest are forever trying to retrieve some meaning from the musical or natural sounds they are exposed to and forced to make some sense of what they hear: “Methought the billows spoke”, Alonso notes with horror, “The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder - / That deep and dreadful organpipe - pronounced / The name of Prosper.” (3.3.96-9) To him, the elemental noises of the island suddenly turn out articulate and convey words and names to him and so communicate what he might prefer to forget. As he observes the magic banquet, he contemplates “Such shapes, […] such sound, expressing / (Although they want the use of tongue) a kind / Of excellent dumb discourse.” (3.3.37-9) Alonso’s oxymoron - “dumb discourse” - is a way of saying that these shapes are saying something without the use of words. Products of Prospero’s conjuring, the spirits can effect communication without enunciation and thus operate in just the way as Prospero’s charms: a dumb discourse whose words are never tongued though its results are there. Such interplay between semantics and acoustics is prominently claimed or noted at some other crucial points, for instance when Sebastian remarks about Antonio’s snoring: “Thou doest snore distinctly. / There’s meaning in thy snores.” (2.1.217-8) Here, the would-be traitor launches his conspiracy against the king’s authority by alleging to interpret the semantics of mere sound. This echoes the earlier moment in the opening scene when Sebastian abuses the Boatswain as a “bawling […] dog” (1.1.39-40). On the sea, the Boatswain is the figure of authority, despite his low rank in the social hierarchies on land, entitled to give orders so as to avert shipwreck. In order to reject these orders and to ignore the meaning of the Boatswain’s words, Sebastian disqualifies them as mere bawling, like a dog’s, effectively thus trying to reduce the speaker to pre-verbal dumbness. Conversely, the snores are later declared to have meaning so as to establish rapport with an ally, while the Boatswain’s words are declared meaningless so as to refuse this. Meaning is here shown to follow principally from the uptake by receivers, listeners who are prepared to make some sense of what they hear. If the noises of the island constitute a rich but confused and confusing soundscape of pre-linguistic sonic events, the frequent music on the island constitutes a harmony and greater order that surpasses possibilities of referential meaning. Noise is before, music is beyond language. In this sonic spectrum, therefore, spoken words and their potential force must negotiate their precise role and status in between these two extremes, a complex T OBIAS D ÖRING 108 process of negotiation which crucially involves the spells and incantations we may hear or witness in Shakespearean plays. As John D. Cox explains words of power […] are the most common example of magical thinking on the Shakespearean stage, and they are almost always effective. Riddles, oracles, omens, prophecies, spells, oaths, swearing, sometimes mere threats and warnings, all are examples of this kind of magic, and nothing indicates Reginald Scot’s misreading of his time more than his belief that arguments against magical language would make people stop believing it. The tide that Scot tried in vain to stem was swollen not only by biblical precedent, but also by classical literature. Senecan tragedy included oracles, and omens, providing a warrant for them on the Shakespearean stage. (182) What, then, may follow from this for our central question about Prospero’s charms? The forgetting of language It seems that Shakespeare’s Prospero resents nothing so much as dissenting voices that sound a different kind of language than his own. When he rebukes and threatens Ariel, the phrase he uses focusses on Ariel’s insubordinate articulations which Prospero calls ‘murmuring’: “If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak / And peg thee in his knotty entrails till / Thou hast howled away twelve winters” (1.2.294-6). Ariel’s murmuring is to be punished by his howling, just as Caliban’s cursing is to be punished by his roaring: “If thou neglect’st, or dost unwillingly / What I command, I’ll rack thee with old cramps, / […] [and] make thee roar, / That beasts shall tremble at thy din.” (1.2.369-72). Thus trying to reduce his disobedient inferiors to inarticulate and beastly noise-makers, the magus enforces the great ideal of Renaissance elocution whose limits and margins - in mumbling, murmuring, babbling or other versions of disabled speech - Carla Mazzio has recently explored in her comprehensive study of The Inarticulate Renaissance. Here she traces not just the religious lines of rhetorical debate by showing how the “Protestant Reformation and the humanist revival of classical rhetoric in England had in common a vivid concern with bad pronunciation” (20), but also argues how notions of articulacy, clarity and proper voicing were frequently involved in establishing or defending cultural norms and ruling values. To speak badly or pronounce indistinctly could quickly lead to find oneself placed outside the realm of the human - as evidenced in Prospero’s speech acts to his subalterns. At the same time, the sheer noise and sounds of indistinct or otherwise unruly language were routinely railed against with relish by Tudor polemicists and language instructors such as Thomas Wilson. Yet Mazzio also notes the curious extent “to which even parodies of sonic excess manifested an investment in the very language Learning to charm: on the virtue of words and the forgetting of language 109 games so fiercely disavowed” (36). To utter any of the noisome words or verbal sounds beyond the limits of accepted speech would easily compromise the speaker. So silence may well be the safer option. It is against the background of this sort of language trouble that Prospero’s injunction at the beginning of the masque gains force: “No tongue, all eyes. Be silent! ” (4.1.59) On the metatheatrical level of The Tempest, which is so prominent through the play, the play-master is giving these instructions to an audience whom he commands to silence so as to make his own show work. This pertains to all the stage magicians, Prospero no less than Faustus, because the main production of their art is theatre, sheer spectacle and role play, and the main way of producing it is linguistic: by means of verbal fiat. Magic functions on the early modern stage as metatheatre because the art of players, too, works mainly by means of their words: on the bare stage, without elaborate props or scenery, all play scenes must be verbally created by means of signifying utterances - like Duncan’s “This castle hath a pleasant seat” (Macbeth 1.6.1) - just as the stage magicians would try to use their charms to change reality and conjure up whatever shape they please. This is the reason why language on the stage, in the terms of Thomas Greene, is always principally conjunctive, or at the least aspires to be so, because it principally constitutes the referents, such as Macbeth’s castle, which are verbally but rarely visually represented and made real. For this reason, too, we can understand the desperate, if ultimately ineffectual, attempts on Prospero’s part to control language and to censure counter voices. Dissenting utterances are disjunctive, hence disruptive of such verbal art, so that he would try to establish a coherent linguistic space, concentrating all sonic events under one command. That these attempts must fail, however, lies not just in the general making of the theatre, which is always multi-vocal, but also in the particular making of The Tempest where, as discussed earlier, so many voices, noises, sounds and idioms compete that a single master language can never quite succeed. In his article “Learning to curse: aspects of linguistic colonialism in the sixteenth century”, Stephen Greenblatt famously identified the “opacity” of Caliban’s world, marked by the mysterious meaning of the word “scamel” (575), a single verbal item that lies outside of Prospero’s as much as outside of our own lexicon: when Caliban promises to his new masters to fetch what he calls “[y]oung scamels from the rock” (2.2.169), 6 his reference therefore designates a world beyond 6 As all editors of the play text note, this particular word has provoked endless - and quite possibly pointless - discussion; Vaughan and Vaughan “imagine scamels as shellfish, perhaps like mussels” but concede that “the exact meaning remains a mystery” (1999, 217); David Lindley construes “the most obvious sense” to be “some kind of mollusc” and suggests “the most plausible emendation orthographically” to “sea-mels”, a “variant of sea-mew (a gull)”, supported also by Strachey’s account of the Sea-Venture (Lindley 155); Stephen Orgel conjectures that “Shakespeare may be T OBIAS D ÖRING 110 the range of Prospero’s or our linguistic repertoire and points us to another world of language just as, metatheatrically, to a different stage of acting. It thus seems as if “scamels” were something like a remnant of the so-called brutish gabbling which Caliban once uttered and then all but unlearned as Miranda first endowed his “purposes / With words that made them known” (1.2.358-9), a remnant of another meaning before entering the discourse of his master, a meaning which both is and is no longer part of Shakespeare’s play - just like his mother Sycorax and like Prospero’s charms, belonging to a border zone or margin between remembrance and forgetting, voice and silence, mimesis and muteness. In view of our central question, then, Caliban’s so-called “gabble” may bear further consideration and might indeed be usefully related to the philosophical accounts on language acquisition and children’s noises discussed by Heller-Roazen in Echolalias. With this title term already indicating a form of speech behavior or condition that privileges language sounds over sense, he explores in this study, among others, the great phonetic richness of young babies and their vocal sound production, what we call “babbling” and what in fact contains, he argues (on the basis of Roman Jakobson’s classic analysis), the entire repertoire of phonemes from all known human languages; so when growing up and beginning language acquisition, the babbling child must gradually give up this rich omnivocality and learn to speak by learning to forget these sounds: “It is as if the acquisition of language were possible only through an act of oblivion, a kind of linguistic infantile amnesia (or phonic amnesia, since what the infant seems to forget is not language but an apparently infinite capacity for undifferentiated articulation).” (11) Yet bits of babbling remain, Heller-Roazen continues, not as regular parts of a language system, but in odd verbal behaviour such as exclamations and onomatopoeic items: they mark “an excess in the phonology of an individual tongue, since they are made of specific sounds that by definition are not otherwise contained in the language. […] they seem, more exactly, included in a language to the very extent that they are excluded from it.” (17) With this analysis in mind, Caliban’s so-called gabbling just as the entire soundscape of The Tempest, with its constant howling, roaring, hissing, twangling and singing, may perhaps suggest this kind of undifferentiated, pre-semantic, omnivocal and omnipotent stage, before the forgetting of language, which Kristeva also tried to trace, as noted at the outset, in her search for the semiotic “that encompasses the body, the material referent, and lanadapting - or misunderstanding - a foreign word from the same body of travel literature that supplied him with Setebos” and construes its referent as “a crustacean, bird, or a fish” (151). This unending guesswork on semantics is precisely the point why the term has come to stand for some broad semiotic sphere of Calibanese, whose outlines we may barely trace. Learning to charm: on the virtue of words and the forgetting of language 111 guage itself” (16) and that, as she suggests in passing, may be manifest in magic: “in the history of signifying systems and notably that of the arts, religion, and rites, there emerge, in retrospect, fragmentary phenomena which have been kept in the background or rapidly integrated into more communal signifying systems but point to the very process of significance. Magic, shamanism, esoterism, the carnival, and “incomprehensible” poetry all underscore the limits of socially useful discourse and attest to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative structures” (ibid.). So perhaps this broad view may indeed suggest the specific sphere where the more potent magical charms come from: a semiotic sphere beyond referential or symbolic language and before learning, a sphere whence even Prospero might derive his island power. So, to come back to the initial question why do we never witness verbal acts of conjuring, I would now risk an answer by way of three tentative points. Firstly, we should note that only by virtue of their absence from the script can Prospero’s charms really be relinquished at the end; otherwise, had they been scripted and uttered, they could easily be reactivated, imitated and continued after him. Only because his charms throughout remain unvoiced, they are finally abandoned with the drowning of his books, sunk once for all. By contrast, when Faustus burns his books we still know how to conjure and what potent charms he used because their very words are scripted in the play text. The same problem is rather pertinent in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, for no matter how vehemently Scot wants to refute the work and power of magicians, his text in fact conveys so many details of their occult words and rites and signs and charms that this entire refutation turns into a veritable handbook for aspiring conjurers. Prospero’s silence in conjuring, then, is a safeguard. Secondly, his silence also is empowerment. The incantations, we now realize, gain in force by being vocally withheld, because the unvoiced charms of all the various acts increase their exclusivity and thus their power. Precisely by not being uttered, the dumb discourse of Prospero’s magic keeps their hermetic sound and wording outside anybody’s reach, opaque, offstage. The “virtue” of his magic words would thus be greater by retaining them in silence, encrypted in his famous books but not exposed to hearing, neither ours nor his subalterns’. Like Caliban’s mysterious “scamel”, they continue to confront us with an impenetrable world, a different sphere, beyond the reach of all familiar reference and theatrical mimesis Thirdly, the “virtue” of his magic words, we noted, seems to correspond to the “virtue” of the words by which his wife once vowed, or vouched, for his paternity. Perhaps we may now reinterpret this as yet another indication that Prospero’s status and great power curiously draw, if not actually rest, on T OBIAS D ÖRING 112 the absent presence of his female counterparts, his wife no less than Sycorax or indeed Medea. For at the one point of magic mimesis in the play, where we actually witness him speak secret incantations and call upon the helpers of “rough magic” (5.1.50), he famously ventriloquizes the well-known words of a classic witch, Ovid’s Medea and her appeal to Hecate and other spirits of the night, as if to signify that all these forceful charms have never really been his own. This very passage, Jonathan Bate notes (249), “constitutes Shakespeare’s most sustained Ovidian borrowing and identifies the arts of the mage with those of Medea”; at the same time, it raises the rather unsettling question whether there is, as Bate delicately puts it (251), “some soul of darkness” in Prospero’s “white magic”. A popular account of magic and recognizable setpiece in early modern drama and the rhetorics of witchcraft, Medea’s incantation also in fact appears as evidence for “the wonderfull power of Inchantments” in Cornelius Agrippa’s occult treatise where Ovid’s lines are quoted and transcribed (158) to illustrate the ways in which true magic language forces nature to reverse its course: “They say that the power of inchantments, and verses is so great, that it is believed they are able to subvert almost all nature, as saith Apuleius, that with a Magicall whispering, swift Rivers are turned back, the slow Sea is bound, the Winds are breathed out with one accord, the Sun is stopt, the Moon is clarified, the Stars are pulled out, the day is kept back, the night is prolonged” (157). Prospero’s reiteration of Medea’s verbal charms to effect such inversions, then, is meant to mark his own reversion and reversal in giving up such dubious arts. Yet perhaps this could as well suggest that he has derived his conjuring power from such witches like Medea in the first place; maybe all his studying of books at home in Milan did not get him too far in the occult arts, so maybe it was even Sycorax who taught him her Medean magic when he, like Ulysses, ventured onto her bewitched island. Since then, his profit is that he knows how to charm. To conclude: Shakespeare’s isle is full of choices and its soundscape resonates with many stories, some of them distinctly heard, others blurred or buzzing in our ears, like Faustus’ angels. What we gather from them is that learning to charm, like learning to curse, is quite a complex exercise and the result of complex histories. Little of this history is shown in The Tempest, but some of it suggested in the diegesis of the play. Following these traces, as I have ventured with this paper, may well be a wrong idea but may also lead us to some interesting alternative perspectives on the language issues that have so long been debated with this play. The language of magic, like theatrical language, we saw must be consubstantial and conjunctive because its “virtue” brings about what is verbally produced. So to end the show there must be a disjuncture of language, as is indeed performed by Prospero’s Learning to charm: on the virtue of words and the forgetting of language 113 epilogue when he displaces his former force to charm and spell to the audience. Performed in the presence of a king, who by virtue of his genealogy inherited his status from two powerful yet female predecessors, may give this gesture extra poignancy. At any rate, relinquishing his verbal power and returning to Milan, Prospero might here be entering his true language exile. For, in Heller-Roazen’s sense, it is the forgetting of language - in both senses of this phrase - by which I think the force of verbal charms is learned throughout as well as through The Tempest. T OBIAS D ÖRING 114 Works Cited Agrippa of Nettesheim, Henry Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy [De occulta philosophia libri tres]. Trans. J. F. [John French]. London: printed by R.W. for Gregory Moule, 1651 [1533]. Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons. The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Cox, John D. The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350—1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century”. Ed. Fred Chiapelli. First Images of America. Berkely: University of California Press, 1976. 561-580. Greene, Thomas M. Poetry, Signs, and Magic. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Echolalias. On the Forgetting of Language. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Hulme, Peter and William Sherman. Eds. The Tempest and Its Travels. London: Reaktion, 2000. King James. Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I. Ed. James Craigie. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1982. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984 [Paris 1974]. Lindley, David Ed. The Tempest. The Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. David Scott Kastan. New York: Norton, 2005. Mazzio, Carla. The Inarticulate Renaissance. Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2009. Orgel, Stephen. The Tempest. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Introd. Hugh Ross Williamson. London: Arundel Centaur Press, 1964 [1584]. Searle, John R.. Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Vaughan, Alden T., and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Eds. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: G.K. Hall, 1998. Yates, Frances. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller “A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard” Apart from the seasonal indications in the titles of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest is the only play by Shakespeare that refers to a natural phenomenon in its title. 1 And yet, as we know, the storm that so terrifies the mariners and the ship’s other occupants in the first scene of the play is, by the very first line of the second scene, said to be the possible result of “art” (1.2.1), a supposition that is soon confirmed. Conspicuously, the singular noun “art”, applied to Prospero’s magical abilities, appears ten times throughout the play and the tempest is said to be “performed” by Ariel (1.2.194). This paradigmatic instance of a natural phenomenon, the sea storm, turns out to be the result of human action, so that, in the world of romance, nature and history appear to strangely merge. 2 Indeed, the play is full of such interpenetrations. The violence of the elements is often described in terms of human warfare: the waves are “contentious” (2.1.119); Fernando is said to have “flung aside” the “enmity” of the waters (2.1.117); and Prospero says he has “called forth the mutinous winds” (5.1.42) and “Set roaring war” “’twixt the green sea and the azured vault” (5.1.43-44). Alonso is, therefore, perfectly justified in remarking, by the end of the play, that “These are not natural events” (5.1.227) and that “there is in this business more than nature / Was ever conduct of” (5.1.243-244). There is 1 This paper exists in the margins of my recently completed PhD dissertation, Texts Waiting for History: William Shakespeare rewritten by Heiner Müller. I provide the German original of all quotations from Müller and also from occasional longer quotations by other authors. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2 In his discussion of the introduction of the word “hurricane” in European discourse, Peter Hulme points to colonists’ difficulties in allegorising and thus taming in narrative the awesome destructive power of this novel phenomenon (cf. Hulme 94-101). As Hulme then proceeds to discuss Shakespeare’s The Tempest, he returns to the dialectics between nature and art in the play in order to argue that “The storm in the play is very clearly ‘tempest’ rather than ‘hurricane’ in the sense that it is interpretable through the master code of Providence. […] The storm that opens the play is only momentarily a natural catastrophe of the kind that [John] Taylor has eventually to designate via an alien discourse: the storm is part of a design and therefore not the disaster it initially appears” (Hulme 101-102). M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 116 even a sustained play on the several uses of the word “natural”: for Trinculo, Caliban is “a natural” (3.2.31), meaning he is a fool; for Prospero, he is rather “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (4.1.188- 189); for Prospero again, it is afterwards Antonio, his usurping brother, who, on the contrary, is said to have “Expelled remorse and nature” (5.1.76), thus being “Unnatural” (5.1.79). On the other hand, critics attuned to ecocritical preoccupations have pointed out that the play includes several references to human transformation of nature. Gabriel Egan discusses the surprisingly many instances in which characters or stage directions mention the gathering of wood, which he sees as proof that “Prospero’s main activity since his arrival on the island has been its deforestation” (Egan 155). 3 Like Egan, though much earlier, Jonathan Bate noted that “The land described in the masque [in act four] is husbanded, not in a state of nature. It is under Ceres, patroness of agriculture” (Bate 257). Bate further reads The Tempest as “Shakespeare’s last revision of [Ovid’s] Metamorphoses”, in that it is a “demonstration of the pervasiveness of change” (ibid. 245). Interestingly, in this junction between nature and history, the factor that is privileged is mutability, rather than fixity. In the history of the sciences an expression exists that, taken somewhat literally, describes this paradoxical situation. The expression, of course, is natural history. Having initially run a long and distinguished career throughout which it designated most of the research that now falls under the heading of natural sciences, it is currently most often reserved for describing a certain type of museum. The strangeness of the expression has not been lost on its practitioners, nor on later historians. 4 In Das Ende der Naturgeschichte [The End of Natural History], Wolf Lepenies studies the change in the cultural assessment of the sciences during the 18 th and the 19 th centuries and points to how practitioners of the natural sciences and encyclopaedists would criticise the expression for its inaccurateness. In the concept of natural history during the 18 th century, no historical development was implied and its unhistorical character was instead stressed, as a way to distinguish it from ‘proper’ human history (cf. Lepenies 30; 37). However, this insistence rather betrays 3 Peter Hulme has also convincingly argued that Caliban’s work for Prospero, represented by the gathering of wood and food, shows how Prospero, despite his much-vaunted magical powers, either cannot or will not satisfy the necessary minimum for survival: he “is dependent upon Caliban’s labour for his food supply and general material requirements” (Hulme 131). By recalling the context of colonial ventures, Hulme then connects Prospero’s magic with the natives’ historical perception of firearms as magical, and points to how, despite their ‘magic’, the Europeans proved incapable of feeding themselves and often depended upon natives for their survival (cf. ibid. 128). 4 A book from 1997, by Rhoda Rappaport, dealing with the history of geology between 1665 and 1750, is fittingly called When Geologists were Historians. Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 117 an anxiety as to the repercussions of the expression. The implication that nature itself might have a history, an implication suggested by fossils and by the beginnings of evolutionary theories, became unavoidable by the time of Charles Darwin. Darwin himself, borrowing a metaphor from Charles Lyell, said that he looked “at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept” (Darwin 229). Some years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, it would be Karl Marx’s turn, in the preface to the first edition of Das Kapital, to adopt a standpoint according to which “the development of the economic formation of society was viewed as a process of natural history” (Marx 92). By the 19 th century, however, according to Lepenies, natural history tropes were becoming a literary device, especially in the novel, rather than a respected scientific method (cf. Lepenies 122-130). By the following century, the concept of natural history, already distanced from its most common meaning, became a fascinating, though modestly developed, theme in the early work of both Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. In his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [The Origin of German Tragic Drama] (1928), Benjamin appropriated the concept of natural history not from Marx but from the German baroque poets and playwrights. By studying baroque analogies between history and the cycle of nature, Benjamin focused on the epochal fascination with ruins and on the way these were seen to unlock a specific ontology of history: Auf dem Antlitz der Natur steht ‘Geschichte’ in der Zeichenschrift der Vergängnis. Die allegorische Physiognomie der Natur-Geschichte, die auf der Bühne durch das Trauerspiel gestellt wird, ist wirklich gegenwärtig als Ruine. Mit ihr hat sinnlich die Geschichte in den Schauplatz sich verzogen. Und zwar prägt, so gestaltet, die Geschichte nicht als Prozeß eines ewigen Lebens, vielmehr als Vorgang unaufhaltsamen Verfalls sich aus (Benjamin 1991, 353). [The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. (Benjamin 2009, 177-178)] In the Baroque interest in ruins, Benjamin saw how historical and natural transience came to merge, but also that, in a dialectical manner, during this period ruins were being produced as artifacts in pictorial representations. Eternal transience is thus said to have become an ontological concept for the Baroque poets: “Natur schwebt ihnen vor als ewige Vergängnis, in der allein der saturnische Blick jener Generationen die Geschichte erkannte” (Benjamin 1991, 355) [“In nature [the baroque poets] saw eternal transience, and here alone did the saturnine vision of this generation recognise history” (Benjamin 2009, 179)]. This ontological concept had already been illustrated, earlier in M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 118 the book, by the image of a waterfall to which the religious man of the baroque and his world were felt to be driven (cf. ibid. 66). In his theses on the concept of history, from 1940, Benjamin was to use a similar image as he described the storm that carried the angel of history helplessly along with it, a storm that Benjamin, in yet another natural-historical metaphor, identified with historical progress. 5 Adorno, on the other hand, developed Benjamin’s theme first in a 1932 paper, “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte” [“The Idea of Natural History”], and also later, during the 1960s. Rather than positing an ontology of history, which he found and criticised in Heidegger’s concept of “historicity”, said to naturalise history, Adorno proposed a dialectical movement: Wenn die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Natur und Geschichte ernsthaft gestellt werden soll, bietet sie nur dann Aussicht auf Beantwortung, wenn es gelingt, das geschichtliche Sein in seiner äußersten geschichtlichen Bestimmtheit, da, wo es am geschichtlichsten ist, selber als ein naturhaftes Sein zu begreifen, oder wenn es gelänge, die Natur da, wo sie als Natur scheinbar am tiefsten in sich verharrt, zu begreifen als ein geschichtliches Sein. [...] Die Rückverwandlung der konkreten Geschichte in dialektische Natur ist die Aufgabe der ontologischen Umorientierung der Geschichtsphilosophie: die Idee der Naturgeschichte (Adorno 2003a, 354-55). [If the question of the relation of nature and history is to be seriously posed, then it only offers any chance of solution if it is possible to comprehend historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as a historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature. [...] The retransformation of concrete history into dialectical nature is the task of the ontological reorientation of the philosophy of history: the idea of natural-history. (Adorno 2006a, 260)] The point of this dialectic was to appropriate the concept of nature not as an unchanging, fixed state, but rather as state of transience: “Natur selber stellt 5 Benjamin’s image of the storm of progress, and other references in these theses, should be connected with the immediate context of a Europe invaded by the Nazi armies. The advance of these armies was, at the beginning, felt to be unstoppable and the German expression “Blitzkrieg”, describing as it did a strategy of constant motion, was also meant to convey this impression. Interestingly, even before the war, the apparently irresistible rise to power of Nazism in Germany had been described by Carl Jung in similar terms. In the essay “Wotan” (1936), Jung described the feeling of forward momentum of Nazism and the subjective powerlessness of spectators in insistent natural-historical terms. In its attempt to describe the awakening of Wotan, the ancient god of storm, the essay includes almost in every page references to dormant volcanoes resuming their activity, cyclones, hurricanes, storms, tempests, “a great gushing river”, “a rock crashing down the side of a hill”, “a torrent caught in gullies, creeks and marshes”, a dammed course of water which breaks through and overleaps its obstacle (Jung 12; 19; 20; 21; 23; 24; 27). In a later essay, “Der Kampf mit dem Schatten” [“The fight with the shadow”], Jung added a reference to “the irresistible force of an avalanche” (ibid. 4). Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 119 als vergängliche Natur, als Geschichte sich dar” (Adorno 2003a, 358) [“nature itself is seen as transitory nature, as history” (Adorno 2006a, 262)]. In a seminar from 1965, Adorno developed this perspective, by pointing to Hegel’s view that historical progress first appeared as an infernal mechanism or slaughterhouse, and by then adding that, at the point when history appeared most uninhibited, it took on the qualities of blind nature, instead of turning away from them. This argument then allowed Adorno to state that all history up to that moment had been natural history, that is, a history of violence (cf. Adorno 2006b, 117)]. 6 Adorno finally used this notion to criticise Hegel for supporting a view of history outside and beyond the subject. According to Adorno, in Negative Dialektik [Negative Dialectics]: “[Hegels] Weltgeist ist die Ideologie der Naturgeschichte” [“Hegel’s world spirit is the ideology of natural history”] (Adorno 2003b, 350). Frozen tempest This connection between an ever-changing nature and human history, which, at its most violent, is seen to be closer to the catastrophic manifestations of nature, was also an object of interest for Heiner Müller, an East German playwright and famous adapter of Shakespeare, especially from the 1960s to the 1990s. 7 Müller adapted three plays by Shakespeare: Macbeth, which became Macbeth, nach Shakespeare [Macbeth, after Shakespeare] (1972); Hamlet, which was used as the basis for Die Hamletmaschine [Hamletmachine] (1977); and Titus Andronicus, which was rewritten into Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome ein Shakespearekommentar [Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome a Shakespeare Commentary] (1985). Müller also translated As You Like It and Hamlet, and wrote a number of poems based on Shakespearean motifs. Archival research at the Heiner Müller Archiv in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin also shows that he may have attempted to write adaptations of King Lear and the Tempest. The second of these fragmentary projects is of particular interest in connection with the 6 One can hear in this distinction an echo of Marx’s distinction between pre-history, meaning pre-revolutionary history, and history proper, i.e. the history of emancipation. 7 This interest is directly connected with Müller’s reception of Benjamin. Müller first read Benjamin perhaps as early as 1946 (cf. Müller 2008b, 108) and Benjamin’s work caused a lasting impression which produced echoes in Müller’s texts up to and including the 1990s. Müller often referred to Benjamin in interviews and there are even audio recordings of Müller publicly reading texts by Benjamin. Closer to my point, it is known that Müller re-imagined Benjamin’s angel of history and storm of progress more than once. At least three texts exist which are declared rewritings of Benjamin’s 9 th thesis: “Der glücklose Engel” [“The hapless angel”]; “Ich bin der Engel der Verzweiflung” [“I am the angel of despair”]; and “Glückloser Engel 2” [“Hapless angel 2”] (cf. Müller 1998, 53; 212; 236). M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 120 topic of this paper. This project, called Frozen Tempest by the author, 8 appears to have been initiated rather late in Müller’s life, possibly around the late 1980s and early 1990s and probably in connection with Müller’s 1988 address to the East German Shakespeare Society, in which he refers to and quotes from The Tempest (cf. Müller 2005a, 337). It seems to have been eventually dropped in favour of finishing Germania 3, Müller’s last, posthumously published play (cf. HMA 5374). The hypothesis that these fragments may simply be preparatory material for the 1988 address and not the beginnings of a planned adaptation might be entertained, but the existence of two typescripts with attempts at translating the first page of The Tempest and the consistent naming of the project throughout suggest otherwise. 9 Finally, the date for the beginning of the project or at least for its inception may be pushed as far back as 1984, when Müller wrote “Bildbeschreibung” [“Description of a picture”], a prose text which refers explicitly to The Tempest as one of its pretexts and which concludes with the following lines: “ICH der gefrorene Sturm” (Müller 1999, 119) [“I the frozen tempest”]. This early a reference to the title of the project suggests that the idea may have already been gaining shape in Müller’s mind. One of these fragments was initially published as the last of the poems in the edition of Müller’s complete works and has, therefore, been dated by Frank Hörnigk, the editor, as having been written during the 1990s: 8 The title “Frozen Tempest” appears almost always originally in English in Müller’s manuscripts. In these, Müller often switched from German to English and back for convenience. In my translations of Müller’s fragments from this project, the words originally in English disappear among the translated terms and no longer stand out as foreign terms. I therefore recommend that the reader browse the original quotations for an appreciation of the linguistic mix. When quoting from the fragments, I either refer to the few published versions or identify them as HMA + number of document, according to the numbering of the Heiner Müller Archiv (HMA) at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In the HMA, the following files contain fragments partly or wholly related to this project: HMA 5369, 5370, 5371, 5372, 5374, 5375, 5377, 5378, 5379, 5381 (which mistakenly includes 5380), 5382 and 9180. HMA 5379 and 9180 are attempts at translating the first page of The Tempest. HMA 5377, from 1993, was found in Müller’s copy of Frank Kermode’s 1954 edition of The Tempest for The Arden Shakespeare Second Series. This fragment has been published by Wolfgang Storch as “Arbeit an Der Sturm nach Shakespeare” [“Work on The Tempest, after Shakespeare”] (Storch 78). 9 Müller’s references to The Tempest outside of these fragments are surprisingly scarce. He uses Miranda’s “O brave new world” and a few adjacent lines as epigraphs to two plays, Waldstück [Forest Play] (cf. Müller 2001a, 87) and Wolokolamsker Chaussee IV: Kentauren [Volokolamsk Highway IV: Centaurs] (cf. Müller 2002, 229), and there is an important reference in the prose text “Bildbeschreibung” [“Description of a picture”], which I discuss in the main text. References in interviews are almost nonexistent. Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 121 Geh Ariel bring den Sturm zum Schweigen und wirf die Betäubten an den Strand Ich brauch sie lebend, damit ich sie töten kann Mir Vater warum (Müller 1998, 328) [Go Ariel bring the storm / to silence and / throw them stunned to the beach / I need them / alive, so I can kill them / / For me father / why] The terse economy of the text marks it immediately as Müller’s. The few lines that compose it confound the reader’s expectations one after the other: the tempest is brought - to silence; the stunned occupiers of the ship are needed alive - so they can be killed. Prospero’s vengeful logic is then met by a cryptic fragment of what could have been a separate stanza. The text was later identified, not as a poem, but as a dramatic fragment, and a new, illuminating transcription was proposed by Wolfgang Storch: PROSPERO Geh, Ariel, bring den Sturm zum Schweigen und Wirf die Betäubten an den Strand. Ich brauch sie Lebend, damit ich sie töten kann. MIRANDA Vater Warum (Storch back cover) [PROSPERO / Go, Ariel, bring the storm to silence and / Throw them stunned to the beach. I need them / Alive, so I can kill them. / MIRANDA Father / Why 10 ] This newly transcribed fragment and a series of other fragments, both of translations and of departures from the material attest to a dramatic project, rather than to a series of poems. In this project, Müller briefly came back to the figure of Hamlet, whom he had already dealt with in Die Hamletmaschine [Hamletmachine], but this time in connection with the issues from The Tempest. In the 1977 play, Hamlet had already appeared on a despoiled shore, his back turned to the ruins of Europe, in a tableau that vaguely recalls The Tempest: “Ich stand an der Küste und redete mit der Brandung BLABLA, im Rücken die Ruinen von Europa” (Müller 2001a, 545) [I stood at the shore and talked with the surf BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me (Müller 1984, 53)]. However, in this play, Hamlet does not escape the double binds of his com- 10 The initial mistake most probably arose from the sequence of letters “Mir”, which in German corresponds to the dative, singular form of the first-person personal pronoun, that is, “for me” or “to me”. However, a full stop was eventually detected immediately after the word, so that it could then be read as an abbreviation of Miranda. M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 122 promised situation as an intellectual and eventually crawls back into the ghost’s armour that seals his fate. In the sparse fragments that compose the Frozen Tempest project, Müller seems to have been interested in rewriting The Tempest by focusing on the theme of Prospero’s revenge, which, as is common in Shakespeare’s so-called romances, never materialises and is instead replaced by reconciliation. The Tempest has been newly put in the context of contemporary revenge plays in the recently added section to the revised Arden edition of the play. In it, Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan refer to John Marston’s The Malcontent and to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster as examples of Jacobean plays about usurped rulers whose restoration is effected in a tragicomic mode, no revenge taking place (cf. Vaughan and Vaughan 142-147). As the editors of this edition show, Prospero also seems set from the beginning on some diabolical revenge; in a remarkable management of suspense and of the spectators’ expectations, his real intention, forgiveness, only begins to be revealed as late as 5.1. Müller’s approach to The Tempest from the point of view of revenge may have been connected with the fact that Müller had already rewritten Shakespeare’s only two revenge tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet. 11 Prospero’s reversal of expectations may, therefore, have appealed to Müller as a creative undoing of Hamlet’s seemingly unavoidable forward movement towards catastrophic revenge. Most of Müller’s fragments concentrate on Prospero, who is represented as a colonial master and as an undead Hamlet: Grünbein Shakesp. Rede Hamlet tempest the sea and the mirror [...] Shakesp. Lektüre Hamlet surviving Sturm d. Liebe die so schwer zu lernen ist tempest rehabilitation frozen tempest: exrevolutionary now (colonial) capitalist [...] Die Insel wo Prospero der untote Hamlet seine Neger quält [...] (HMA 5370). [Grünbein Shakesp.[eare] speech / Hamlet tempest / the sea and the mirror […] Shakesp.[eare] reading Hamlet / surviving / storm / t.[he] love that is so hard to learn / tempest rehabilitation / frozen tempest: exrevolutionary / now (colonial) 11 Müller also rewrote Macbeth, which has elements in common with revenge tragedies, and seems to have envisaged rewriting Julius Caesar, another of Shakespeare’s plays with connections to the genre. However, because of a series of unforeseeable events, Müller eventually chose to rewrite Titus Andronicus instead of Julius Caesar (cf. Müller 2005b, 254). Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 123 capitalist […] The island where Prospero / the undead Hamlet / tortures his Negros] Besides the nod towards W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, itself a rewriting and a commentary of The Tempest, the three references to Hamlet prove particularly conspicuous. 12 From these rather cryptic notes, one may decipher a representation of Prospero as Shakespeare’s revision of or return to Hamlet, who, having survived, had gone from revolutionary to colonial capitalist. The reference to a love that is so hard to learn may be made to connect to the following fragment: “froz. tempest vor Germ? / Prosp. in exile / (Anfang similar to Philoktet) / revenge or grace / alternative / Auschwitz” (HMA 5374) [“froz.[en] tempest before Germ[ania 3]? / Prosp.[ero] in exile / (Beginning similar to Philoktet) / revenge or grace / alternative / Auschwitz”]. 13 In it, the exiled Prospero seems to ponder whether to exercise revenge or grace. By referring to Auschwitz, Müller was probably repeating a frequent idea of his, according to which only grace, or mercy (“Gnade”), could be presented as an answer or way out of the selective, eventually genocidal logic which, for him, had culminated in the extermination camps. 14 This perspective seems to be confirmed by Müller’s turn to The Tempest near the end of his 1988 speech to the East German Shakespeare Society, “Shakespeare eine Differenz” [“Shakespeare a Difference”]. In this fascinating text, Müller gathers a number of references around the theme of how to read Shakespeare after a century of historical catastrophes. He quotes 12 As usual, Müller was well aware of his predecessors in the practice of rewriting specific plays by Shakespeare. He knew the work of Aimé Césaire and even translated the play Une Saison au Congo. He may, therefore, have been acquainted with Césaire’s Une Tempête. Although Césaire goes unmentioned in these fragments, his anti-colonialist preoccupations are shared by Müller. Auden’s poem, The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, on the other hand, is explicitly referred to in this fragment and may have either spurred or strengthened what seems to have been Müller’s identification between Prospero and Hamlet. Indeed, according to Arthur Kirsch, in a preparatory list at the beginning of the draft of The Sea and the Mirror, Auden “associated Prospero with Hamlet, a character whom he found unsympathetic” (Kirsch xxi). 13 In this fragment, Müller refers to two of his plays: Germania 3, which would be his last play; and Philoktet, a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, which also begins with a man abandoned and stranded on an island. 14 “Da gibt es als Antwort auf das Prinzip Auschwitz nur die Gnade: die Liebe einer Prostituierten. Das hat ein Element von Kitsch und Christentum, aber es gibt bisher auf Auschwitz keine andere Antwort als die Gnade” (Müller 2008a, 677) [“The only answer to the Auschwitz principle is grace/ mercy: the love of a prostitute. This has an element of kitsch and of Christianity, but until today there is no other answer to Auschwitz other than grace/ mercy”]. M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 124 Miranda’s first line in Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror - “MY DEAR ONE IS MINE AS MIRRORS ARE LONELY” (Müller 2005a, 335) - and adds to it Hölderlin’s fragment about Shakespeare - “WILDHARREND / IN DER FURCHTBAREN RÜSTUNG / JAHRTAUSENDE” (ibidem) [“FIERCELY ENDURING / IN THE FEARFUL ARMOUR / MILLENIUMS” (Müller 2001b, 120)] 15 - in order to create a narrative about an all-mirroring- Shakespeare trapped in the wilderness of a catastrophic history. After quoting Horatio’s speech about the death of Julius Caesar, Müller then offers the following comment: “Geschichte im Naturzusammenhang” (Müller 2005a, 336) [“History in the context of nature” (Müller 2001b, 120]. He adds to this the theme of a “war of landscapes”, which work at the disappearance of human beings, after having been ravaged by humans. The catastrophes of history, therefore, gain a more than metaphorical projection into nature - although the cosmic response to Caesar’s death may be a trope, climate change is only too real. Referring to this recurring historical sameness, that is, the perpetuation of violence that so often becomes reflected in Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, Müller says that one must work at differentiating oneself from this cycle: Unsre Aufgabe, oder der Rest wird Statistik sein und eine Sache der Computer, ist die Arbeit an der Differenz. Hamlet, der Versager, hat sie nicht geleistet, dies sein Verbrechen. Prospero ist der untote Hamlet: immerhin zerbricht er seinen Stab, Replik auf Calibans, des neuen Shakespearelesers, aktuellen Vorwurf an alle bisherige Kultur: YOU TAUGHT ME LANGUAGE AND MY PROFIT ON’T IS I KNOW HOW TO CURSE (Müller 2005a, 337) Our task - or the rest will be statistics and a matter of computers - is the work at this difference. Hamlet, the failure, didn’t accomplish it, this is his crime. Prospero is the undead Hamlet: after all, he smashes his staff, a reply to Caliban’s, the new Shakespeare reader’s topical rebuke to all hitherto existing culture: YOU TAUGHT ME LANGUAGE AND MY PROFIT ON’T IS I KNOW HOW TO CURSE (Müller 2001b, 121) Here, Müller revises Hamlet again via the figure of Prospero. By breaking his staff, which represents his magical power to do violence, Prospero puts an end to the spiral of violence. In a rare reference to The Tempest in an interview from 1987, Müller insisted precisely on Prospero’s forgiveness of his enemies and on the renunciation of the power to both do violence and enforce harmony (cf. Müller 2008a, 14). 15 I here use, and on occasion silently alter, Carl Weber’s translation of the address in Müller 2001b 119-121. Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 125 Combining this notion with the fragments, it is almost impossible not to read the act of freezing the tempest as an allusion to Walter Benjamin’s thesis from “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” [“On the Concept of History”] according to which the angel of history is helplessly and violently carried forward by the storm of progress (cf. Benjamin 1999, 249). In his earlier rewritings of Shakespeare, Müller had focused on the tragedies and had developed a Benjaminian view of the progress of history as a sequence of catastrophes. Müller’s reference to Auschwitz in connection with the Frozen Tempest project seems to develop this mode of thinking, by possibly alluding to Adorno and Horkheimer’s idea that enlightenment and progress are inextricably connected with horror (cf. Adorno and Horkheimer 223), or, as they put it at the beginning of the Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment]: “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (ibid. 3). 16 Benjamin’s other representations of the unstoppable onslaught of history in the form of a natural catastrophe (a waterfall, a storm) seem, then, to have been picked up by Müller in the Frozen Tempest project. By turning to one of Shakespeare’s romance plays, The Tempest, Müller seems to have become interested in the issue of forgiveness and of renunciation of power over others. Imagining Prospero as a capitalist exploiting the island’s natives, Müller sketched the rudiments of an abdication of colonial power which, had the adaptation been finished, might have revised the vengeful exchanges and bitter endings of the previous rewritings. Prospero’s solution, to renounce magic and oppression, may have been envisaged as the means of stopping this storm of progress and bringing it to silence, effectively freezing it. Of course, an analysis of these brief fragments is speculative at best, but, bearing in mind their late date and the consistent references to The Tempest in “Shakespeare eine Differenz” [“Shakespeare a Difference”], it becomes possible to argue that this idea constitutes a fairly discernible theme common to Müller’s uses of The Tempest. This interpretation might be reinforced by pointing to the theme of father / daughter relations, which not only appears in other fragments related to this project, but that also begins to show in some of Müller’s later poems. In 1992, his daughter Anna had been born and, fighting with a cancer that ultimately killed him, Müller wrote a number of autobiographical poems which, among other things, dealt with this new infant presence in his life and with his own perceived change in relation to the world around him. Many of these poems have a different, more elegiac tone and are less punctuated by Müller’s cruel aphorisms, rather pondering 16 Müller himself made the connection clearly enough in an interview: “Das Grundthema der Linie Dostojewski-Kafka-Faulkner ist die Selektion: Auschwitz als das letzte Stadium der Aufklärung” (Müller 2008a, 684) [“The underlying theme of the line going from Dostoyevsky to Kafka and Faulkner is selection: Auschwitz as the last stadium of the Enlightenment”]. M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 126 on the cruelty of a world that is being seen for the first time through a child’s eyes. This theme of a “brave new world” also appears in one of the fragments (cf. Storch 78) and may thus be connected with a possible turn that might have been effected in the Frozen Tempest project, a turn not entirely unlike that which was practiced by Shakespeare himself in the plays now known as romances. If this project had been completed, the theme of Hamlet’s revenge, now Prospero’s, might have been transfigured in a romance-like way, even though such a change might appear unlikely to us given Müller’s main body of work, obsessed as it is by the perpetuation of violence. And yet, who would have imagined the author of such bleak plays as Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida to have also written The Tempest? “Storm still” 17 At a recent congress held in Porto, Chris Morash proposed looking at the current financial, economic and social crisis as a storm in slow motion, that is, as the apparently unstoppable movement of a massive and abstract force. 18 Morash, of course, was making use of Benjamin’s image of the storm of progress. Coming back to Müller, we may begin to see that Morash’s suggestion could very well provide a possible reason for Müller’s surprising insistence, during the abovementioned period, on “natural history”, understood in the Benjaminian and Adornian sense of human history seen as everchanging, catastrophic nature, in which the focus is placed on mutability rather than on stability. If the proposed dating for most of the Frozen Tempest fragments as having been written sometime between the late 1980s and the early 1990s holds, it becomes almost irresistible to imagine that they probably bear some relation to the fall of the Berlin Wall and to the introduction of capitalism in what 17 King Lear, Folio version, 3.1, opening stage direction. Incidentally, this stage direction has become the title of a recent novel, or dramatic script, by Peter Handke, Immer noch Sturm (2010). Given Handke’s antipodal position to Müller in German letters, it is worth noting that Handke’s novel/ play also makes use of the storm trope as a way to describe the history of Slovenian struggles against foreign rule from the 1930s to the post-war period. These struggles are particularised by their effects on the narrator’s family, which is invoked in a long ghostly scene that constitutes the novel/ play. Handke overtly rewrites Lear’s entry holding the dead Cordelia in his arms (cf. Handke 132) and, near the end, Gregor, the narrator’s uncle, declares: “Es herrscht weiterhin Sturm. Andauernder Sturm. Immer noch Sturm” [“A storm continues to rule. A lasting storm. Storm still”] (ibid. 161). 18 The congress “Dashed All To Pieces” was held at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto, Portugal, in the first days of December 2011. It was dedicated to representations of natural catastrophes and meant to celebrate the 400 years of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 127 would soon cease to be the GDR. It is usually pointed out that, throughout this period, Müller did not produce a single play, rather devoting himself to poems, interviews, directing and generally being a public figure. His creative answer to the end of the GDR and the fall of the Wall had been a mammoth production of Hamlet and Die Hamletmaschine, called Hamlet/ Maschine, which premièred on March 24, 1990, at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin, six days after the elections that gave the majority to the conservative CDU/ DA/ DSU coalition. The production had been prepared during the months preceding and postdating the fall of the Wall and several of the actors involved in it spoke publicly at demonstrations during this period. Closer to the object of this essay was the scenery by Erich Wonder and what it suggested. Besides the use of trompe l’œil effects, including a famous view from within Ophelia’s grave, for the first three hours of the play the stage was partially separated from the audience by a transparent curtain that suggested an ice cube, while the back of the stage was inundated with water, as if the ice were melting. This was a way of suggesting not only the melting of the Cold War but also the climatic catastrophes that, according to Wonder and Müller, would define the coming century (cf. Suschke 140-141). The enormous length of the production, which, with three intervals, lasted up to eight hours, was also meant to alter the spectators’ perception of time and to produce an experience which, by encompassing large spans of time, went beyond the political here and now (cf. Moninger 239-240). Indeed, this viewpoint somewhat shunned the everyday events happening outside and aimed at suggesting a form of time which even went beyond that eagle’s eye perspective on history, in which, as Hegel would say, nation states were the protagonists. As Katharina Keim has rightly pointed out, at stake was no longer human history, but natural history (cf. Keim 243). On the other hand, as Maik Hamburger has noted, the theme of the passage of time was also politically motivated: “Time has run away from Hamlet, as it has from a whole social era. Life punishes those who come too late, said Gorbachev. We all come too late, said this Hamlet/ Maschine” (Hortmann 429). In an interview from 1994, Müller gave yet another excuse for no longer writing any plays: in the new reunified Germany, there was nothing to write about, no past, no future, only an everlasting present and, Müller seemed to suggest, no interesting political figures with dramatic potential. He then added the following: “Das einzige, was an Geschichtlichem derzeit passiert, ist der Kapitalfluß. Und der ist unsichtbar” (Müller 2008b, 580) [“The only thing that is happening historically for now is the flow of capital. And this is invisible”]. According to Müller, capital flow could not be dramatised; it could not be represented by characters on a stage, because it was an unseen, abstract force. And yet, I would argue that Müller did try to grasp this new history as capital flow in play form - precisely in the figuration of a natural M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 128 catastrophe in the Frozen Tempest fragments. What might have been critically unclear in 1994 may now, in March 2012, be much clearer, also due to our own historical experience. The catastrophic effects of a capitalist crisis appear to us, in an almost phenomenological manner, as arbitrary, sudden, unexpected and inevitable. Its formidable driving force and lack of interest in its victims likens it to a natural phenomenon, such as a waterfall, to use Benjamin’s image, or to a natural disaster, such as a storm at sea or an earthquake. I would argue that, if Müller did connect the Frozen Tempest fragments with this notion of history as capital flow, he may have been trying to adapt his ongoing historical-philosophical reflections to a changing reality, while, once again, coming back to Shakespeare in order to transform those insights into dramatic material. If this reading has any plausibility to it, it might provide a new testimony of Müller’s mutability in these matters and of the seemingly endless uses to which Shakespeare continued to be put, even beyond his original use value in the GDR. 129 Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophische Frühschriften - Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003a. . Negative Dialektik. 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Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1999. . The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. Londo, New York: Verso, 2009. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Ed. Gillian Beer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. Londo, New York: Routledge, 2006. Handke, Peter. Immer noch Sturm. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Hortmann, Wilhelm. Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century. With a Section on Shakespeare on Stage in the German Democratic Republic by Maik Hamburger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797. Londo, New York: Routledge, 1992. Jung, Carl Gustav. Essays on Contemporary Events - 1936-1946. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Londo, New York: Routledge, 2002. Keim, Katharina. Theatralität in den späten Dramen Heiner Müllers. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1998. Kirsch, Arthur. “Introduction”. The Sea and the Mirror. A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Eds. W. H. Auden and Arthur Kirsch. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. xi-xlii. Lepenies, Wolf. Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Münche, Wien: Hanser, 1976. Marx, Karl. Capital. Volume 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Londo, New York: Penguin/ New Left Review, 1990. Moninger, Markus. Shakespeare inszeniert: Das westdeutsche Regietheater und die Theatertradition des “dritten deutschen Klassikers”. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996. Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 130 Müller, Heiner. Hamletmachine and other texts for the stage. Ed. and trans. Carl Weber. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984. . Werke 1 - Die Gedichte. Ed. Frank Hörnigk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. . Werke 2 - Die Prosa. Ed. Frank Hörnigk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. . Werke 4 - Die Stücke 2. Ed. Frank Hörnigk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001a. . A Heiner Müller Reader. Ed. & trans. Carl Weber. Baltimore/ London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001b. . Werke 5 - Die Stücke 3. Ed. Frank Hörnigk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. . Werke 8 - Die Schriften. Ed. Frank Hörnigk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005a. . Werke 9 - Eine Autobiographie. Ed. Frank Hörnigk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005b. . Werke 11 - Gespräche 2. Ed. Frank Hörnigk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008a. . Werke 12 - Gespräche 3. Ed. Frank Hörnigk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008b. Rappaport, Rhoda. When Geologists Were Historians (1665-1750). New York: Cornell UP, 1997. Shakespeare, William King Lear. Ed. R. A. Foakes. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Thomson Learning, 2002. . The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Storch, Wolfgang (ed.). Paul Virilio. Drucksache N. F. 1. Düsseldorf: Richter, 1999. Suschke, Stephan. Müller macht Theater: Zehn Inszenierungen und ein Epilog. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2003. D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, cannibalism, and Caliban Shakespeare’s Caliban has received an impressive amount of scholarly attention for a character who speaks relatively few lines, though admittedly the lines he does speak are quite memorable. In Shakespeare’s Caliban Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan document his “eventful odyssey from Shakespeare’s time to the present,” showing “how and, wherever possibly, why each age has appropriated and reshaped him to suit its needs and assumptions” (ix). Harold Bloom, who sees Caliban as “the grotesque and pathetic slave” of Prospero (xv), edited a collection devoted to the character and rather regretfully states that “we are now in the age of Caliban, rather than the Time of Ariel or the Era of Prospero” (1). And in Constellation Caliban Nadia Lie and Theo D’haen explore “Caliban as a cultural icon conveniently allowing for the most varied kinds of research and reflection” (i). These broad studies of Caliban, which examine the uses to which he has been put in many times and places, are undeniably valuable scholarship; however, much can also be gained from a narrower examination of Caliban’s uses and adaptations in a single place and a short span of time, such as in Cuba during the few decades between Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s landmark 1971 essay, Caliban and Raquel Carrió and Flora Lauten’s 1997 play, Otra Tempestad. In Constellation Caliban Lie and D’haen note that Retamar’s Caliban started a whole new discipline, “Calibanology”(i). Retamar and others have attempted to redeem and reclaim Caliban, and have called for an examination of literature and culture from Caliban’s perspective. They have pointed out that the cannibalism associated with Caliban is a fiction and, at the same time, they have embraced the idea of the cannibal, choosing to devour their source text and the colonial and imperial powers with which it is associated. Indeed, Caliban has proven such a compelling character that Retamar himself has been devoured by him. Though he tried to write a “Farewell to Caliban,” he found that Caliban would not let him go, and in the wake of Caliban’s emergence from the background of Shakespeare’s play, other, even more marginal, suppressed, or external characters have begun to surface. As these new characters have taken their seats at the table, a complicated and cacophonous dialogue between the cannibals and the cannibalized has begun, which sometimes makes it difficult to determine who is the cannibal and who is the meal. However, in Cuban texts that use Caliban and Shakespeare’s The D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY 132 Tempest as their source or inspiration, an interesting evolution occurs. In Cuba, Caliban has transformed from the “savage and deformed slave” of Shakespeare’s play, to a valiant symbol of Latin America, to a symbol of the language that can finally allow everyone at the table to join in the conversation. It might seem surprising that Cuban writers would seat themselves at a table at which Shakespeare is the main dish. Cuba does differ from postcolonial countries such as India, which were British colonies for a long period and which saw Shakespeare used as a tool for instilling British colonial values. 1 Cuba was only a British colony for eleven months between 1762 and 1763, and Shakespeare never seems to have been used as an instrument of colonial propaganda. However, Cuba has endured a long history of both colonization and foreign influence, and since the Cuban revolution in 1959 its independence from foreign influence, and particularly its ability to resist the influence of its powerful near neighbor, the United States, have been points of national pride. It might seem surprising, then, to see Cuban scholars and poets using Shakespearean characters as symbols, or to see Cuban theatrical companies writing and performing Cuban adaptations of Shakespeare. While Shakespeare is not American, he is foreign, and he could easily be perceived as a dubious foreign influence. But if independence is a point of national pride, so is the high level of education and cultural literacy enjoyed in postrevolutionary Cuba, and Shakespeare is seen by many Cubans as an example of the sort of cultural knowledge they prize. His position in Cuba is thus primarily positive, if somewhat ambivalent. 2 The first course: Retamar’s cannibalization of and by Shakespeare Roberto Fernandez Retamar exemplifies this ambivalence. A poet, essayist, and fervent supporter of the Cuban revolution, Retamar has written dozens of books since the early fifties, and he continues to be a leading cultural figure in Cuba, serving as the president of the prestigious Casa de Las Americas, a center for the study and preservation of art and culture. In his 1970 essay, Caliban, Retamar embraced the figure of Caliban. Though he was not the first Caribbean or Latin American writer to adapt or appropriate The Tempest, he distinguishes himself from the others, critiquing those whom he feels were too influenced by European thought. He praises the Barbadian author, George Lamming, as the first Latin American or Caribbean writer to assume the identity of Caliban, but then he mourns the fact that Lamming „no lograr romper el círculo que trazara Mannoni” [did not succeed in breaking the 1 For more on this see Jyostna Singh. 2 I have made this argument elsewhere. See Donna Woodford-Gormley(2008). Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, cannibalism, and Caliban 133 circle traced by Mannoni] (29). This criticism is sharper following as it does a paragraph condemning Octave Mannoni, the French psychoanalyst whose Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, first published in 1950, was, Retamar notes, the first work to identify Caliban as a colonial, but which he sees as a flawed, paternalistic interpretation that portrays Caliban as suffering from a “Prospero complex” and wanting to be colonized and dependent. In stating that Lamming was unable to escape Mannoni’s influence, Retamar is both accusing Lamming of a similar paternalistic theory and, ironically, placing him in a dependent relationship to Mannoni. 3 Likewise Retamar acknowledges his indebtedness to the Uruguayan writer, José Enrique Rodó, and his 1900 manifesto, Ariel, but criticizes Rodó both for choosing Ariel, rather than Caliban, as the symbol of Latin America and for being overly influenced by the French writer Ernest Renan. However, Retamar himself is guilty of a similar crime, as he himself admits when he recalls that his symbol is also “una elaboración extraña” (36) [a foreign elaboration]. Though he is critical of other Latin American and Caribbean authors for being influenced by European writers, he acknowledges that it is necessary to speak in the language of the colonizer, in the language that Prospero taught to Caliban, and he also seems to place Shakespeare, who he says is possibly “el más extraordinario escritor de ficción que haya existido” (15) [the most extraordinary writer of fiction that ever existed], in a separate category from foreign influences such as Renan or Mannoni. Jonathan Goldberg notes, Retamar’s symbol, “like Rodó’s, comes from elsewhere - indeed, from the same place, Shakespeare, an author whom Fernández Retamar adores […] precisely because he somehow knows ‘us’ better than we do ourselves” (9-10). Goldberg further claims that Retamar “misreads” Shakespeare’s text as revolutionary (10), but he is not the only Cuban to interpret Shakespeare in this manner. Cuban scholar Beatriz Maggi has interpreted Shakespeare’s texts as revolutionary, and in 1964 the Consejo Nacional de Cultura (National Counsel of Culture) produced a pamphlet, Shakespeare, Un Contemporáneo Nuestro, which suggested that Shakespeare was only nominally bourgeois and that he would have been sympathetic 3 Retamar’s criticism of Mannoni is actually much sharper in his original version of Caliban, published in 1971 in the Casa de Las Americas. The version included in Todo Caliban, published in 2000, to which I have referred, takes into account Lamming’s later works and his favorable comments on the Cuban revolution, and so offers him more praise than criticism. Nevertheless, even in this later version of his essay, Retamar still states “Aunque algún pasaje de su enérgico libro […] podría hacer creer que no logra romper el círculo que trazara Mannoni” (29) [Although some passages of his forceful novel […] could make one believe that he didn’t succeed in breaking the circle traced by Mannoni] The implication is still that Lamming couldn’t quite free himself from Mannoni’s influence. D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY 134 with the Cuban revolution had he been alive at that time. 4 Retamar’s text thus illustrates the ambivalent view of Shakespeare in Cuba. He is both a foreign influence, and a great writer who somehow understood and portrayed a people and a land he never encountered. Retamar begins “Caliban” by responding to a well-intentioned, leftist, European journalist, who asked him if there was such a thing as a Latin American culture. In Retamar’s mind he might just as well have asked “do you people exist? ” since to question the existence of a Latin American culture is to question the existence of Latin Americans as human beings. Retamar goes on to discuss the “mestiza” culture of Latin America, which blends native, African, and European influences, and the “mestiza” people who speak in European languages, but speak from the point of view of those colonized by the Europeans. He enters into an argument with ”these colonizers,” but admits that he, like Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, must do so in a language learned from Prospero, and he invokes Caliban’s famous cry: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language” (1.2.364-66). Retamar then gives a brief etymology of Caliban, noting that the name is an anagram for Cannibal, and that that word came from the word “Caribe,” or Carib, the name of a native tribe who, according to Retamar, “were the most valiant, the most warlike inhabitants” of what is now Latin America “before the arrival of the Europeans, against whom they made a heroic resistance” (15-16). The Caribs became associated with cannibalism because Columbus claimed to have heard that they ate human flesh. In his diary entry for the 15 th of February, 1493, Columbus noted: We have not encountered monsters here, nor news of them, except in one island (of Caribs) […] that is populated by a people that are held by all the islanders to be very ferocious, and that eat human flesh. (Retamar 17) 5 Notable in this diary entry are the fact that this instance of cannibalism is actually only “heard second hand by Columbus”, and that it seems to be offered, apologetically, to make up for the lack of monsters. Of course, Retamar points out, Columbus also wrote in his diary about how he was told that “far from there were men with one eye, and others with the heads of dogs” (Sunday, 4 of Nov. 1492; Retamar 16), and yet while nobody today believes that the native Caribbeans were Cyclops or dog-headed people, the belief that they were cannibals persists, and continues to provide moral justification for a brutal conquest. Since the Caribbeans were so fierce and bestial, 4 See, for example, Beatriz Maggi and Consejo Nacional de Cultura. I have also discussed the Cuban view of Shakespeare as a revolutionary in “In Fair Havana, Where We Lay Our Scene: Romeo and Juliet in Cuba.” 5 All translations from Spanish to English are mine. Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, cannibalism, and Caliban 135 goes the argument, their violent conquest, enslavement, and extermination was warranted. Though Retamar asserts that the cannibals from which Caliban draws his name were fictional, a convenient ideological tool in the project of colonization, he nevertheless embraces the symbol of the cannibal, and specifically of Shakespeare’s Caliban. Responding to Rodó’s Ariel, in which Rodó identifies Caliban as a symbol of the corrupt United States and Ariel as a symbol of Latin American, Retamar asserts that Caliban is actually a more appropriate symbol of Latin America than the passive, docile Ariel: Nuestro símbolo no es pues Ariel, como pensó Rodó, sino Caliban. […] Próspero invadió las islas, mató a nuestros ancestros, esclavizó a Caliban y le enseño su idioma para entenderse con él: ¿Qué otra cosa puede hacer Caliban sino utilizer ese mismo idioma para maldecir, para desear que caiga sobre élla „roja plaga”? No conozco otra metáfora más acertada de nuestra situación cultural, de nuestra realidad. ¿ qué es nuestra historia, qué es nuestra cultura, sino la historia, sino la cultura de Caliban? (31-32). [Our symbol is not Ariel, as Rodó thought, but Caliban […] . Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else could Caliban do but use the same language to curse, to hope that the red plague falls on him? I know of no other metaphor closer to our cultural situation, to our reality […]. What is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban? ] Of course, in taking the part of the cannibal, Caliban, Retamar in a sense cannibalizes Shakespeare. He takes the play of Shakespeare and uses that play as a starting point. But from that point he diverges, looking at the play, and the world, from the point of view of Caliban, rather than of Prospero. Ironically, however, if Retamar was cannibalizing Shakespeare, Caliban has in turn cannibalized Retamar. In 1993, having seen his 1971 essay translated into many different languages, Retamar wrote an afterword to a Japanese translation of his essay. He called it “Farewell to Caliban,” 6 and he later explained that he wrote it not because he thought there was no more to say about the subject, but to signal his desire to turn, and return, to other topics. Caliban, he said, had become his Prospero, his master (87), and he could not always be certain which ideas were his, and which Caliban’s, what he, Retamar, had written, and what were the words of Caliban. However, his efforts to free Caliban, and so to free himself, were unsuccessful. The character would not let him go. In 1999 he wrote “Caliban before the Anthropophagy” and noted that a writer doesn’t always choose his themes - sometimes the themes choose him, and in this case he had been chosen by a 6 Or „Adiós a Calibán.” This and all of Retamar’s Caliban related essays are collected in Todo Caliban. D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY 136 Shakespearean character who continued to make demands of Retamar. Playing with Cannibals can be a dangerous business. The second course: Teatro Buendía’s Shakespeare buffet If Retamar has cannibalized and been cannibalized by Shakespeare and Caliban, the food chain does not stop there. Later Cuban writers have cannibalized both Shakespeare and Retamar. Raquel Carrió and Flora Lauten’s Otra Tempestad devours not just The Tempest but also many other Shakespeare plays, and blends them together and flavors them with Afro-Cuban ritual and other aspects of Cuban literature and culture, including Retamar’s Caliban, which they list among their influences. Lauten, the director and founder of Teatro Buendía, and Carrió, its dramaturge, are not new to adapting classic texts in new and experimental ways. Carrió has written on the topic in her Dramaturgia Cubana Contemporánea, and their repertoire includes adaptations of ancient Greek plays, such as The Bacchae, and classic Cuban Plays. Nevertheless, in “Otra Tempestad: de la investigación de Fuentes a la escritura escénica” Carrió admits that Otra Tempestad might at first appear to be “un cruzamiento forzoso de cosas que poco o nada tendrían que ver” (3) (a forced cross of things that have little or nothing to do with each other). Wanting, however, to explore Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the cultural encounter between old and new worlds, they embarked on a year and a half long process in which teams of actors worked to imagine and interpret different scenes, and Carrió wrote and rewrote those scenes, as the story developed into “una ‘tempestad’ más real, más nuestra” (4) [a ‘tempest’ more real, more ours”. In addition to combining Caliban, Miranda, and Prospero with characters from other Shakespearean works, Carrió and Lauten add some of the Afro- Cuban pantheon of orishas into the cast of their play. The orishas have their origins in the gods brought over by the African slaves transported to the new world. Once in the new world, these gods were combined with Catholic saints to whom they bore some resemblance. The result was the orishas, dual personality deities worshiped in the syncretistic Afro-Cuban religion, Santeria or Regla de Ocha. In Otra Tempestad these deities are the daughters of Sycorax, and they have additional personalities projected onto them by the old world, Shakespearean characters, so that they themselves become the embodiment of the syncretistic, mestiza culture created by the merging of cultures. Otra Tempestad, created and performed by Carrió, Lauten, and the actors of their theatrical company, Teatro Buendía, is a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. At the beginning of the play Prospero, Miranda, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and Shylock set sail in search of a new land on Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, cannibalism, and Caliban 137 which they can found a Utopia. They shipwreck on the coast of Cuba and discover that the island is inhabited by Sycorax, Caliban, and the daughters of Sycorax, who are also orishas. The play depicts the encounters between the old world Shakespearean characters, and the new world figures onto whom they project the desires, fears, and regrets that they tried to leave in the old world. Hamlet believes the orisha Oshún, river goddess, to be Ophelia; Macbeth is seduced by the orisha Oya, the queen of the dead, who he believes to be Lady Macbeth. Prospero sees this new land as the perfect place to establish his Utopia, but he is so absorbed in his Utopian dreams that he fails to see that his daughter Miranda does not want the marriage he has arranged with Othello and instead loves Caliban. Miranda, who contrary to her father’s wishes wants to marry Caliban, dies at the end. Prospero dies having realized that he has destroyed his new world utopia, and Caliban becomes king. The plot does contain a shipwreck and some of the same characters, but otherwise it is quite different from the plot of Shakespeare’s play. It is a Cuban tempest, which pays tribute to Shakespeare, but retells the story from the other side of the world, and from the point of view of different characters. One critic, having seen the play performed at The Globe in London, noted that “Shakespeare’s final play has been hijacked as thoroughly as Prospero’s dukedom” (Palmer 2), but in her program notes Carrió explains that they are not hijacking the play, nor is Teatro Buendía, like Retamar, borrowing the language of the colonizer but placing it in the mouth of the colonized. Carrió writes: Pero en los finales del siglo la fábula se vuelve más compleja. No se trata ya de negar el lenguaje del conquistador, sino de investigar en qué medida del cruce de etnias y culturas resulta una cultura otra, un tercer lenguaje que ya no es del dominador ni del vencido sino un product cuya naturaleza tiene un character sincrético […]. ¿Qué hacer, desde este lado del mundo, que no reitere las imagines ya hechas de un dramaturgo que ha sido miles de veces llevado a la escena? ¿Cómo lograr un lenguaje que respete la belleza y profundidad de los referentes pero no resulte una simple traslación de los temas y las formas de representación? (59-60) [at the end of the century the story has become more complex. It isn’t a matter of trying to negate the language of the conqueror but of investigating in what way the mixture of ethnicities and cultures results in another culture, a third language that is neither that of the conqueror nor that of the conquered but a product whose nature has a syncretic character […]. What can we do, from this side of the world, that wouldn’t simply repeat the images already created by a playwright whose works have been performed thousands of times? How can we achieve a language that respects the beauty and profundity of the original but that does not result in a simple translation of the themes and forms of representation? ] D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY 138 Carrió and Lauten’s play can, like Retamar’s essays, be seen as a cannibalization of Shakespeare’s work, but they also go beyond what Retamar did. They are not simply speaking back to the conquerer; they are creating a new language in which to discuss Shakespeare, Caliban, Sycorax, and the encounter between two very different worlds. The multiple levels of translation (linguistic, cultural, temporal) mean that there are relatively few times when language from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, even in Spanish translation, is used, but as Peter Hulme has noted, this makes those Shakespearean citations especially powerful when they do appear, and the fact that the borrowed words are often put into the mouths of different characters also allows for new interpretations of these familiar words (157). It is, for instance, Miranda, and not Caliban, who wants to ”people the island with Calibans” (41), making the comment not a threat of rape but a declaration of passion. Ariel still sings the same song from The Tempest: A cinco brazos de aquí Yace el cuerpo de tu padre. Corales son sus huesos Perlas son sus ojos tristes Y todo el mar se ha transformada En algo Hermosa y extraño. (31-2) Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. (1.2.397-402) But in Otra Tempestad he is singing it not to Ferdinand but to Hamlet. Rather than serving to soothe Ferdinand’s grief over his supposedly dead father, as the song does in The Tempest, in Otra Tempestad it stirs Hamlet’s grief and helps to drive him towards madness. Indeed, the one, minor change to the song, the addition of the word “triste” or “sad” to the description of the dead father’s eyes, adds to the son’s grief and guilt. Additionally, while Hulme is correct in noting that there are far fewer citations from The Tempest than in Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, there are many citations from other Shakespeare plays, and again, the placing of these borrowed words in different mouths and the combination of seemingly different plots adds rich, new meaning to Otra Tempestad. If they have cannibalized Shakespeare, they have done it with the end result of creating a Shakespeare buffet. Flora Lauten has noted, We thought all the most important themes of Shakespeare should be on that boat […]. Macbeth is there as a symbol of treason and ambition, Shylock as avarice, and Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, cannibalism, and Caliban 139 so forth. All of them are eager to go to this new world and leave their pasts behind, but everything they left keeps coming again and again, full circle. These things are all aspects of the human soul and you cannot escape them. (Palmer 1) The play suggests that the Shakespearean immigrants to the new world bring their own fates or destinies with them. They find in the new world exactly what they had hoped to leave behind in the old, and the cultural and psychological baggage that they bring with them often prevents them from truly seeing the new world, from truly speaking its language or hearing what it might have to say to them. As Greenblatt has famously noted, that communication has been lost. In “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century”, he notes: It is precisely to validate such high-sounding principles - “Eloquence brought men from barbarism to civility” or “all men are descended from one man and one woman” - that the Indian languages are peeled away and discarded like rubbish by so many of the early [European] writers. But as we are now beginning fully to understand, reality for each society is constructed to a significant degree out of the specific qualities of its language and symbols. Discard the particular words and you have discarded the particular men. And so most of the people of the New World will never speak to us. That communication, with all that we might have learned, is lost to us forever. (576) The old world Shakespearean characters of Otra Tempestad likewise miss out on their opportunity for communication with the new world inhabitants, since they are unable to truly see them without projecting their own desires and regrets onto them. This miscommunication illustrates the need for the third language of Otra Tempestad. Retamar’s reclaiming of Caliban’s lost voice was an important first step; however, Carrió notes, it is now necessary to move beyond that. It is no longer acceptable to give speech only to Prospero, but it is also not satisfactory to listen only to Caliban’s angry cursing. Either solution, Carrió suggests, would involve a loss. Instead she suggests that a third language must be created to allow communication between the two cultures. Otra Tempestad is the attempt of Carrió and Lauten to create this language. Carrió notes that “en el cruce de referentes, sonoridades e imagines europeos y africanos no hay ‘vencedores’ ni ‘vencidos’ sino el intercambio de ritos y acciones que caracterizan el sincretismo cultural propio de América Latina y el Caribe” (18) [in the mix of African and European references, dreams, and images, there are neither ‘conquerors’ nor ‘conquered,’ but rather the interchange of rituals and acts that characterize the cultural syncretism unique to Latin America and the Caribbean]. The translation of the play into Spanish and into another culture combined with the free adaptation and the incorporation of other Shakespeare plays, of Cuban literature, and of Afro-Cuban ritual has left some play goers D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY 140 puzzled, particularly when the play was performed in England. Carole Woddis, though generally pleased by the performance, acknowledged her own confusion after seeing the play at The Globe Theatre in 1998 when she wrote, “one may not always understand what is going on, but this hundredminute version is wonderfully physical and imaginative” (1998). Reviewer Ian Shuttleworth also saw the play performed at London’s Globe, but had a far less favorable response. He asserted that: Without the programme’s scene-by-scene synopsis, I would have had little or no idea what was going on from moment to moment; even with it, there is no indication of why what is happening, is happening. There is, of course, no reason to treat Shakespeare with ossifying reverence - but this particular gallimaufery seems to have been put together simply for its own sake. It is constantly eye-catching […] but to no apparent end. There may be a parabolic subtext commenting upon the state of their native Cuba […] but if so it lurks, along with any palpable significance of any kind, full fathom five below the surface. (1998) But though these critics may not always have been able to discern it, the play is full of significance, and the confusion of non-Cuban audiences does not negate Carrió’s idea of a third language. It indeed illustrates the need for that language since the languages of conquered and conqueror do not allow for cross-cultural communication. What Carrió and Lauten have borrowed and imported from Shakespeare as well as what they have changed reveal the complexities of cross cultural communication and of cannibalizing another culture or text. There are some things that can be translated and consumed, but there are some things that prove indigestible for the cannibal. The third course: varieties of literary cannibalism Raquel Carrió, in her essay on the process of creating the play, ”Otra Tempestad: de la investigación de Fuentes a la escritura escénica” notes that there are two different types of theatre: Una es representacional y se corresponde con la noción de “teatro” que conocemos en la tradición occidental. Desde esta tradición […] el actor “hace” - representa - al personaje. Sin embargo en la otra tradición no es así […]. En los rituals el propósito no es representacional (no se representa para otros) sino participativo, iniciático […] Se trata de un dialogo del actante con la divinidad, no con los espectadores. (4) [One is representational and corresponds to the notion of “theatre” that we know in the Western tradition. According to this tradition […] the actor “acts” - represents - the character. However in the other tradition it isn’t like that […] in the rituals the process is not representational (one doesn’t represent for others) but participative, initiatory […] it is about the actor having a dialogue with the divine, not with the audience.] Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, cannibalism, and Caliban 141 This latter school of acting requires the actor to both allow himself or herself to be consumed by a role and at the same time to take the role into oneself as one might consume a meal. It is, in other words, similar to cannibalism, but a sort of mutual cannibalism that blurs the line between the cannibal and the cannibalized. According to Paul Yachnin in “Eating Montaigne,” Shakespeare himself engaged in a similar type of cannibalism when he consumed Montaigne’s essays so thoroughly that they became his own and appeared, almost word for word, in The Tempest. As Yachnin notes “appropriating, owning, and making a profit from the words of another are thus strange but close kin to eating those works and becoming one with the other” (159). Taking another’s words into oneself, or allowing a character to possess one during a play is not so different from the act of cannibalism. Indeed, the two schools of acting that Carrió describes could be likened to two different perceptions of cannibalism. The cannibalism that Columbus described in his diaries, and which Retamar both denies as a fact and embraces as a metaphor, sees the cannibal as a ruthless aggressor who consumes his victim. But the cannibalism described by both Yachnin and Carrió involves being in dialogue. It involves both consuming and being consumed. This, however, is what many of the characters of Otra Tempestad fail to understand. The Shakespearean characters who sail from the old world to the new do not realize that they are becoming actors and cannibals in the ritualistic tradition described by Carrió. They expect that they can control who they are or how they act in the New World; however, they find repeatedly that they cannot leave behind the people that they were, and because they merely project their own desires, fears, and ambitions onto the new world divinities, they fail to truly enter into a dialogue either with the divine or with the new world characters. Otra Tempestad may be a “cannibalization” of Shakespeare, but it also depicts Shakespearean, old world characters attempting to cannibalize the new world, and often biting off more than they can chew. Frequently the old world Shakespearean characters of Otra Tempestad attempt, unsuccessfully, to cannibalize the new world without being changed by it. They think they can remain in control of their own identities and of the new world characters they encounter. They do not realize that they can neither easily leave behind their old world identities nor can they truly communicate with the new world inhabitants if they merely project their own assumptions onto the people they encounter. When Hamlet, for instance, first appears at the beginning of Otra Tempestad, he appears to have put on an antic disposition. He is dressed as a “bufón” or jester and appears to be a sort of comic master of ceremonies: “¡Pasen, señores, pasen! ¡Por primera vez, los cómicos de Elsinor representando […]! ”(21) [Enter, gentlemen, enter. For the first time, the comedians of Elsinor, representing […]! ]. His speech in this first scene is D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY 142 characterized by a strained jocularity and punctuated by bursts of song and laughter. He echoes the song of the gravediggers in Hamlet, who speak the few comic lines in a generally tragic play: “¡Cuando yo era joven, y amaba y amaba […] muy dulce […] todo me […] parecía! ” (21) [“In youth when I did love, did love, / Methought it was very sweet” (Shakespeare 2008, 5.1.57-8)]. Even when he speaks lines that belong to Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play, he recalls his comic conversation with the Gravediggers: “Esta calavera […] ¡hum! […] tenía lengua. Y en otro tiempo, solía cantar” (ibid.) [“That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once” (Shakespeare 2008, 5.1.70)]. His behavior is slapstick and exaggerated, and he seems to be desperately trying to leave tragedy behind in the old world and to be a jester or comedian in the new world. By the fourth scene of the play, however, he is in the new world, and his tragic nature seems to have caught up with him. Rather than echoing the speech of the comic gravediggers, his lines, though not an exact translation, are reminiscent of the lines spoken by his father’s ghost. “¡Mi alma vaga en una explanada del Castillo condenada a andar errante! ” (31) [My soul wanders on the terrace of the castle, condemned to roam]. He then encounters three different orishas. The first is Ellegguá, a trickster god who Prospero has already mistaken for Ariel. Ellegguá/ Ariel sings a song to Hamlet, stirring his grief over his father, and tells him a patakin, or a traditional story about the orishas in Cuba. The story bears some resemblance to the mousetrap play in Hamlet, and at first it serves to remind Hamlet of his father’s death, but then Ellegguá/ Ariel mentions lovers and Hamlet, reminded of Ophelia, sees her “¡Muerta no, dormida […]! ! ¡[…] flotando como un ángel sobre el agua! ” (32-3) [Not dead, asleep! Floating like an angel over the water! ]. The orisha Oshún appears. She is the combination of the Catholic saint and patron saint of Cuba, Caridad de Cobre, and the Yoruban goddess of rivers, beauty, and love. She is the Afro-Cuban equivalent of the Greek Aphrodite. Onto all of these layers of personalities and symbolism, however, Hamlet projects another layer of meaning. He sees her as Ophelia. He is at first delighted to see her alive, but he becomes frustrated when he cannot get her to stop singing her mad songs. They become entangled in a conversation in which most of her lines are from Ophelia’s mad songs and most of his lines are from Hamlet 3.1. She asks how she should know her true love, and he tells her to get herself to a nunnery. She sings about her love’s hat of shells and his sandals, and he tells her not to be a mother of sinners. She says that the owl was a baker’s daughter and he asks if she is fair. At this point, however, she takes on both sides of the conversation, alternatively embodying Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet becomes upset and tries to end this conversation, but then Oya, the orisha of the graveyards, Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, cannibalism, and Caliban 143 appears as his mother, and Hamlet is first driven insane and then driven to vengeance. Oshún/ Ofelia: ¡Soy doncellita! (Lo Incorpora.) ¿Eres honesta? ¡Soy doncellita¡ Eres Hermosa? (Con ira) ¡Soy Doncellita! Hamlet: ¡Basta! Oshún: Yo te amaba, Ofelia Oyá/ Madre: ¡Yo no te amaba! Hamlet: ¡Madre! (Con la espada, como el Rey.) ¡Gertrudis, por Dios, veta allá, vete allá […] ! ¡Ese muchacho está loco¡ Prospero: ¡Loco! Voces de la Isla: ¡Loco! ¡Loco! ¡Loco! ¡Loco! Hamlet: (Enloquecido por las voces, tapándose los oidos.) ¡Pero de astucia! Oyá/ Madre: […] ¡Venganza! ¡Venganza! Hamlet: (Con la espada) ¡Venganza! (33-4) [Oshún/ Ophelia: I am a maid! (She embodies him.) Are you honest? I am a maid! Are you fair? (angrily) I am a maid! / Hamlet: Enough! / Oshún: I loved you, Ophelia! / Oyá/ Madre: I didn’t love you! / Hamlet: Mother! (With the sword, as the king.) Gertrude, for God’s sake, get away from there, get away from there! That boy is crazy! / Prospero: Crazy! / Voices of the Island: Crazy! Crazy! Crazy! Crazy! / Hamlet: (crazed by the voices, covering his ears) But with cunning! / Oyá/ Mother: […] Vengeance! Vengeance! / Hamlet: (with the sword) Vengeance! ] Though Hamlet begins the play thinking that he can cannibalize the island, he becomes consumed by it and consumed by the past he attempted to leave behind. Though he sails to the new world as a comedian, he cannot escape the tragedy he brings with him. He cannot withstand the influence of the orishas, but neither can he see them for what they are. He projects the issues he has tried to escape onto the inhabitants of the Island and finds in the new world exactly what he left behind. Macbeth is similarly unable to escape his Shakespearean/ old world fate. He begins the play shouting “¡fidelidad al rey! ” (23) [fidelity to the King], but once he is in the new world his ambition overtakes him and in an ironic appropriation of the idealistic Gonzalo’s lines in The Tempest he starts to imagine himself as king of the Island: “¡Si yo fuera rey de esta plantación! ” (29) [If I were king of this plantation]. But unlike Gonzolo he is not imagining a utopia (that role will be performed by Prospero). He is imagining a kingdom in which he has glory and power. He conjures the spirits of the Island and they begin to chant his name in answer to his questions about who will conquer more lands for the kingdom and gain more slaves for the King. Later in the play two of the orishas, Echu Elegguá, who is the messenger of the orishas and a guarder of pathways, and Oyá, who is the goddess of graveyards, appear to Macbeth. Echu Elegguá wears the mask of death and recites many of the lines of the weird sisters in Macbeth, and Oyá transforms into Lady Macbeth. Together Echu and Oyá/ Lady Macbeth spur Macbeth on to D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY 144 acts of murder and treason. Sometimes Oyá recites Lady Macbeth’s lines from Macbeth, and sometimes Macbeth himself recites these lines, illustrating that the desire for blood and power really comes from within him. Oyá is a convenient hook for his projection of Lady Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth was a convenient excuse for his ambition and bloody acts in the old world of his own play. But even voyaging to the new world without Lady Macbeth or the weird sisters does not free him from his destiny, since he brings them with him and projects them onto the new world orishas. Though he thinks he can cannibalize the island, using it to create a kingdom he can rule, he is consumed by the orishas. In both plays Macbeth’s death is inevitable. Unlike Hamlet and Macbeth, Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban do not end up experiencing the same destiny they encountered in their Shakespearean text. Their endings in Otra Tempestad are quite different from those in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. While Prospero ends Shakespeare’s play by abjuring his magic only after having recovered his kingdom, inflicted vengeance on his brother, and ensured that his daughter will marry Ferdinand and be the next Queen of Milan, the Prospero in Otra Tempestad abjures his magic as he dies, having just seen that his single-minded focus on establishing a utopia in this new world paradise has led to the death of his daughter and of his ideals. He dies vowing that he will not see the island soaked in blood. Whereas Shakespeare’s Miranda is, at the end of The Tempest, married to Ferdinand and prepared to set sail for the old world where she will be queen, the Miranda in Otra Tempestad dies in the forest after fleeing from the marriage her father had arranged for her and Othello, preferring to “people the island with Calibans” (41). And Caliban, who at the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is acknowledged as Prospero’s “thing of darkness” (5.1.275) and whose ultimate fate is uncertain, is, at the end if Otra Tempestad, crowned king of the island. But while these characters do not seem stuck in their Shakespearean destinies like Hamlet and Macbeth, they still engage in a sort of cannibalism. Carrió and Lauten’s Prospero, for instance, leaves the old world where “nuestras ciudades son estrechas, per también son las mentes de su gente” (22) [“our cities are straight and narrow, but so are the minds of their people”] to a land that he hopes will be a “paraíso” or paradise (23). He confesses to Ariel/ Ellegguá that he came to the new world with the idealistic goal of creating a Utopia: “Te confesaré un secreto, amigo mío: ¡no he venido a conquistar, sino a fundar un Mundo Nuevo de donde nazcan hombres libres capaces de realizar mi Utopia! ” (37) [I’ll confess a secret to you, my friend. I didn’t come here to conquer, but to found a New World where men are born free, capable of realizing my Utopia! ”]. But even seemingly benevolent cannibals can be dangerous, particularly if they are unaware of the reflexive nature of cannibalism. The ‘friend’ Prospero is speaking to refers to him as ‘master’ and does Prospero’s bidding as though he is a slave. And Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, cannibalism, and Caliban 145 though Ariel/ Ellegguá tells Prospero early on that Caliban will be king after Sycorax’s death, Prospero seems incapable of absorbing this piece of information that is contrary to his vision of the new world. He is determined that Miranda will be queen, but that she will not marry Caliban. And while he is happy to teach Caliban his language before he has seen him with Miranda, after seeing the couple together he calls Caliban a Cannibal and threatens to destroy the island and curse his daughter if she marries him. Miranda first comes to the island willing to obey her father and marry Othello, but once on the island she falls in love with Caliban and believes the promises of the orisha, Oshún: “Paracerá que has muerto. Te dormirás en dulces suenos […] Tu cuerpo sera nave, océano, viento, pero cuando despiertes, el alma del amor estará en ti” (41). [It will appear that you have died. You will sleep in sweet dreams […] your body will be, ship, ocean, wind, but when you awake, the soul of love will be in you]. She does not fully understand the ambiguous prophecies of the orisha and it is this naïve acceptance of a new world she doesn’t understand that leads to her death. These characters show how cannibalism can be dangerous when the cannibal doesn’t understand that it will involve a dialogue, both consuming and being consumed. It is dangerous for Prospero and Miranda since they die in the new world, and it is dangerous for the new world since even the love of Miranda and the desire of Prospero to establish a utopia can lead to the land being soaked in blood. Caliban’s story, however, reveals something different. Dessert: the transformation of Caliban At the end of the published text of Otra Tempestad, Carrió and Lauten list the texts consulted in creating this adaptation. They list, of course, Shakespeare’s Complete Works, but they also list several Cuban texts, including Retamar’s “Calibán.” By incorporating both Shakespeare and Retamar into Otra Tempestad Carrió and Lauten complicate the portrayal of cannibalism and of Caliban. Is their Caliban the monster so often mentioned in The Tempest? Is he the child-like Caliban who Prospero and Miranda teach to read? Is he Retamar’s triumphant, powerful Caliban? Teatro Buendía’s Caliban is all of these. He is first introduced as the son that Sycorax gave birth to because she violated a commandment and conceived a child with the god of fire, Changó. Ariel/ Ellegguá tells Prospero that when Sycorax dies, Caliban will be king, but Prospero, already fantasizing about his Utopia and about making Miranda queen, seems incapable of understanding this. We later see Prospero in a paternal role, teaching a child-like Caliban to speak and write the words “Agua” [water] and “Isla” [Island] (38). In spite of what Ariel/ Ellegguá has told him, he sees Caliban as an innocent and powerless native or as a noble savage. Miranda in Otra Tempestad finds Caliban beauti- D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY 146 ful and wants to “people the island with Calibans” (41) and once Prospero discovers them together, he suddenly sees Caliban as a monster and a “Canibal” [Cannibal]. Like his sisters, the orishas, Caliban provides a hook for the projections of the old world inhabitants. They see in him what they want to see. The projections, however, are of a different nature. While the old world immigrants see in the orishas aspects of the old world they tried to leave behind, Caliban, whether he is seen as a god, a monster, or a child, is always seen as a native of the new world. In the world of Otra Tempestad, Caliban is unique. He is the only Shakespearean character who is neither an immigrant from the old world nor a new world orisha with a Shakespearean character projected onto him. He comes from Shakespeare’s play, but not from Shakespeare’s world. Unlike Prospero, Miranda, Hamlet, Shylock, Macbeth, and Othello, Caliban does not sail from the Old World to Cuba. And unlike Ellegguá, Oshún, and Oyá, he is not an Afro-Cuban orisha. There is no Caliban in the pantheon of Santeria. 7 He is a polyvalent sign, being both a native of Shakespeare’s text and a native of Cuba. Retamar has previously claimed Caliban as a symbol of the new world and of Latin America in particular, but in Otra Tempestad he becomes something more. He becomes a symbol of the third language that Carrió referred to in her program notes on the play, “a third language that is neither that of the conqueror nor that of the conquered but a product whose nature has a syncretic character” (59). This is clear in the final scenes of Otra Tempestad. In the penultimate scene the coronation and death of Macbeth are merged with Yoruban ritual dances. Masked figures, including the orishas, crown Macbeth with a mask and then actors wearing branches advance and kill him. In the final scene, “Caliban Rex,” all of the masked figures remove their masks and Caliban appears crowned with an intricate headdress that includes all of the masks. These masks are linked to the Afro-Cuban ritual that has just occurred, but some of them have also been worn by Shakespearean characters and by the orishas when they were embodying Shakespearean projections. Ophelia/ Oshún has worn the flower mask. Oya/ Lady Macbeth has worn the mask of death. Prospero wore a mask when he told Ariel “todos esconden bajo el disfraz alguna passion o algún crimen” (28) [Everyone hides some passion or crime behind a disguise]. In this final scene, Caliban, the king, takes on the masks of the old world and the new and becomes the embodiment of this multi-layered, syncretistic culture that is neither the conquered nor the conqueror, but a compilation of the two. Caliban is not the only cannibal in Otra Tempestad, but he is the most successful one since he is the one who is willing to be changed by the process, to both consume and be consumed. 7 Sycorax could perhaps be placed in this category as well, but in Shakespeare’s play she is a mere reference, not a fully realized character like Caliban. Devouring Shakespeare: Cuba, cannibalism, and Caliban 147 But of course, Caliban can only be this sort of cannibal because Carrió and Lauten have created him by cannibalizing both Retamar and Shakespeare, and in doing so they may have created a solution to the apparent contradiction of Retamar rejecting foreign influence while embracing Shakespeare. Through this cannibalization, Shakespeare’s works have travelled to a country that Shakespeare never set foot in, and Shakespeare has been welcomed and embraced there. Retamar may have been correct when he saw in Shakespeare a sympathy for the revolution or for the mestizo culture of Cuba. While Shakespeare might not have spoken or written in Spanish, there is something in his characters that does speak to Cubans today. These characters do not, however, speak in contemporary Cuba exactly as they would have in early modern England, which may account for the critical resistance to Otra Tempestad in London. They have been cannibalized, and they have been changed in the process. When Shakespeare’s works and characters are cannibalized in this way, they bring much that is valued and embraced by the Cubans, but one should not expect them to be treated with “ossifying reverence” (Shuttleworth, s.a.) or to remain unchanged. As the works are reinterpreted by Cuban artists, and as the actors, working in the tradition of ritual, become possessed by these characters and enter into a sort of dialogue with Shakespeare, transformation will occur. Some things cannot be left behind. Hamlet will remain a tragic figure, agonizing over his relationship with his mother and Ophelia. Macbeth will continue to embody the archetype of ruthless ambition. But some transformations will occur. On this side of the world, Caliban is not seen as a monster. In Cuba, even a benevolent Prospero with Utopian ideals may be seen as dangerous if he refuses to understand and enter into a dialogue with the culture he is consuming and being consumed by. Shakespeare’s text, adapted, appropriated, or ‘hijacked’ will not remain the same, but if the dialogue is allowed to proceed, this communication might not be lost. It might result in a “sea-change / Into something rich and strange” (1.2.401-02). D ONNA W OODFORD -G ORMLEY 148 Works Cited Bloom, Harold. Caliban. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1992. Carrió, Raquel and Lauten, Flora. Otra Tempestad. Havana: Ediciones Alarcos, 2000. Carrió, Raquel. Dramaturgia Cubana Contemporánea: Estudios Críticos. Ciudad de la Habana: Editorial Pueblo Y Educación, 1988. . “Otra Tempestead: de la investigación de fuentes a la escritura escénica”. Tablas 3-4 (1997): 3-6. Consejo Nacional de Cultura. Shakespeare, Un contemporáneo Nuestro. La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1964. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century”. First Images of America. Vol. 2. Ed. Fredi Chiappelli. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976. 561-580. Goldberg, Jonathan. Tempest in the Caribbean. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Hulme, Peter. “Otra Tempestad at The Globe”. The Tempest and Its Travels. Eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. 157-158. Lie, Nadia, and Theo D’haen. Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. Maggi, Beatriz. “Abajo los Montesco! Abajo los Capuleto! ” Panfleto Y Literatura. Ciudad de La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982. 80-93. Mannoni, Octave. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990. Palmer, Judith. “Theatre: A Sea-change into something rich and strange”. The Independent. London, England: . Independent Print Ltd., 1998. 1-2. <http: / / www.highbeam.com/ doc/ 1P2-4914701.html> (last accessed on 16 June 2012) Retamar, Roberto Fernández. Todo Caliban. Havana: Fondo Cultural del ALBA, 2006. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine E. Maus. 2nd. New York: Norton, 2008. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Singh, Jyostna. “The Postcolonial/ Postmodern Shakespeare”. Shakespeare: World Views. Eds. Heather Kerr, Robin Eaden and Madge Mitton. Newark, DE and London: University of Delaware Press, 1996. 29-43. Shuttleworth, Ian. Review: Otra Tempestad. <http: / / www.cix.co.uk/ ~shutters / reviews/ 98048.htm> (last accessed January 15, 2012). Vaughan, Alden T, and Virginia M. Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1991. Woddis, Carole. “Otra Tempestad, Shakespeare’s Globe, London”. The Herald. Herald & Times Group. 1998. <http: / / www.highbeam.com/ doc/ 1P2-23697055.html>. (last accessed 16 Jan. 2012). Woodford-Gormley, Donna. “In Fair Havana, Where We Lay Our Scene: Romeo And Juliet In Cuba.“ Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 201-211. Yachnin, Paul. “Eating Montaigne”. Reading Renaissance Ethics. New York: Routledge, 2007. 157-172. H ISAO O SHIMA The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku The Tempest has a unique international afterlife, traveling through time and space not only in Europe and the brave new world but also in Asia and Japan. This essay will trace its travel in Japan, borrowing the metaphor of journey used by the editors of “The Tempest” and Its Travels. 1 The Tempest was first staged in Japan in 1916. Since then, it has been performed in Japan but less often than other more popular Shakespearean plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Does the paucity of its stage productions mean the play is neglected in Japan? Not at all. In its journey in Japan, The Tempest has encountered and incorporated Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku, resulting in hybrid intercultural stage productions. I will examine these intercultural encounters in Ninagawa’s Tempest, Yamada’s Bunraku adaptation, and Kurita’s Tempest to show what happens in intertextual encounters between Shakespeare’s last solo play and Japanese theatrical traditions. 2 Of the three, only Yamada’s Bunraku Tempest can be called a complete adaptation in its true meaning of the word, drastically changing the original story into a Japanese period play with suitable Japanese character names; the traditional form and style of Bunraku necessitated such change. On the other hand, Ninagawa and Kurita used a faithful Japanese translation of Shakespeare’s original, but they strongly impress us like a quite Japanese play, almost a Japanese adaptation, probably because their uses of elements of Noh and Kabuki are not mere Japanesque decorations. So we should not just be charmed with the outward beauty of their productions, but consider how their uses of Japanese theatrical traditions give the audience new perspectives to understand the intertextually expanded meaning of the play. The [Resarch for this paper was supported by JSPS KAKENHI, Grant Number 22520252.] 1 Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (xii). As for the play’s afterlife, see Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (73-124). This edition is quoted in this chapter. On the reception of Shakespeare in Japan, see Akihiko Senda; Testuo Anzai; Friederike von Schwerin-High (60-67); Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw (1-28); Ryuta Minami; Michiko Suematsu; Shoichiro Kawai. 2 On the theory of intertextuality which Julia Kristeva has been credited with inventing, see Megan Becker-Leckrone (92-98). James Goodwin applied the theory to his analysis of Kurosawa’s films in his Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema (9). H ISAO O SHIMA 150 established theatrical styles of Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku have a respectable history of their own as much as Shakespeare’s drama has. Shakespeare and these great theatrical traditions are fused in the three productions to create unique local Shakespearean stages, which prove globally entertaining, moving, and worthy to be staged. As more and more similar approaches are witnessed not only in Japan but also in other Asian countries like China and Korea, it is essential to grasp how Shakespeare is received and staged locally in order to understand Shakespeare in this global age. This chapter aims to focus on the reception of The Tempest in Japan, examining the imaginative intertextualities of some Japanese stage productions hybridizing Shakespeare and Japanese theatrical traditions, Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku. Shakespeare and Japan’s Westernization: Tenkatsu Ichiza’s Tempest (1916) The reception of Shakespeare in Japan is closely related to its Westernization in the Meiji Era (1868-1912), which greatly influenced the formation of a modern Japanese theatre caught between traditional practices and western influences. When the long rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) collapsed under the colonial threats of Western imperial powers in 1868, the new Meiji government which had defeated the 15th and last shogun, Yoshinobu Tokugawa (1837-1913), started to modernize Japan, imitating Western practices not only in politics, social systems, armaments, industries and technology but also in art, culture and even daily life such as food and fashion. Native theatrical traditions such as Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku were considered old and barbarous; the Tokyo government summoned Kabuki actors in 1872 and urged them to perform good ethical stories suitable for the new Westernized intellectual people and visiting foreigners. Engeki Kairyo Kai [The Theatre Reformation Society] was formed in 1886 to start Engeki Kairyo Undou [The Theatre Reformation Movement] 3 , which aimed to reform Japanese theatre on a Western model (Mine 204-28). A Kabuki company first staged a Shakespearean play, Sakuradoki Zeni no Yononaka at Ebisu-za [Ebisu Theatre] in Osaka in 1885, adapting The Merchant of Venice as a Kabuki period play with its familiar Japanese character names and situations (Kawato 1.163-170). In 1878, a Kabuki company built Shintomi-za, though only its façade, in the Western architectural style in Tokyo, while even the theatre named Kabuki-za was built in the same way in 1889. The first authentic Western theatre with its proscenium stage and all Western seats in Japan, Yuraku-za, was opened in 1908, then followed by a luxurious modern Western-style theatre, Teikoku Gekijo [The Empire Theatre], near the 3 Brackets are used to explain Japanese words in English. The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 151 Emperor’s Palace in 1911. Players on stage were all male in the Edo Era, but the first training school for female actors was established in Teikoku Gekijo where female stars such as Sumako Matsui (1886-1919) played the roles of famous heroines in Western plays. Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shakespeare were eagerly translated into Japanese and staged in the Western style on a Western stage, leading to the birth of a new Westernized theatrical style called Shingeki [New Theatre] in Japan (cf. Ortolani 243-247). The Tempest, however, was introduced into Japan much later than other popular Shakespearean plays: The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Japanese readers first read Shakespeare with some scenes of Hamlet translated into Japanese by Kanagaki Robun (1829-1894) in 1875 early in the Meiji period while they first encountered The Tempest through Lamb’s story version translated into Japanese in 1888. 4 The play itself was first translated by Daisui Sugitani (1874-1915) in 1913, and then by Shoyo Tsubouchi (1859-1935) in 1915. 5 Sakuradoki Zeni no Yononaka, mentioned above, was staged in 1885 while an adaptation of The Tempest was performed by Tenkatsu Ichiza in Tokyo in 1916. Tenkatsu Ichiza [Tenkatsu Company] was a magic show company whose leader was a beautiful lady magician, Tenkatsu Shokyokusai (1886-1944). In Japan, the art of magic performance is usually called kijutsu [magic] which is often acrobatic and, like Kabuki and Bunraku, has a long history as a traditional form of popular entertainment. Their magic was based on this traditional Japanese style of kijutsu, but they seemed to have mastered some techniques of the Western magic; there remains a photo of Tenkastu in the Western dress performing a Western magic with her assistant girl. The company even made a successful American tour twice in 1924-5. As Sumako Matsui’s Salome in the Shingeki style was a great hit, Tenkastu’s company also produced Oscar Wilde’s play at Yurakuza in 1915 in the Shingeki style with her enticing feminine beauty and magic performances like Jokanaan’s speaking head (fig. 1). 6 Much encouraged with 4 The Shakespearean stages and publications in the Meiji Era are listed in Kawato (2.261- 9; 373-86). 5 As for Tsubouchi, the first Shakespearean scholar who translated all his works in Japan, and his early adaptation of Julius Caesar, Shizaru Kidan, see Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw (1-28). In 1931, four scenes of The Tempest translated by Tsubouchi were known to be staged in Ooguma Lecture Hall of Waseda University, for the production’s script is extant. In memory of his completion of translations of all Shakespeare’s works in 1928, the university established the Theatre Museam, the only one in Japan, whose exterior design was based on the Elizabethan Fortune Theatre. 6 Kayoko Marukawa (184-92); Gasho Ishikawa (145-162). The company asked Kaoru Osanai (1881-1928), one of the famous founders of Shingeki, to direct their Salome in the new Western style. Yuraku-za, the first Western-style theatre in Japan, was then the stronghold for the Shingeki movement. As for Kijutsu as a traditional Japanese performance art, see Shintaro Fujiyama (17-8): Bunraku is derived from such “karakuri ningyo” [mechanical trick puppets] used by Tezuma kairaishi [Magic puppeteers] (114- H ISAO O SHIMA 152 the success of this stage, the company’s manager and her husband, Shinnosuke Noro, persuaded Tenkatsu to stage The Tempest whose early stage productions seem to often feature a magic show by the magician. 7 With Daigo Ikeda’s direction, Heitaro Doi played the role of Prospero while she played the roles of Ariel and Miranda. Unfortunately, however, their magic Tempest in the Shingeki style failed, probably because the Shingeki style and their magic performances were not well mixed on stage this time and Miranda was a too innocent female character for Tenkatsu to show her feminine charms. Yukio Ninagawa and The Tempest on Sado Island Ironically, modern stage productions of Shakespeare’s plays have received much benefit from the very native theatrical traditions which were regarded old and barbarous by those who fostered Shingeki. 8 Yukio Ninagawa (1935-), an internationally famous Japanese stage director, took advantage of the nebulous location of Prospero’s island and imaginatively linked The Tempest with Sadogashima [Sado Island] in the northern part of Japan. One of Ninagawa’s favourite dramatic strategies is to relocate Western classics such as Greek tragedies and Shakespearean plays in Japanses settings, though he keeps Shakespeare’s original texts, faithfully translated into Japanese as much as possible. Ninagawa used a Japanese translation by Yuji Odajima at Niseei Theater in Tokyo in 1987, switching to a new translation by Kazuko Matsuoka for later Japanese stagings. 9 In its first performance at The Nissei Theatre in 1987, he added a subtitle to the main title: “A Rehearsal on Sado’s Noh Stage,” thus placing the play’s romance world in the intertextual 123). In 1936, Tenkatsu with other 32 magicians founded Japan Magic Association at whose website you can see her beautiful portrait: http: / / www.jpma.net/ index.html. 7 You can see such a magic show scene in The Tempest (1908), a silent film directed by Percy Stow for Clarendon Film Company in BFI’s Silent Shakespeare: doves fly away from Prospero’s magic cauldron. 8 In this point, Akira Kurosawa is the great pioneer in the modern Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare, incorporating elements of traditional theatres in its samurai period setting, though his media is film; Kumonosujo (1957) is its typical example. In fact, it is Kurosawa who firmly established the “tradition” of Japanese Shakespearean adaptations whose history goes back to those in Meiji Era. See Hisao Oshima. 9 Odajima (1930-) also translated all Shakespeare’s works while Matsuoka (1942-) is the first female translator working to translate all his plays now. The uniqueness of her translation lies in her collaboration with actors and directors staging Shakespeare’s plays, especially Ninagawa who is also trying to stage all his plays at Saitama Art Theatre. The first Japanese director staging all the plays is Norio Deguchi who formed his company, The Shakespeare Theatre, starting his project with Twelfth Night in 1975 and completing it by Antony and Cleopatra in 1981; he staged The Tempest as the 26th play in 1979 at Shibuya Jan Jan in Tokyo. The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 153 framework of a specific Japanese location; this production was also staged in Edinburgh in 1988 and in London in 1992. 10 His Macbeth, staged also in Edinburgh in 1985 and in London in 1987, surprised the Western audience by placing Macbeth’s tragedy in a Japanese butsudan [ancestral house-shrine]. As he wrote in his book describing his dramaturgy, the Japanese settings he used, such as butsudan, and sekitei [stone garden] for his Midsummer Night’s Dream, are not mere visual Japanesque enticements for a Western audience. 11 He thinks that these beautiful stage sets rooted in Japanese traditional culture strongly affect the Japanese audience’s memory, making a foreign Shakespearean story more familiar for them (cf. Ninagawa 95-105). Because his stage is commercial and he needs to entertain a varied audience, he draws on a mix of cultural traditions, Japanese as well as foreign, often putting them into surprising combinations accompanied by lively audio-visual representations. Although he himself, like many others in the trade now, was trained as a stage artist in Shingeki theatre, Ninagawa has rebelled against the Western style of realistic drama focused on language and ideas, and worked to restore the Japanese emphasis on stage pictures, offering ‘visual pleasure’ to fascinate the eyes. Far from being a maker of facile visual entertainment products, Ninagawa is an industrious artist, always seeking original methods of dramatic representation, never satisfied with his past successes. His desire to stage The Tempest was very special and personal. According to his interview, he first read the play with a certain awareness of the end of his own career as a stage director (cf. Ninagawa and Hasebe 335-49). Though he is still very active and directs many plays all year round as the Art Director of Saitama Art Theatre and Theatre Cocoon in Shibuya Cutltural Village, he had a health problem then and often said that this might be his last stage in his usual humourous manner. After reading Shakespeare’s last play, however, he was rather disappointed with its story, because it does not contain the same sort of dramatic actions as Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. When he was in Vancouver for his tour of Euripides’ Medea, some of his staff suggested he should go to the Bermuda Islands to do some preliminary research for his Tempest. Ninagawa, however, thought its fundamental story is about an old man banished from the court to a prison island. As a result, he went to Sado Island, not Bermuda, to look for hints and materials for his stage production. Many political prisoners were sent to this typical Japanese prison island since the Kamakura period (1185-1333). In fact, shima nagashi [island banishment] even became a traditional Japanese literary theme. There were several prison islands where criminal and political culprits were sent in Japan, and the 10 As for the London stage of Ninagawa’s Tempest and a Bunraku adaptation, see Virginia Mason Vaughan (151-167). 11 You can see beautiful scenes of his London stages in Takeshi Yamaguchi (82-7 et passim). H ISAO O SHIMA 154 most famous ones were heralded in songs and poetry and sometimes made into heroes in Noh and Kabuki. 12 Later in the Edo Era Tokugawa Shogunate operated a gold mine there, forcing vagabonds and criminals in its capitol, Edo, to work as miners. 13 One of the famous early political prisoners was Zeami (1363-1443), the founding actor and dramatist of Noh, who was banished there for an unknown reason by the emperor in 1434 when he was 72 (cf. Kitagawa 2-48; 160-84). When the Tokugawa Shogunate began in 1603, Choan was appointed as the first governor of the gold mine. Because he was from a Noh player family, he had the first Noh theatre built in Sado where more than 200 Noh stages stood in the past (fig. 2) (cf. Sado Museum 8; 89-92). Nowadays, there are still about 30 Noh stages, some well preserved, some crumbling, beside Sado’s village shrines and temples, and Noh plays and other traditional ritual dances are staged in its seasonal village festivities (fig. 3) (cf. ibid. 9; 86- 8). 14 Ninagawa drew on the historical and cultural background of Sado Island to create a unique intercultural stage production of The Tempest: Zeami is intertextually superimposed on the traditional image of Prospero, who has been often associated with Shakes-peare in his retiring days. 15 When spectators arrive at Ninagawa’s Tempest, while they look for their seats, they see that a rehearsal for a village festival, often annually held in early summer or autumn in Sado, has already started. 16 Boy actors with their school bags join adults, as if arriving after school. Among the adults is a village leader (played by Mikijiro Hira) who later plays the role of Prospero. On the proscenium stage is an old, almost crumbling, traditional Noh stage near the sea. Then Shishimai, a lion dance, called Oni Daiko in Sado, begins with sounds of a drum (cf. Sado Museum 88). This is a common way to stage a Noh play in Sado. Village festivals often begin with performances of folk dance and music, and then a Noh play is staged, sometimes only lighted by candles or 12 The Buddhist monk Shunkan (1143-79) is such a literary hero banished to Kikaigashima Island in a Noh play, Shunkan, and Monzaemon Chikamatsu’s Bunraku and later Kabuki play, Heike Nyogogashima (1719). According to Virginia M. Vaugahn (163), the head of Shunkan was used to represent Prospero in the London staging of the Bunraku Tempest. As for the history of Sado as a prison island, see Kinzo Isobe and Keiichi Tanaka (9-28). 13 Kinzo Isobe (44-47). Isobe points out the human and cultural exchange between Kyoto and Sado, mentioning the possible Sado tour of Okuni (the legendary lady founder of Kabuki) and the popularity of Sadogashima-za [Sadogashima Company] in Kyoto in the 17th century (ibid.). 14 You can see scenes of unique traditional ritual dances in Sado at the web site of Sado Tourism Association: http: / / www.visitsado.com/ . 15 Peter Greenaway’s film, Prospero’s Books (1991), is also based on a “deliberate crossidentification” between Shakespeare and Prospero, adding John Gielgud as well (Peter Greenaway 9). 16 The following description of the stage is based on the one produced at Melpalk Hall (Postal Bank Hall) in Fukuoka in 2000. The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 155 Figure 1: Tenkatsu as Salome with Yokanaan’s speaking head at Yuraku-za in 1915. Figure 2: Daizen Jinja [Shrine] Noh Stage, the well-preserved oldest Noh stage in Sado with its thatched roof and Hashigakari on the left. H ISAO O SHIMA 156 Figure 3: Noh Stage and Kagami-ita [Mirror Board], on which an old pine is traditionally planted, at Daizen Jinja. Figure 4: Playbill of Ninagawa’s The Tempest at Melpalk Hall Fukuoka in 2000. The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 157 candles or torches in the evening. Sado is a precious preserve for such folk dances and rituals as Oni Daiko and Harukoma, because people from various parts of Japan rushed to the small island for gold, bringing their unique local cultures with them. Villagers sit on the grass surrounding the stage, eating from Jubako, special lunch boxes, and drinking sake. It is a festive moment for communal enjoyment; you are not supposed to see the entire Noh play silently without motion. In Ninagawa’s Tempest, the village-performers choose Shakespeare’s play for their torch-lit Noh stage, a rare, or impossible, choice. After the lion dancers, who really belong to a lion dance group in Sado, leave the stage, the Shakespearean story starts with the Noh stage quite ingeniously transformed into a ship tossed on the tempestuous sea (fig. 4). The rough waves are represented by several long pieces of cloth on which waves are painted, a common stage device called Nami-nuno [Wave-cloth] in Kabuki, just as the set of a ship is: the roof of the Noh stage removed and a mast and the bow added. 17 Ariel, hung by a rope, flies over the stage, causing thunder and lightning: this flying action is called Chunori in Kabuki; such special effects are called Keren. Kabuki developed mainly as a theatrical media for civic popular entertainment while Noh satisfied aristocratic taste and the desire for ceremony in the Edo Era. Kabuki plays were staged on licenced theatres in Edo (now Tokyo); Noh plays were performed on stages attached to shrines or temples where people prayed for communal prosperity, or on stages in aristocratic mansions and castles by and for samurais [warriors] to pray for the prosperity of their master. In his Tempest, Ninagawa uses Kabuki elements for spectacles, as in the shipwreck scene, and for comic effects to represent the vulgar plebeian world of Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano. When Caliban first appears on stage, he looks indeed like a fish because he wears a Koinobori [carp-shaped flags often raised on a pole in May to celebrate the healthy growth of boys] costume. 18 The costume was an actor’s idea, not Ninagawa’s, but the Koinobori outfit is quite appropriate in an ironical sense, because Koinobori also symbolizes the social success of a boy climbing up in the social hierarchy; Caliban’s conspiracy with his comic conspirators against Prospero fails, after all. From the space under the Noh stage, which seems to be his assigned den, Caliban comes out with a special Kabuki gesture called Mie, a Kabuki star’s heroic pose meant to impress the audience with his sharp eyes wide open, but Caliban is soon tamed by Prospero’s magic, thus creating a Miles Gloriosus comic effect. The foolish revolting gang of Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban becomes a mock version of Kabuki bandit heroes, Shiranami Gonin Otoko [Five Bandits of White Waves], though only three in this case 17 Nautical scenes are often staged in Kabuki: see Masakatsu Gunji (210-1). 18 You can see the Koinobori costume in Yamaguchi (88). H ISAO O SHIMA 158 (2.2). In Kabuki, they are heroic thieves like Robin Hood, who steal only from evil rich men and distribute the stolen wealth among poor people. Flourishing their characteristic umbrellas, they depart the stage with a typical Kabuki stylized heroic action of leaving, Michiyuki, in its mocking version. Entering and exits on the hanamichi [special separate long entrance / exit stage] are highlights of the Kabuki stage, important dramatic moments which the audience eagerly looks forward to in Kabuki. On the other hand, Ninagawa uses Noh elements to represent the supernatural magic world of Prospero and Ariel. Like a Shite [Noh main character], Ariel, wearing a beautiful Japanese dress (kimono) and a Noh men [mask], enters the stage, walking on a Hashigakari, the bridge connecting the tiring room and the Noh stage. When he leads Ferdinand (Kazuma Suzuki) to Miranda (Shinobu Terashima), Ariel (Youji Matsuda) wears the mask of Otafuku, the Japanese goddess of happiness. Just as in Noh, the masks clearly represent the role and character of their wearers in this play. When Prospero orders Ariel to punish the “three men of sin” (3.3.53), the spirit appears with the mask of Tengu [bird man], the Japanese version of a harpy, which Shakespeare derived from Virgil’s Aeneid (Hamilton 74-8). In Japanese folklore, a Tengu is a monster much feared for doing harm to men (often bad men) and sometimes maddening them. When Stephano and Triculo are trapped by gaudy kimonos, the scene alludes to a custom called Mushiboshi in Noh theatres; Japan is a very humid country, especially in its rainy season, and Noh costumes must be dried, hung in the windy shade, to kill vermin once a year. 19 When Ferdinand brandishes his sword against Prospero, the old man uses magic to totally incapacitate the young man (1.2.486-8). In Ninagawa’s production, Prospero hurls a magical spider web over the young prince to immobilize him. Ninagawa derives this stage spectacle from a popular Noh play called Tsuchigumo [Earth Spider] in which the hero fights against a spider monster spouting a web against him. 20 Some critics might complain about Prospero using an evil monster’s magic web to tame his future son-in-law, but here a spectacular effect is only aimed, emphasizing the power of Prospero’s magic, without any intention to equate Prospero with an evil spider monster, or it might suggest that Prospero’s powerful magic, if pursued by anger and revenge, has a dangerous possibility to turn him into a monster. This is not a far-fetched interpretation, as extreme emotions such as anger, sorrow, and hate often turn men into monsters in Noh, as you see below. Mugen Noh [Noh of Dream Vision] and Monogurui Noh [Noh of Madness], created by Zeami, are the most famous Noh genres (Kitagawa 90-124). In a Mugen Noh play, incidents in the past come back in a character’s dream, 19 You can see the picture of Mushiboshi in Yuichiro Yamazaki (77). 20 See the stage pictures of Tsuchigumo in Ortolani, Figure 38 and Yamazaki (76). The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 159 often featuring a traveling Biddhist monk who visits the places closely related to past incidents, thus bridging between the past (the main story) and the present (a sort of framework to represent the main story). A similar time structure is also found in The Tempest in which Prospero tells Miranda about events in “the dark backward and abysm of time” (1.2.50). Furthermore, Ninagawa frames the play with the fiction of a “Rehearsal on a Sado Noh Stage,” linking Prospero’s tragic past with Zeami’s island banishment. In Japanese poetry, the name of a famous historical site such as Sado has an important function for poetical allusions. In Japanese poetics, a poetic location name is called an utamakura [song pillow] which, evoking historical or literary associations traditionally linked with the place, is supposed to give poetic inspiration to a poet. 21 In a sense, Sado is an important utamakura for Ninagawa to locate a Shakespearean play in the particular Japanese poetic and literary milieu with rich historical and cultural associations for the known audience. In a Monogurui Noh play, a character loses his or her senses because of great sorrow or anger, and madness sometimes even transforms him or her into a monster. 22 In Ninagawa’s Tempest, the three men of sin are punished so severely that they are reported to become mad from grief and their guilty consciences, “all three distracted” (5.1.12); the three men of sin, especially Antonio, sit stricken in great sorrow like a forlorn child in the stage setting reminiscent of Sainokawara, the Japanese mythical shore of the river across from which dead men are ferried to the other world. Dead children are not allowed to cross it alone, so they must wait stacking pebbles on the shore until their dead parents come to take them together to the world of the dead. When a mountain of pebbles is almost finished, a fiend appears to scatter it, almost like a Sisyphean punishment. According to legend, Sainokawara is said to be located at the northern end of Sado Island (Sado Museum 6). Lastly, in Prospero’s masque, Western and Japanese elements are intertextually and audiovisually fused to establish a magical world of beauty. Just as Stuart court masques were staged for royal celebration, Noh plays were also performed to pray for the long prosperity of the nation and its ruler. 23 Goddesses of Prosperity, Iris, Ceres and Juno, dance wearing Noh masks and 21 As for “the art of allusion, or this love of allusion” in Japanese art, see Ezra Pound & Ernest Fenollosa (4). Utamakuras were such an important device in Waka [Japanese Poetry] that many books listing them were compiled in the past. They also served as guidebooks for travelers eager to visit those places evoked in poetry. 22 In Kumonosujo, Kurosawa told the hero and heroine to simulate the facial expressions of particular Noh masks; Asaji (Lady Macbeth) becomes a typical Monogurui Noh character, tragically losing sense because of her guilty conscience. See Kurosawa Akira Kenkyukai [Research Society] (184-191; 346-7; 358-9). 23 On the play’s relation with the Jacobean masque, see Stephen Orgel (43-50). H ISAO O SHIMA 160 kimonos to pray for the young couple’s happiness. 24 In a sense, this prothalamium Noh-masque scene is the climax of Ninagawa’s Tempest, because the scene is a dramatic realization of Yugen, the ideal sublime beauty of Noh expounded in Zeami’s dramatic theory. 25 Ninagawa boldly mixes Japanese and Western traditions: the Noh music is played harmoniously with a solemn Western classical hymn; Western reapers clothed in straw appear with typical Japanese vegetables in their hands and dance with Noh goddesses. Ninagawa is sometimes criticized for blending different traditions to create visual entertainment. Purists might complain about such a mixture of Shakespeare, Noh and Kabuki theatrical techniques, especially extreme instances such as the sight of Ariel wearing a Noh mask, flying over the stage in the Kabuki style called chunori. A Japanese stage production of Shakespeare in any style, however, is an intercultural hybrid. What is important is whether the different Japanese conventions are successfully unified so that the performance will move the audience. In The Tempest, at least, Ninagawa succeeds in combining the resonances of different Japanese theatrical traditions with Shakespeare’s plot and characters into an intertextual performance that is unified on stage. Tempest Arashi Nochi Hare : The Tempest in Bunraku puppet theatre One of the most unique Japanese adaptations of Shakespeare is certainly Tempest Arashi Nochi Hare [Sunny after Storm], a Bunraku version of The Tempest. Bunraku is a traditional Japanese puppet drama in which three Ningyotsukais [Puppeteers] manipulate one puppet stylistically as well as realistically, accompanied by Gidaiyubushi [Narration, Speech and Song] and Shamisen [a sort of Japanese guitar with three strings hit by a stick of bone] music, each performed by one or more players. 26 In order to celebrate the centenary of the London Japan Society, three Shakespearean productions in the styles of Kabuki, Kyogen, and Bunraku were planned to be staged in London in 1991: a Kabuki version of Hamlet (Hamlet Yamato Nishikie), a Kyogen version of The Merry Wives of Windsor (Horasamurai) and a Bunraku version of The Tempest (Tempest Arashi nochi Hare). Though the plan never materialized for some reason, the Bunraku adaptation of The Tempest was staged in the Kintetsu Art Centre in Osaka and the Panasonic Globe Theatre in Tokyo in 1992, and later revised and restaged in the National Bunraku 24 Even in modern traditional Japanese weddings, Noh songs are sometimes sung to pray for the lasting happiness of the couple and the families united by their marriage. 25 On Yugen, see Kitagawa (150-52). 26 You can see the instrument at Japan Arts Council’s website referred below. As for Bunraku, see Ortolani (208-32). The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 161 Theatre in Osaka and the National Theatre in Tokyo in 2009 (cf. Yamada 2009). 27 Tempest Arashi nochi Hare is based on Tsubouchi’s translation adapted by Shoichi Yamada (1925-) with music composed by Seiji Tsurusawa. Yamada set the play in the medieval warrior society of Japan, situating Prospero’s island in its southern sea; he also changed the characters’ names to Japanese nomenclature: Prospero became Asonozaemon Fujinori; Miranda, Midori; Ferdinand, Harutaro; Ariel, Erihiko; and Caliban, Degamaru. In an interview, Yamada commented: It is rather difficult to translate the play’s philosophical ideas and subtle feelings and emotions into Gidaiyubushi, so I adapted it with the Japanese spirit. Moreover, the smooth flow of the story is essential in Bunraku. As I adapted it as a period play, Tachiyaku [hero] needs to have Monogatari [dramatic narration about his heroic action], while Onnagata [heroine] needs to have Kudoki [passionate or sorrowful speech about her tragic situation]. So I adapted it, keeping these points in my mind. This time [in the 2009 production], I added Prospero’s epilogue, which kind of action had never been seen or heard on Bunraku stage, but Fujinori [Prospero] remained alone on stage and spoke to the audience. All in all, I tried to direct it like a classical Bunraku play. (my translation) 28 This approach, quite different from Ninagawa’s, is rather close to a Meiji adaptation of a Shakespearean drama into a Kabuki play, such as Hamlet Yamato Nishikie by Kanagaki Robun (cf. Kawato 7-19; 161-70). 29 Bunraku is often regarded as drama to be heard rather than to be seen; Gidaiyubushi accompanied by Shamisen music is the core of Bunraku, though the actions of puppets look very natural and even moving in spite of their naive appearance. In fact, the natural movements of puppets are made possible by puppeteers’ long hard training. 30 Adopting Tsubouchi’s literay translation, Yamada created a unique Joruri [script of Bunraku]. 31 27 The following description is about the Bunraku stage at National Theatre in Tokyo in 2009. 28 You can read the interview, though in Japanese, at the website of Japan Arts Council: http: / / www.ntj.jac.go.jp/ member/ pertopics/ per090612_02.html. It also offers information about Japanese traditional theatres, Kabuki, Bunraku, Noh and Kyogen in English: http: / / www.ntj.jac.go.jp/ english.html. Along with Noh, Kyogen and Kabuki, Bunraku is registered in UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. 29 Kurosawa tried this type of Shakespearean adaptation very successfully in his films, Kumonosujo (1957) and Ran (1985), setting the stories of Macbeth and Lear in the Japanese historical period of civil war called “Sengoku Jidai” (1467-1573). In 2005, Ninagawa staged his Kabuki adaptation of Twelfth Night in this style, transplanting the story into a medieval Japanese court, changing the characters’ names in a similar way. It was staged by all male Kabuki actors, using Kabuki settings and costumes, at Kabuki Theatre in Tokyo with a big success. 30 A puppeteer has to train himself as Ashizukai [foot puppeteer] for 10 years and then as Hidarizukai [left hand puppeteer] for another 10 years until he can become Omozukai H ISAO O SHIMA 162 When the play begins with a tempest, the violent Shamisen music performed by five Shamisen players represents the storm, accompanied by a waving curtain lighted by flash lights. Then on the right side from the audience, Dayu and Shamisen [the players of Gidaiyubushi and Shamisen] sit on Dayudoko, a special small stage while Fujinori’s big cave with three small chambers inside appears. 32 In 1992, panels and abstract stage settings were used. In 2009, on the other hand, realistic Bunraku settings were built on genuine Bunraku stages in Osaka and Tokyo (cf. Yamada 2009). The play is divided into 7 scenes called dan in Bunraku: 1st dan: Tempest; 2nd: In the Cave; 3rd: On the Beach; 4th: In the Forest; 5th, 6th and 7th: In the same Cave. As Yamada tells us in the interview quoted above, the story of Bunraku must be straightforward, focusing on Monogatari and Kudoki. Therefore, the original story is drastically changed and simplified. Yamada tried to keep its main action as much as possible: Gonzalo and Sebastian are cut while Trinculo and Stephano are merged into one comic character, a drunkard Buddhist monk named Chinsai. Fujinori was once the lord ruling Aso, which suggests his country was situated in the central area of Kyushu, famous for the still active great volcano, Mt. Aso, in the southern part of Japan. His brother, Kagetaka, conspired with Akizane, Tsukushi no Tairyo [governor of Kyushu] and banished Fujinori to a remote island in order to become the lord of Aso. Thus, in this play too, the place names set Shakespeare’s story in historically and geopolitically evocative Japanese locations. The sound and kanji letters of the characters’ names are also suggestive: Midori means “green” in Japanese while the first 2 of the 3 kanji characters in the name of Degamaru mean “mud” and “tortoise,” often referred as a slow animal in Japan, with the last one “maru” being a common suffix for a boy’s name. In the second cave scene, six Ningyotsukais dressed in black manipulate the two puppet-characters, Fujinori and Midori: those dressed in black with their faces also hidden by black cloth are called Kurogo who are conventionally supposed to be invisible on stage. One Dayu plays both the roles, projecting the voices of Fujinori, and Midori, changing his tone accordingly, but in other scenes in which several characters appear the number of Dayu is increased to divide the dialogue between them; the number of Shamisen is also increased when more gorgeous or dramatic music is required in the [head and right hand puppeteer]. Omozukai, the chief of the three Ningyozukai, can manipulate the eyes and mouth in a Kashira [head] to change its facial expression and represent subtle emotions. 31 At a theatre shop in the National Theatre, you can get a tokohon, booklet of Joruris in the program in which two or three different plays are usually featured. 32 From the right cave, you can see the sea while the left one seems to lead to the forest. Before the center one hangs a curtain which functions as an inner stage used to discover Midori and Harutaro playing a Japanese chess-like game in the last scene. The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 163 climactic scenes. At first, ignorant of his purpose, Midori, onnagata, asks her angry father why he caused such a terrible tempest in the style of Kudoki. Fujinori throws something into a small fire and prays; then Erihiko appears flying (fig. 5) and leads Harutaro from the beach to the forest. Erihiko always appears with the harmonious sounds of Koto [a 17-string instrument] and bells which players ring from a special hidden chamber called Misuuchi above Dayudoko. A Japanese flute is used for songs of birds, and drums represent thunder and sometimes foretell the appearance of ghosts and monsters just as in the harpy scene in 3.3. The forest is represented by a big tree in the center with a backdrop of a forest-scene painting reminiscent of Henri Rousseau’s “Tropical Storm with a Tiger” (1891) at the National Gallery in London. Tired Harutaro sits under the big tree. Then Midori comes to the forest to pick flowers to soothe her father’s unusual anger, while Degamaru, the monstrous wild native, flying from his master’s punishment, also comes there to find her. Degamaru tells her that he has waited to see her grow mature and would like to get married to her now. Facing her complete rejection, he tries to rape her in the forest. Thus the episode of Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda only recollectively mentioned in the original is acted on stage, resulting in a Monogatari scene of heroic action in which Harutaro notices it and rescues her from the lustful hands of Degamaru. After this Monogatari scene, Harutaro and Midori fall in love just as Fujinori expected. Fujinori, however, is harsh to Harutaro; he tells Midori and Harutaro how he was banished by his brother and Harutaro’s father. Harutaro apologizes for his father’s wrong-doing against Fujinori, but Fujinori, testing the honesty of the young man’s repentance, pretends to cut his head in revenge. Harutaro willingly offers his head to compensate for his father’s sin, so Fujinori saves his life but he orders him to become his slave for the rest of his life. This is another relocation of a section of Shakespeare’s text, essential for making a good emotional, or even sentimental, Bunraku scene, for in Shakespeare, Prospero tells only Miranda about their past in I.ii and Ferdinand does not know it until the last scene. In Bunraku, a comic scene is called chariba, the Bunraku version of comic relief (Yamada 1990, 69). Degamaru, running away from Harutaro, meets Chinsai drinking sake from a bottle. In this typical chariba, full of comic topical allusions in their dialogue, Degamaru tastes intoxicating sake and thinks Chinsai is a god. As the Japanese title clearly suggests, a fine day comes back after the storm. In Bunraku, the end of a play must be clear-cut, without any Shakespearean ambiguity. After punishing the sinners to a certain extent, Fujinori forgives the genuinely penitent sinners, Akizane, Kagetaka, and even Degamaru, who, plotting with Chinsai, attempted to kill him. He shows the young couple innocently playing a board game in the inner cave (fig. 6) and H ISAO O SHIMA 164 Figure 5: Erihiko [Ariel], 2009. Copyright: The National Theatre. Figure 6: Fujinori [Prospero] shows the young couple playing the board game to Akizane [Alonso], 2009. Copyright: The National Theatre. The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 165 Figure 7: Fujinori [Prospero] throws his books and scrolls into the fire, 2009. Copyright: The National Theatre. Figure 8: Rehearsal scene on Ryutopia Noh Stage, lighted in the torch-lit style, 2009. Copyright: Kurita Company. H ISAO O SHIMA 166 Figure 9: Rehearsal scene on Ryutopia Noh Stage with four sybil-like fairies, Miranda and Ferdinand sitting at the front, 2009. Copyright: Kurita Company. Figure 10: Prospero, Miranda and Masked Ferdinand; Ariel in Noh mask and costume on the left; back picture of the DVD package of the production. The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 167 throws his magic books and scrolls into the fire he used to create his magic (fig. 7). Yamada says he is not completely satisfied with his adaptation; so, it will take more time to know whether this new Shakespearean Joruri will remain in the Bunraku repertory or not. But Yukikazu Kanou, leader of his theatrical company, Hanagumi Shibai, used Yamada’s Bunraku script to stage a Kabuki version of Tempest Arashi nochi Hare in the style of Maruhon Kabuki. 33 Like Kanou’s Kabuki Tempest, the Bunraku adaptation of The Tempest with its poetic Gidaiyubushi speech and narration might be transplanted into other Japanese theatrical traditions, just as was done to classical Joruris. 34 Yoshihiro Kurita and The Tempest on Noh stage Another unique Japanese production of The Tempest was performed on an authentic Noh stage in 2009, very appropriately, in Niigata to which Sado, the island of Noh stages mentioned above, belongs. Ryutopia Noh Theatre Shakespeare Series, No. 6, Tempest, was directed by Yoshihiro Kurita, who also played the role of Prospero. The actor-director Kurita, leader of his local theatrical group, the Kurita Company, has contributed a great deal to Niigata’s local stage culture by directing citizen musicals at the Niigata Performing Arts Centre “Ryutopia” since its opening, as well as by directing a series of professional Shakespearean productions, called Ryutopia Noh Theatre Shakespeare. So far, he has directed Macbeth (2004, 6-7), King Lear (2004-5), Winter’s Tale (2005), Othello (2006), Hamlet (2007), The Tempest (2009), and Pericles (2011). 35 The uniqueness of his Shakespearean productions lies in his staging of Shakespearean plays on an authentic Noh stage, combining Noh elements very effectively with the Western dramatic conventions of Shakespeare’s plays. His productions have been performed in Tokyo and other major Japanese cities as well as abroad: The Winter’s Tale was staged in Romania (Shakespeare International Festival), Mordva, Poland and Germany in 2008. A modern Noh stage is often built in a concrete building, though it is given the same wooden structure as the traditional ones on Sado Island have. 33 Yukikazu Kano, “From Watching to Listening” in the production pamphlet (2-3). Maruhon Kabuki is also called Gidaiyu Kyogen in which Bunraku joruri is transplanted into a Kabuki play with Gidaiyubushi leading its action forward. 34 For example, Chikamatsu’s joruris for Bunraku stage were transplanted into Kabuki to create a very popular jenre of love suicide tragedy such as Sonezaki Shinju (1703) while a Noh play transplanted into Kabuki is called a Matsubame-mono, referring to the backboard of Noh stage on which an old Matsu [pine] is painted [Figure 4]. Kanjincho, based on a Noh play, Ataka, is a typical example of Matsubame-mono. 35 You can have glimpses of Kurita’s productions at the website of Ryutopia Noh-Theatre Shakepeare Series: http: / / www.ryutopia.or.jp/ skp/ . H ISAO O SHIMA 168 Ryutopia Noh Stage is such a one, located on the 7th floor of the great theatre complex of the Niigata Performing Arts Centre. You walk in the medium-size hall and find lines of Western seats in the auditorium, but in front of them is a traditional wooden Noh theatre with its roofed stage, bridge, and three pine trees, sometimes planted in pots in front of the bridge. Kurita’s Tempest begins in complete darkness; the audience only hears the voices of the shipwrecked sailors and courtiers, with their fearful imagination enhanced by darkness. Generally speaking, stage properties are rarely used on a Noh stage; if any, they are simple ones, just like the props that were employed in Shakespeare’s Globe. Scenes on Noh stages are enlivened by the characters’ speech or special narrative songs chanted by Jiutai [singers] sitting on stage. After the darkened scene of the shipwreck, the stage lights are on, but so dim that the characters’ shadows are silhouetted on the back board (Kagamiita) of the stage (fig. 8). This is the lighting effect often experienced in torch-lit Noh productions on outdoor Noh stages built in the precinct of a Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine. Such a lighting effect is quite suitable for a Mugen Noh play, because it surrounds the play in a dark mystical atmosphere, appropriate for Prospero’s explanation to Miranda about the “dark backward and abysm of time” (1.2.50). Furthermore, because Shakespeare’s romance plays seem to have been more targeted at a higher class audience at the Blackfriars Theatre and at court than at public theatres, an intimate as well as intense atmosphere in the small Noh theatre makes its stage especially suitable acting space for their performance. Similar to Ariel in Ninagawa’s production, Kurita’s Ariel appears as a Noh character, wearing a female mask throughout the play that represents a noble lady. In a Noh play, a Shite wearing a mask performs a beautiful Noh mai [dance], often at the emotional climax. Kurita’s Ariel also dances elegantly just in the same Noh style to the tune of a Noh song and music at the play’s important moments. The other actors mostly perform in a Western acting style and Kurita uses a faithful modern Japanese translation by Kazuko Matsuoka for their dialogue. Still, some of Ariel’s speech and songs are rendered in the style of old Japanese verse, often chanted by Noh characters. So Kurita’s Tempest, like Ninagawa’s, is not a complete adaptation; however much these directors rely on Japanese theatrical traditions and incorporate Japanese elements into their productions, they keep the original names and story almost intact. In Kurita’s Tempest, four spirits looking like sibyls appear wearing costumes of blue, red, yellow, and black. Each has a book in her hands, and sometimes each can be seen reading them aloud, like some magical message (fig. 9). Prospero carries only a magic wand. The spirits are on stage throughout the play; they sit on the right side of the stage when they have no stage business. This is another Noh stage convention: if an actor sits with his The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 169 back towards the audience or sits on the right side (from the audience) of the stage, the audience regards him nonexistent. The four spirits following Ariel perform whatever Prospero orders, but they sometimes speak by turns lines written for Ariel in Shakespeare’s text. Though this is a bit confusing, these sibyl-like ladies have been a trademark presence in Kurita’s Shakespearean stages since they appeared as witches in his Macbeth. In The Tempest, they seem to be Ariel’s transformed shapes as well as servant spirits. In 3.3, when the harpies threaten the three sinners, they offer them the books which now become food trays, but when the sinners try to eat, the spirits snatch them from the sinners’ hands and read severe sentences from their books (which now have returned to their original function as books). In Prospero’s masque, the spirits also perform a beautiful dance with Ariel to pray for the future happiness of Miranda and Ferdinand. Another character who wears a Noh mask throughout the play is Ferdinand (Mitsuru Hirokawa), whose Noh mask represents the image of a young lord (fig. 10). This creates an interesting effect among other characters, including Miranda (Haruyo Yamaga), who wear no mask. Probably, Kurita wants to emphasize the role of Ferdinand as a suitor, rather than his individual personality, which is clearly contrasted with Miranda’s lovable individuality, full of youth and vigor. The most beautiful scene in Kurita’s Tempest, just as in Ninagawa’s, is Prospero’s masque when Ariel dances a Noh mai to the tune of the Noh Utai [song] and Hayashi [music] played by Hayashikata, players of fue and taiko [a Japanese bamboo flute and small drum]. 36 The players’ musical technique is also a traditional art, handed down from master to disciple. In this play, fue is played by Makoto One (from the Fujita School in Nagoya) while taiko is played by Akira Takano (from the Takayasu School). Ariel is performed by Reijiro Tsumura, a Noh actor (from the Kanze School, which is traditionally supposed to have descended directly from Zeami) who is officially endowed with the title of “Human National Treasure: Important Intangible Culture (Noh)” by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Prospero’s mysterious masque is transformed into a Noh mai scene of Yugen, and it conveys the Noh ideal of sublime beauty that Zeami and the Noh actors following him have tried to achieve. 37 36 As for the musical instruments used in Noh, see Yamazaki (64-5). 37 On 23-24 December 2011, Kurita staged The Tempest again, this time as a very modern stage based on the concept of jazz bar at the Hall of Niigata City Bandai Citizen Cultural Center. It is a seasonal entertainment production, featuring jazz by a piano and a bass and famous Christmas songs sung by Miranda (Haruyo Yamaga). Four barmaids, not sibyl-like fairies, appear as servants of the bar’s master Prospero (Kurita), and pour liquid from their bottles over the courties’ heads in the first shipwreck scene, and ever force them to drink from them. Caliban is chained to a chair on which he sits before the opening of the play, and asks the audience to put off their mobile phones at H ISAO O SHIMA 170 Conclusion We have witnessed above some highlights of The Tempest’s journey in Japan. Tadashi Suzuki, another famous Japanese director, pointed out, “Shingeki attempted to only imitate the Western drama, but their international approach, not rooted in Japanese theatrical traditions, failed, because imitations are just imitations, after all” (115-8; Takahashi 1-5). In other words, they tried to copy only the foreign appearance of Western drama, but missed its dramatic essence, separating themselves from their native environment, cultural, theatrical, spiritual, political, historical, and so on. They were certainly successful in conveying the story and ideas contained in the logos of Shakespeare’s text, but some of the most important meanings of drama often lies beyond the logos. On the other hand, Ninagawa’s Tempest, Yamada’s Bunraku adaptation, and Kurita’s Tempest on Noh stage, attempted to expand the play’s meanings intertextually beyond the logos with their hybridization with Japanese theatrical traditions, presenting us unique local stage productions of The Tempest, and attaining a truly international appeal, though their approaches are quite different. In a sense, they succeeded in firmly locating Shakespeare in the historical and cultural milieu of Japan as well as in its theatrical milieu so that the audience can understand Shakespeare’s play more freshly and deeply, seen from a new intercultural perspective. Shakespeare has been such a great cultural catalyst in Japan that The Tempest’s Japanese journey will not end here but continue to create its fascinating intertextual stages. its beginning. A young actress (Chiaki Eihou) plays the roles of Ferdinand and Ariel like a breechs role, or Otokoyaku [girl actor impersonating male roles] in Takarazuka, the famous girls’ opera theatre in Japan. The story is simplified (no Gonzalo again), focusing on Prospero’s revenge and forgiveness. The kitsch style of this “maid-bar” Tempest is certainly intentional and directly contrasted with the Mugen Noh style on Noh stage in 2009; Kurita proved the great possibility of Japanese adaptations of The Tempest. The Tempest and Japanese theatrical traditions: Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku 171 Works Cited Anzai, Testuo. “What do we mean by ‘Japanese’ Shakespeare? ”. Performing Shakespeare in Japan. Eds Ryuta Minami, Ian Carruthers and John Gillie. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 17-20. Becker-Leckrone, Megan. Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory. London: Palgrave, 2005. British Film Institute. Ed. Silent Shakespeare. London: Milestone Film & Video, 1999. Fujiyama, Shintaro. Tezuma no Hanashi: Ushinawareta Nihon no Kijutsu [Talks on Magic: A Lost Art of Japanese Magic]. Tokyo: Shincho-sha, 2009. Goodwin, James. Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Greenaway, Peter. Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991. Gunji, Masakatsu. Kabuki. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1969. Hamilton, Donna B. Virgil and “The Tempest”: The Politics of Imitation. Ohio: Ohio UP, 1990. Hulme, Peter, and William H. Sherman. Eds. “The Tempest” and Its Travels. London: Reaktion, 2000. Ishikawa, Gasho. Shokyokusai Tenkatsu. Tokyo: Togen-sha, 1968. Isobe, Kinzo, and Keiichi Tanaka. Sado Runin-shi [History of People Banished to Sado]. Tokyo: Yuzankaku, 1975. Isobe, Kinzo. Sado Kinzan [Sado Goldmine]. Tokyo: Shincho-sha, 1984. Kano, Yukikazu. “From Watching to Listening”. Production Pamphlet of Hanagumi Shibai, a Kabuki version of Tempest Arashi nochi Hare in the style of Maruhon Kabuki. Tokyo: National Theatre / Osaka: National Bunraku Theatre, 2009. Kawai, Shoichiro. “Kabuki Twelfth Night and Kyogen Richard III: Shakespeare as a Cultural Catalyst”. Shakespeare Survey 64: Shakespeare as Cultural Catalyst. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 114-20. Kawato, Michiaki. Ed. Meiji no Shakespeare [Shakespeare in Meiji Era]. 2 vols. Tokyo: Oozora-sha, 2004. Kishi, Tetsuo, and Graham Bradshaw. Shakespeare in Japan. London: Continuum, 2005. Kitagawa, Tadahiko. Zeami. Tokyo: Chuokoron-sha, 1972. Kurosawa Akira Kenkyukai [Research Society]. Ed. Kurosawa Akira: Yumeno Ashiato [Footprints of his Dream]. Tokyo: Kyodotsushin-sha, 1999. Marukawa, Kayoko. Kijutsushi Tanjou [Birth of Magician]: Shokyokusai Tenichi, Tenji and Tenkatsu. Tokyo: Shincho-sha, 1984. Minami, Ryuta. “‘What, has this thing appear’d again tonight? : ’ Re-playing Shakespeares on the Japanese Stage”. Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia. Eds. Poonam Trivedi and Ryuta Minami. London: Routledge, 2010. 76-94. Mine, Takashi. Teikoku Gekijo Kaimaku [Opening of The Empire Theatre]. Tokyo: Chuokoron-sha, 1996. Ninagawa, Yukio. Tatakau Gekijo [Fighting Stage]. Tokyo: NHK Shuppan, 1999. Ninagawa, Yukio, and Hiroshi Hasebe. Enshutsujutsu [Dramaturgy]. Tokyo: Kinokuniya-shoten, 2002. H ISAO O SHIMA 172 Orgel, Stephen. Ed. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Tempest. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. Revised Edition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Oshima, Hisao. “‘Country Vanquished but Rivers and Mountains Remain: ’ the Afterwar Japanese Intertextuality of Kumonosujo”. Shakespeare News Shakespeare Society of Japan 48.1 (2008): 21-31. Pound, Ezra, and Ernest Fenollosa. The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1959. Sado Museum. Ed. Historical Walks in Sadogashima. Tokyo: Kawade-shobo-shinsha, 1998. Senda, Akihiko. “The Rebirth of Shakespeare in Japan: from the 1960s to the 1990s”. Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage. Eds. Takashi Sasayama, J. R. Mulryne, and Margaret Shewring. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 15-37. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Suematsu, Michiko. “Import/ export: Japanizing Shakespeare”. Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance. Eds. Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 155-169. Suzuki, Tadashi. Engeki towa Nanika [What Is Drama? ]. Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1988. Takahashi, Yasunari. “Introduction: Suzuki’s work in the context of Japanese theatre”. The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi. Eds. Ian Carruthers and Takahashi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 1-5. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. “Two Japanese Tempests”. Shakespeare in Performance: The Tempest. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011. 151-167. von Schwerin-High, Friederike. Shakespeare, Reception and Translation. London: Continuum, 2004. Yamada, Shoichi. Bunraku. Tokyo: Gyosei, 1990. Yamada, Shoichi. “Tempest Zakkan [Thoughts about Tempest]”. Production Pamphlet of Tempest Arashi nochi Hare. Tokyo: National Theatre/ Osaka: National Bunraku Theatre, 2009. Yamaguchi, Takeshi. Ed. Ninagawa Yukio no Chousen [Ninagawa’s Challenges]. Tokyo: Heibon-sha, 2001. Yamazaki, Yuichiro. Ed. Hajimete no Noh - Kyogen [Introduction to Noh and Kyogen]. Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1999. R URU L I The Chinese reception of The Tempest: a visual examination of three productions China’s acquaintance with The Tempest, as with all of Shakespeare’s plays, began in an indirect way: Chinese readers first encountered the story through earlytwentieth-century translations of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare; then early spoken drama adaptations based on the Tales were acted for Chinese audiences. Gradually, over the 1930s to early 1960s, China saw accomplished translated productions of Shakespeare’s great works, except for The Tempest. Not until 1982, six years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, was a full translation of The Tempest first staged in mainland China. Based mainly on stage images - first-hand materials from the respective theatre companies - this paper examines three performances of The Tempest: a spoken drama production in Beijing (1982, Fig. 1); a Taiwanese song-music adaptation (2004, revived in 2008, Fig. 2); and a Chinese/ Danish co-production (2010, Fig. 3) by the Shanghai Spoken Drama Arts Centre in collaboration with the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe and the Copenhagen-based companies Meridiano Theatre and Batida Theatre. Figure 1: A kind father and an obedient daughter, Central Academy of Drama, 1982. Courtesy of the Central Academy of Drama (CAD). R URU L I 174 Figure 2: A blissful couple, Contemporary Legendary Theatre, 2004. Courtesy of the Contemporary Legendary Theatre (CLT). Figure 3: Acrobatic techniques are used in the Chinese-Danish Tempest, 2010. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 175 Spanning three decades of immense change in every sphere of life, the contrasting genres of these three versions of the play serve to express the different intentions of their respective practitioners because each stage presentation conveys its practitioners’ understanding both of the text of The Tempest, created four centuries ago, and of the current reality in which they live and work. These productions, as witnesses to the ongoing transformation of the Chinese-speaking world, testify to the retrospection of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the complexity involved in Taiwan’s past and present, and the adjustment of the Communist ideology in mainland China when economic reform induced a taste for extravagant style on the stage. The following analysis, based on production images and set in the context of the rapid social-political-economic changes experienced in mainland China and Taiwan, investigates each production’s distinct approach towards subjects such as magic, politics, revenge, conspiracy, and romantic love. It is also, in a sense, a response to my own work on the topic of Shakespeare on the Chinese stage during the 1980s and 1990s (2003), which critiques Rustom Bharucha’s passionate argument that intercultural performance is a “dead end” (2) and supports the proposition that intercultural theatre is a “two-way street” (Li 2003, 8). My analysis of Chinese practice demonstrates that when Shakespeare is performed by Chinese theatre the latter is certainly affected, but Chinese theatre also contributes to Shakespeare performance and scholarship. Yet, as the twenty-first century develops, the global impact on Chinese practitioners appears far greater than I had anticipated, and the three versions of The Tempest illustrate a more complicated process than a clearlysigned “two-way street” (ibid.) that I had discerned ten years ago. Erika Fische-Lichte points out that “the process of interweaving would yield something new that cannot readily be identified with any culture in particular” (294). Thus the investigation below questions how, amid the globalizing influence, the three productions successfully stretched the boundaries of Bourdieu’s concept of a “cultural field” - despite various problems on the artistic side while experimenting with disparate genres - and explored new theatrical and cultural spaces through a process of struggle, negotiation and compromise with Shakespeare’s text. The article pays specific attention to the performers’ gestures, movements, makeup, costumes and the mise-en-scène, testing the visual relation to the written play and its material scope and philosophical implications. Bourdieu’s idea that the cultural field is not only a “field of forces” but also a “field of struggles” (30) well defines the active nature of the long and complicated process of an intercultural work: Every new position, in asserting itself as such, determines a displacement of the whole structure and that, by the logic of action and reaction, […] leads to all sorts of changes in the position-taking of the occupants of the other positions. (58) R URU L I 176 Seventeen years later, Ric Knowles’s conclusion concerning the process of the intercultural theatre is more severe and designates it as the “interculture war” (21). Shakespeare is staged by both modes of Chinese theatre: spoken drama, huaju, a modern Western-style theatre devised by reformers at the beginning of the twentieth century; and the traditional Chinese theatre of sung-verse, xiqu, a generic term for over 300 indigenous regional operatic theatres. Spoken drama (huaju) has been the predominant mode for performing Shakespeare ever since the modern theatre first emerged and found that his plays provided it with a ready-made repertoire. Most spoken drama Shakespeare productions are based on straight translations. Productions of Shakespeare by the traditional Chinese music theatre have to adapt his plays to suit the performing styles of aria singing, dance, mime and acrobatics. Some adaptations have tried to follow the spoken drama conventions by retaining a European Renaissance setting with performers made-up to look like Westerners. Other sinifiers instead treat Shakespeare as a source of raw materials from which to create Chinese stories with Chinese characters. The 1982 spoken drama production: an ode of forgiveness The 1982 production at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing 1 was a presentation by the finalists, including twenty-one male and nine female students, of a four-year BA training course in the Department of Acting. It was directed by Tsai Chin, a British Chinese artist, who was among the first few “foreign experts” (Chin 118) invited after the Cultural Revolution to teach at one of the two most prestigious drama academies. The first performance on the Chinese stage of a full translation of The Tempest was marked by both the Academy and the National Association of Chinese Dramatists which organized seminars involving Shakespeareans and practitioners. As a “report” of a five-month-long teaching and learning experience (September 1981-January 1982), the production was the debut public performance of these students who had been admitted in 1978. The first entrants to the academy once the national higher-education system had been rebuilt after the end of the Cultural Revolution, they had been selected from some four thousand applicants through a strict entrance procedure of three written exams plus two auditions. It was also the first time that Chinese students had worked with a professional director from abroad rather than with their own tutors, although 1 Since the establishment of the two drama academies in the 1950s, finalists of both academies in Beijing and Shanghai present two public performances each year and these productions tend to make great contributions to theatrical activities because, as works done by teaching organizations, they enjoy less ideological interference (also less box office pressures nowadays) and more freedom of doing experimental work. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 177 most of them also worked on the professional stage. Those many “firsts” meant unfamiliarity and demanded adjustments. Compared with the two later Tempest productions, the “struggles” to which Bourdieu refers involved in the 1982 work was a relatively straightforward issue since it was only five-and-half years after the Cultural Revolution when anything that had not conformed to Mao’s leftist ideology had been publicly denounced and banned. The early 1980s revealed how the whole nation was thirsty for knowledge and information from the outside world. In addition, Shakespeare was very popular in China at the time, and Chinese audiences were reawakened to the beauty of Shakespeare’s plays by six productions between 1979 and 1981: three mandarin productions of Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet; the Old Vic’s touring Hamlet (1979, directed by Toby Robertson); a Tibetan version of Romeo and Juliet (1981, performed by Tibetan students at the Shanghai Theatre Academy); and Measure for Measure, which Toby Robertson was invited to direct for the Beijing People’s Art Theatre (1981). So the Central Academy of Drama was ready to embrace The Tempest warm-heartedly without question. Nonetheless, over five months, the process for both the British-based professional director and the individual members of the Chinese student cast still entailed complicated negotiations to deal between a Shakespeare play and the participants’ different theatrical traditions. In addition, each individual’s social and training background also contributed to the eventual outcome of the performance. The following discussion will first explore the director’s artistic approach which exemplifies her intention of using The Tempest for her teaching; secondly her interpretation of the play; and finally the student cast’s reaction towards an experimental and intercultural work. Director Tsai Chin, the daughter of one of the most famous actors in jingju (known as Beijing Opera in the West), moved to England after her early life in Shanghai, graduated from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1951, and played the eponymous role in The World of Suzie Wong on London’s West End stage. As an invited foreign expert, and being able to communicate in Chinese with staff and students, Tsai Chin took advantage of her “dual identity” and felt she “had no communication problems and no difficulty reading facial expressions - a joke and a laugh in the class dispelled initial anxieties” (120). Yet this was her first trip back to her home country after a long absence; a trip with strong personal feelings because her father had died in the purges of the Cultural Revolution. Her article reveals her profound emotions after her five months’ work in China: “I followed the same profession as my father, but trained and worked in the West. Returning to share my professional experience with my countrymen after the holocaust was a sad but proud moment for me” (118). The discussions below tease out “the anxieties” and the different approaches in these situations. R URU L I 178 Tsai Chin was keen to offer her experience and knowledge of the contemporary Western theatre to Chinese colleagues and students. The Tempest not only gave her a home to accommodate thirty young students but also afforded her a good opportunity to introduce contemporary Western concepts and methods of presenting plays on the stage. ‘Western’ here means her experience and knowledge of a group of avant-garde practitioners like Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and others who had not been content with the established theatre in the West and sought inspiration from Asian theatres. While such experimental theatre movements were being pioneered one after another during the post-war period in the outside world, mainland China’s traumatic years of civil war had been followed in the 1950s and 1960s by its self-imposed isolation behind the bamboo curtain. The fact that spoken drama practitioners had never staged The Tempest before 1982 illustrates the problematic binaries they established between the spoken drama - a theatrical form imported from the West - and China’s own indigenous song-dance theatre. The distinctiveness of The Tempest, its supernatural spirit, fantasy, destiny and the hand of God, all seemed far removed from the Chinese mental image of what drama should be, based on essentially naturalistic material, such as the works of Ibsen, Chekhov, O’Neill, or even Shakespeare’s own earlier tragedies or comedies. Yet what had deterred previous Chinese artists was something that inspired Tsai Chin. Although the two theatrical forms of modern spoken drama and indigenous song-dance theatre had their own aesthetic principles, they could absorb certain elements from each other to expand their own boundaries. The magic power and spirits in the original play assisted her to combine the Western canon with facets of jingju, China’s own theatrical tradition, and this helped her challenge the orthodox treatment of Shakespeare’s work on the Chinese stage that had been laid down in the 1950s by the Soviet experts invited at that time to teach at the two drama academies. 2 The following two images illustrate the conventional Chinese presentation of a Shakespeare play. Figure 4 shows Much Ado About Nothing (1979, Shanghai Youth Spoken Drama Company), re-creating the 1957 production directed by the Soviet expert Yevgeniya Konstantinovna Lipkovskaya. This 1979 revival was the first Shakespeare production to appear after the Cultural Revolution. Fig. 5 is The Merchant of Venice (1981, China Youth Art theatre) by Zhang Qihong, a Moscow-educated director. The overt message from the two images is that the story takes place afar and has nothing to do with the Chinese reality. All characters are heavily made-up, making full use of wigs and prosthetic noses, with strongly-painted round eyes and artificial lashes, which help Chinese performers look like Westerners. They all wear well-cut costumes, precise copies of the Renaissance fashion. Their poses reinforce the 2 Details of the Soviet’s works can be seen in Li 2003 (53-69). The Chinese reception of The Tempest 179 impression of a different type of physical presence: for example, the way Beatrice stands in fig. 4; Portia raises her finger and holds her skirt in fig. 5; and how the two male characters position their legs. The careful composition of the actors expresses a hospitable and appreciative impression of the scenes (5.2 in Much Ado and 3.2 in The Merchant). Holding his arm high, Benedick looks up at Beatrice’s profile with his full attention, clearly revealing his admiration for Lady Disdain’s wit and quick tongue. Portia and Bassanio gaze into each other’s eyes, smiling and enchanted with each other’s company. The stylization of the setting - presented by the arch against which Beatrice and Benedick lean; Cupid (the Western icon of love) above the fountain’s elegant arcs of water; the projected shadows of tall Gothic buildings behind Bassanio and Portia - suggests the directors’ attention to the demands of presenting an exotic image on the Chinese stage. Figure 4: The 1979 Revival of Much Ado About Nothing, first directed by Soviet director Yevgeniya Konstantivnovna Lipkovskaya in 1957. Courtesy of the Shanghai Theatre Academy. R URU L I 180 Figure 5: The Merchant of Venice was one of the early Shakespeare productions in the post-Cultural Revolution period by Chinese Youth’s Art Theatre, 1980. Courtesy of the director Zhang Qihong. By contrast to the above images of magnificent scenery, doublet and hose costumes, blonde wigs and prosthetic noses, the 1982 The Tempest adopted a minimalist design for set and costumes, conveying the flexibility of the acting space, a notable feature of the traditional Chinese theatre (see figs. 6 and 7). Figure 6: Prospero creates the storm battling Alonso and the company’s ship. Courtesy of CAD. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 181 Figure 7: Prospero encounters the shipwrecked survivor, 1982. Courtesy of CAD. The presentation of the 1982 production was a bold innovation at the time, challenging the long-established conception of how spoken drama should deal with a Western masterpiece. To Tsai Chin, a simple set could help her students live on the stage more naturally. She says: The set consisted of only two rocks, so that the students did not have to compete with the elaborate sets which the Chinese are so good at painting. The costumes were basic tunics and trousers not identified with any particular period or country; thus the students filled their costumes with ease and without self-consciousness. Miranda, the only mortal woman in the play, wore a long dress. Symbolic colours were used to denote status and character, a notion borrowed from Beijing opera (123). Corresponding to the minimal stage design and simple costumes most actors were natural-looking, except for the spirits who wore stylized makeup, as did Trinculo and Stephano (see fig. 8). Figure 8: Flask in hand, Stephano and his friend Trinculo are admired by Caliban. Courtesy of CAD. R URU L I 182 The rehearsals and blocking were based on a variety of exercises Tsai Chin gave students to carry out. “Lines were learned gradually rather than by rote, and both the history of the characters and off-stage happenings described in the play were improvised so that the actors were thoroughly familiar with the play before blocking” (Tsai 122). She discovered that students lacked spontaneity in acting due to the “obsessive analysis of script and character, plus the Chinese social expectation of restraint in public” (120). She concluded this was a problem caused by overemphasizing certain aspects of the Stanislavsky System taught by the Soviet tutors in the 1950s. It is fair to say that the Method in the 1980s was already strongly tinged with the Chinese colour, due to the country’s political, social and cultural impact over the past three decades. Not only the relationship between China and the former USSR encountered severe problems in the late 1950s, the decade-long Cultural Revolution further isolated China from the outside world. In addition, the conventional style of presenting Western plays, as shown in Figs. 4 and 5, invited students to put on a histrionic display. In order to “force” the students to act spontaneously and from internal motivation Tsai Chin asked them not to “jot one word down on paper” (122), nor did she allow them to view the BBC production of The Tempest. Conversely, in the early 1980s, it was normal practice for Chinese companies putting on Western plays to seek special permission to see recordings of such exemplars; indeed, it was regarded as a major privilege theatre practitioners could enjoy because of the difficulty and cost of obtaining any foreign video recording. Among various exercises of “physicalization” (ibid.), an expression used by Tsai Chin to describe how to help actors get to know their characters’ feelings through their bodies, the “rope exercises” proved to be most efficient. Tsai Chin interpreted The Tempest as a play about relationships: the rope symbolized the bond between people, and the ways lines were spoken accorded with the physical feelings delineated by the rope. Thus, for Prospero and Caliban, the latter was fastened while the master used the rope to drag or to control the slave. Between Prospero and Ariel the servant was asked to hold one end of the rope while the other end was in the master’s hand. Again, Prospero used the rope to react whenever Ariel was obedient or rebellious while Ariel had to feel the movement of the rope and respond spontaneously. When the rope was in the hands of Miranda and Ferdinand its nature changed to suit their relationship. Liang Bolong 3 , a lecturer at the Central Academy of Drama, observed: 3 Chinese names are given in Chinese style, i.e. family name first, followed by given name, unless otherwise printed. All translations from Chinese into English are mine unless otherwise noted. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 183 These exercises [of the rope] were very simple, but they helped students quickly gain feelings, and understand the characterization and the relationship between characters. The communication between characters was carried out through body reactions and thus it was more immediate and accurate (59). Relationship was the key to the plot; it also helped the whole group understand the new reading of the play that the director wanted to achieve. Tsai Chin found The Tempest, written by an English poet in the 1600s, remained extremely pertinent to the reality of 1980s China because “the lesson in forgiveness […] mirrored the attitude adopted by the Chinese people towards their former persecutors during the Cultural Revolution” (121). The theme also reflected her personal loss since both of her parents had died tragically during that chaotic time. The original play’s motifs of tempest, shipwreck, revenge and reconciliation, and Prospero’s final speech, projected a complicated and intriguing perspective on contemporary China. In many ways Chinese people in the early 1980s had similar impressions of the outside world to those of English audiences when The Tempest was first written. The stage direction in act 5 of the Folio Tempest: “Here Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess”, and Gonzalo’s amazement at the young couple’s sudden appearance paralleled the wonder Chinese people discovered in Shakespeare’s plays and in many other foreign or Chinese masterpieces after the Cultural Revolution. “Re-liberated” was the catchphrase of the time. The play prompted actors and audiences to “rejoice / Beyond a common joy” (5.1.206-7) 4 at getting rid of the ultra-leftist control and gaining the enticing prospect of “O brave new world” (5.1.183). Tsai Chin paid much attention to the play’s final discovery scene, but she did not go for any spectacle. Simplistic but graceful was the style of the production. Instead of placing the couple at the back of the stage (as in the stagecraft of Shakespeare’s era) she moved them to the very front of the stage (fig. 1). Prospero looked on at the young couple, a miracle he had created, from afar without emotion. The close of the play unites joy with forgiveness: “[t]hough the seas threaten, they are merciful” (5.1.178). A particular charm of the 1982 Chinese Prospero was that he valued forgiveness more highly than revenge, freely pardoning the “three men of sin” (3.3.53). Significantly, in this staging, Caliban was no longer a “savage and deformed slave” but unfolded himself “to stand like a proud man on the same rock where Prospero had first stood at the beginning of the play” (Tsai 124), (see fig. 9). The five-month learning experience through workshops, exercises and rehearsals was not easy for the class of thirty students. They found Tsai Chin’s approach to spoken drama and to a Shakespeare play differed mar- 4 The Arden revised edition (2011) by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan is used in this article. R URU L I 184 Figure 9: Caliban finally occupies the rock, which has been Prospero’s position. Courtesy of CAD. kedly from their training and expectation. Tsai Chin observed that some had considered her use of jingju concepts in The Tempest a “sacrilege to Shakespeare” and sighed: “Reverence for this Western genius was greater than for their own traditional theatre” (124). Similarly, it was difficult for students to access the characters and the action in the play through Tsai Chin’s method of “physicalization” because, to them, literary analysis would constitute the only correct mode of approaching such profound characters as Shakespeare had created. Many games and exercises were regarded as childish and “all a bit of a joke” (Tsai 122-23) as, for instance, the exercise of “carrying chairs”. In the rehearsals, the student who acted Ferdinand was ordered to carry chairs up and down the rehearsal hall just as he would have to carry logs in the play. Although initially reluctant, the student eventually found the tiredness and frustration he endured from carrying the chairs turn into feelings of real anger which helped him begin to understand Ferdinand, his situation and his relationship with Miranda in 3.1. The exercise for this particular student was significant because it put him in a new position in his way to acting Ferdinand and offered him a new perspective of performance in general. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 185 The question of the makeup presented a similar “struggle” to other students. In the 1980s, using wigs and prosthetic noses, plus heavy paint, was the norm when spoken drama performed a foreign play. Tsai Chin’s insistence on a natural look in the 1982 production proved contentious, as she recorded: Confrontation came during the dress rehearsal. The male actors wanted to put on their usual heavy rouge and thick eyebrows. I made up one man and woman “naturally” and challenged them to tell me which makeup, theirs or mine, looked more like a human face. It was their will against mine (124). While the 1982 Tempest paid much attention to the power relationships between characters in the original play, Tsai Chin’s experimental exercises and rehearsals on relationship gave rise, in turn, to effects that altered the actual relationships both between student and tutor and between actor and acting. The 2004 Taiwanese musical adaptation: fantasy or Zen interpretation? The 2004 Tempest adaptation was by the Taiwan-based Contemporary Legend Theatre (CLT hereafter) and its founder Wu Hsing-kuo, who co-directed the play with film director Hsui Hark, a major figure of Hong Kong cinema. The stage and costume designer was Tim Kam-tim Yip, whose work for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won him an Oscar. The script was co-written by Xi Zhigan, a playwright based on the mainland, and Wu Hsing-kuo. Wu’s CLT is one of the most exciting theatre companies aiming to fuse Western and Eastern theatrical arts. Among the productions Wu and the CLT have staged since 1986, when the company was founded, four have quarried materials from Shakespeare plays: Macbeth (1986), Hamlet (1990), King Lear (2001) and The Tempest (2004). Among these adaptations, The Tempest has attracted the greatest controversy. It was hailed for its breathtaking visual effect on the stage, yet it was also severely criticized for lacking clear directorial control. Through the following discussion of key scenes in the adaptation, the change of themes of the performance, and how the production team sought to express the fantasy created by the original, we will find that the practitioners seemed to have become lost in the dynamic sources of a versatile play: bewildered by the diverse directions of interpretation and debate offered by Shakespeare’s text. Not just “interculture wars” are involved, the intracultural aspects are even more fascinating. R URU L I 186 This adaptation of The Tempest consists of twelve scenes5 divided into two acts, and the new structure is based on Prospero’s fondness for books. Very possibly it was influenced by Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books. The performance of every scene displays the magical power of Prospero’s knowledge and his insight into the whole world, with the word “book” appearing in each scene’s title. For example, scene 1 is “The Book of Magic” which portrays the shipwreck, while scene 9 is “The Book of Slavery” which involves the conspiracy between Caliban and the jester and the butler.6 The images in this section show the extensive use of the written Chinese characters as symbols of knowledge, printed either on the backdrop or on Prospero’s magic gown. The stage/ costume design visually expresses the theme and the structure of the adaptation. Figure 10 below is from scene 1, “The Book of Magic”. The material of the magic cloak is printed with Chinese characters in the style of ancient inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells from the 16 th -11 th centuries BC. Bobuluo (Chinese Prospero) gives Ailier (Ariel), a female figure in white, the order to unleash the tempest on the sea: Figure 10: Waving the banner in her hand, Ailier follow her master’s instruction to create the tempest. Courtesy of CLT. 5 Both 2004 and 2008 versions contain twelve scenes, yet the contents are different. In the 2004 version, act 1 consists of seven scenes including the one in which “Bobuluo’s ugly slave Kaliban seeks to approach Milanda but only to be scolded and insulted by Bobuluo.” The 2008 version deleted this scene but added one to act 2, in which Bobuluo made Kaliban a Spirit of the Earth, who was equal to Ailier, the Spirit of the Air. 6 Instead of using a Chinese transliteration of their names, the adaption used their job titles to make it easier for audiences to understand. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 187 The following image (fig. 11) is from scene 3, “The book of Time”, when Bobuluo tells his daughter Milanda (Miranda) the background story of the usurpation, the honest counsellor Gangzhaluo (Gonzalo), the divine providence, and this remote magic island. The written characters on the backdrop and its yellow and red colour scheme blend well with the aria singing about the melancholy and intriguing history of the past twelve years. Figure 11: Courtesy of CLT. As the designer Tim Yip expected, written characters ably convey the image of knowledge contained in the original play. Yet the real magic power of the play, which has invited many different renderings since it was first performed in 1611, needs more dramatic action. Wu Hsing-kuo believes that “to make traditional topics more meaningful they must be given not only a change of style, but also a new spirit, new thinking, and new attitudes that reflect contemporary society” (2004). 7 Indeed, the choice of The Tempest in 2004 demonstrated the artist’s intention of using the play’s socio-historical implications to mirror Taiwan’s reality. Stimulated partly by the political and colonial themes that had excited much interest among academics and practitioners, and partly by the changing political landscape in Taiwan, the adaptation emphasized its representation of Kaliban (Caliban) as a Taiwanese aborigine. Wu asserted: “The Tem- 7 Cited from his speech at the conference: ‘Tradition and Innovation in Chinese Opera - Professional Identity and Interculturalism,’ organized by the Centre for Theatre Laboratory Studies in the Institute for Aesthetic Studies (29 September to 3 October 2004). I went to Aarhus and Holstebro in Denmark to join the CLT which had been invited by Eugenio Barba to perform their adaption of King Lear for the 40 th anniversary of the foundation of the Odin Theatre. R URU L I 188 pest was a play that the CLT produced especially for the place we live, work and love dearly” (2011). 8 Taiwan, a mountainous island off the southeast coast of mainland China, underwent periods of colonization by the Dutch (1624-1662) and Japanese (1895-1945). Since 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gained control of the mainland and established the People’s Republic of China, the Nationalist government of the Republic of China moved to Taiwan. The Nationalist policies in the early 1950s further sharpened the social divisions evidenced by the 1947 massacre when Nationalist forces suppressed an antigovernment uprising resulting in a great number of civilian deaths. The Nationalists’ political dominance remained uninterrupted until 2000 when the presidential election was won by the Democratic Progressive Party, which has a distinctive Taiwanese identity. Taiwan’s 23 million residents consist of Han Chinese, Taiwanese, and nine different aboriginal groups. The intricate history of occupation by different rulers and the social issues between ethnicities made the island sensitive to the conceptual relationships of outsider/ occupier and insider/ native, giving The Tempest particular topicality. Using a jingju actor with an aboriginal family background to act Kaliban added further connotations to the performance. The character of Kaliban is highlighted in scene 8, “The Book of Dream”, which opens the second half of the performance. Kaliban, acted by Yang Jingming, a jingju actor from the Paiwan tribe (Wu 244), appears on the stage amid a smoke effect suggesting the beautiful mist of the mountains, accompanied by newly-composed music tinged with a strong Paiwan melodic colour. Whereas in previous scenes (especially in front of his master) Kaliban had always appeared bent-over in a humpbacked posture, he now stands tall despite carrying heavy logs on his back. Wearing a costume of leaves with a long thick tail, he shows his dignity, walking freely in his own land. To match the tail, his handsome face is painted with several chevron-shaped white strokes across the nose, quite unlike any of the customary facial patterns in jingju. The first line of his song contains only a few vowels without words, giving the impression that he enjoys the freedom on his own. Suddenly he stumbles as if the wounds, caused previously by Bobuluo’s whipping, hurt him. It is worth noting that Kaliban’s dance is not choreographed in accordance with the jingju principles of movement, such as “roundness” or “opposition”. 9 8 Interview with the author held 14 August 2011 in Edinburgh when Wu performed his one-man show Li Er Is Here at the Edinburgh Festival. 9 The principles stem from the contradictory forces of yin and yang that interact to produce the Great Ultimate in Chinese aesthetics. For example, when raising one’s leg in jingju the upward and outward motion of the actor’s foot towards his forehead produces a rounded shape. Similarly, when the actor’s arms stretch out to both sides (before leg kicking starts) they should form a curve rather than a straight line. In order to The Chinese reception of The Tempest 189 Instead, it is a blend of folk dance with types of movement in-between an ape and a human being. Kaliban starts his main aria created on the basis of the original song of “noises, / Sounds and sweet airs” (3.2.135-6). Again, it is not in a jingju musical mode but in a Taiwanese folk melody. Haystacks piling high, / Let the flame grow. / Burn, burn Bobuluo to death, / That tyrant should die. / I still remember when you first landed, / You used sweet words to trick me. / I told you where the best springs and the salt wells are, / Where good soil and ponds are. / Oi-yi-ya-ho, hi-yi-ya-ho. / You taught me to be civilized, / Saying you were helping me / But in the end you made me / A homeless wandering destitute, / Lost in my own land. / Oi-yi-ya-ho, hi-yi-ya-ho. / (Starting a speech style of shuban 10 .) / Words and moral codes of conduct, / Moving my head sideways, / Reciting all this nonsense. / You scold me calling me / Dirty low-class savage mongrel, / Good-for-nothing loudmouth. / I learn your walk, / With my back straight, / Sticking out my belly, / Lowering my head, averting my eyes, / Swaying my bottom sideways. / You accuse me saying I’m ugly, / Moving about, (starting to sing again) like a praying mantis. / Oi-yi-ya-ho, hi-yi-ya-ho. / (Shuban again) / I swear and curse so that venomous spells / Will land on your head / From inside out from head to toe, / Poisonous zits will spread all over your body. / I’ll curse so you will become a monkey, / Unable to control your face, mouth always agape. / I curse so you will become a porcupine, / Your prickly spines piercing through your stomach. / (Singing) / Ancestral mother or mother, / To curse him daily. / I suffer huge pains in my heart and all through my body, / How come he’s still alive / That evil tyrant! / Ancestral mother, oh mother, / Oi-yi-ya-ho, hi-yi-ya-ho. / Ancestral mother or mother, ancestral mother, ancestral mother. 11 While still calling for the ancestral mother, Kaliban falls to the ground. Then, at centre stage, a triangular-shaped monumental statue begins shaking with a strange noise and splits apart. From the smoke emerges a witch (fig. 12) who claims to be Kaliban’s ancestral spirit from the Flying-fish tribe. Summoning her spirit warriors to fight against Bobuluo’s spirits, led by Ailier, the witch launches a fierce war, presented through jingju’s martial arts and acrobatic tricks. During the fight the witch becomes increasingly angry with Kaliban, scorning her offspring as weak-kneed, and hits him down. Finally triumphant in the battle, the witch and her spirits celebrate their victory: achieve ‘roundness’ every movement must begin in the opposite direction to its final destination. Those who are interested in the jingju movements can see Li 2010. 10 Literal translation is: count beats. It could be over-simplified as the Chinese rap, in which lines of different lengths are in strict rhyme, speaking rhythmically to the percussive beat without other musical accompaniment. 11 Transcription of the English subtitles from the DVD recording kindly offered by the CLT. R URU L I 190 Figure 12: Courtesy of CLT. Figure 13: Courtesy of CLT. Despite the prominence assigned to Kaliban in the CLT’s Taiwanese adaptation the attempted post-colonial presentation of the play seemed rather halfhearted. There were several reasons for this problem. Firstly, although the adaptation stressed Kaliban’s victim status it could not extenuate the moral The Chinese reception of The Tempest 191 outrage of his crime of attempted sexual assault on Milanda written in the original play. Secondly, Wu Hsing-kuo, the real driving-force behind this production, had an ambivalent attitude towards Taiwan’s reality when the work was first created. On one hand, he was against what the Nationalists had done to the aborigines in Taiwan; on the other, he did not agree with the Democratic Progressive Party’s policy of exclusively promoting the ‘Taiwanese consciousness.’ For Wu, there was no conflict between the Chineseness and the Taiwaneseness of his own cultural identity. He was born and bred in Taiwan, and regarded the island as his sole homeland. Yet, having worked on the jingju stage since he was ten years old, jingju - a theatre that originated from Beijing - was not only his career but also a crucial part of his life. He loved it but also hated it because he found the stylized theatre shackled his own creativity. The psychological complexity surrounding this Taiwanese actor and his feelings for jingju, best illustrated by Wu’s one-man-adaptation of King Lear, 12 put him in the avant-garde of the performing world. Since 1986, long before the DPP came to power, he had been seeking to revolutionize jingju through the perspective of his particularly Taiwanese upbringing. Thus, as cited in Wu Peichen’s article, Wu Hsing-kuo made a defiant personal statement: I was very frustrated and annoyed by the nativist cultural policy and its monopolization of art festivals [in Taiwan]. … Why was I suddenly labelled an “outsider” by the new dominant discourse of nativism? Who is the real native Taiwanese, then? Why did the art that I perform, jingju, suddenly become an antithesis to the Taiwanese identity? (243). The complicated historical background of the island and its current politics made it difficult to define a clear strategy for adapting The Tempest in Taiwan, while the casting arrangement, with Wu acting Bobuluo using jingju elements and Yang acting Kaliban using Taiwanese aboriginal song/ dance, added more strands to an already tangled mesh. It is worth noting that in order to tone down the unpleasant side of Kaliban and lessen the antagonism between the slave and the master), Wu, in the 2008 version which was taken to the Hong Kong Arts Festival, cut the whole scene concerning Kaliban’s approach to Milanda out. However, the cutting was not enough to solve the problems entangled in an ambiguous text, social and political background to Taiwan and to the individual performers, and the different origins of the performing forms. As Wu Peichen observed: By representing native Taiwan by the Taiwanese aborgines only, and by making changes in the relationship between Ariel and Caliban, Wu still reaffirmed hierarchical relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in his production, thus 12 Those who are interested in Wu’s adaptation Li Er Is Here can see Li 2006 (195-215), and Alex Huang (31-47). R URU L I 192 in turn reflecting the deeply rooted iedological hegemony of the ruling class coming from the outside. (247-48) Not only taking the above Kaliban’s scene out of the revised work in 2008, Wu also tried to emphasize the idea of “reconciliation.” He felt he could discern the Buddhist concept of zen or meditation in The Tempest. The anger originally expressed in the adaptation diminished. Instead, the revised work placed greater emphasis on the theme of understanding in the later scenes, with a peaceful relationship growing between Babuluo and people harmonizing together with the environment. Wu Hsing-kuo said at the interview when the adaptation revived: Recently, in Taiwan’s special political environment, the mutual exclusion, intimidations, and divisions of ethnic groups were Taiwan’s historical wounds. Producing The Tempest was to pray for the serenity after the purification of the mind. The care for aboriginal people and nature should be one of the most concerned issues in the contemporary world. The new theme of reconciliation and freedom was illustrated by the end of the performance. After discarding his enchanted red gown, the book and the magic banner, Bobuluo starts a long aria, delivered through a blended style of singing and chanting on the basis of the kunju 13 mode. Figure 14: Holding the magic banner in his hand, Babuluo is asking the heaven what he should do with the power he once had. Courtesy of CLT. 13 It was an older theatrical genre than jingju. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 193 Figure 15: Dropping his enchanted red gown on the ground, can Babuluo really go back to his real self and normal life? Courtesy of CLT. From now on my hands are empty, / I forego all magic art, / No longer imprisoned by my own spells and curses, / No longer commanding spirits and genies, / I return to my old self and my country. / I’ll no longer care about power and desire, / I’ll forgive what was wrong in the past. / No more blessings or guilt, / I leave behind the shackles of the spirit, / I’m grateful Heaven has relieved me of my vengeance, / With your kind applause, / Please grant me a gentle breeze, / So I can sail home, / Allow me to bid farewell to the stage, / This play ends now set me free. Set me free. 14 Chen Fang, a Taiwanese scholar, found that the new adaptation “revealed the Chinese Prospero’s psychological path to the Buddhism” (115). In order to reach the ultimate reconciliation, not only, as in the original play, does Bobuluo make possible the romance between his daughter Milanda and the Prince Huodingnan (Ferdinand) (see figs. 2 and 16), but now he also arranges a marriage between white-winged Ailier and Kaliban. Babuluo refers to the former as the Spirit of the Air while the latter is Spirit of the Earth. Wu Hsing-kuo said at the interview “Love and caring is what Taiwan needs today.” 15 However, the result shown on the stage was that Bobuluo intended to control everything, while critic Wang Youhui was anxious that such an arrangement “may cause the ‘family violence’ rather than the happiness of reconciliation brought by the love and forgiveness” (2005b, 106). 14 Transcription of the English subtitles from the DVD recording kindly offered by the CLT. 15 Recorded on the DVD The Tempest, produced by CLT, kindly offered to me by the company. R URU L I 194 Figure 16: Miranda, Prince Huodingnan and the spirits are happily together. Courtesy of CLT. Figure 17: The white-winged spirit Alier and Kaliban are forced to be a couple. Courtesy of CLT. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 195 Wang Anqi, a renowned scholar, playwright, and the Artistic Director of the Guoguang Jingju Company in Taiwan, points out astutely that when practitioners become confused by the various ideas that they want to use to interpret Shakespeare’s text the only thing one could expect from The Tempest would be “the magic effect” on the stage. 16 As a result, the fantasy born out of the artistic world created by Shakespeare offered the practitioners an easy escape. Tsui, as a film director famous for his kung fu masterpieces, worked on a stage production for the first time. As he wrote in his Director’s Words: “Even I was wondering what would happen when stage, Beijing Opera, Shakespeare worked together in my hands.” 17 He was fascinated to see how a Shakespeare play could stretch the possibility of the stage and the ability of jingju actors. Figure 18 shows the battle between the rival spirits. Ailier in white, using the stage convention of a female warrior role, jumps up and kicks the poles thrown towards her by the enemy led by the witch. Figure 18: Courtesy of CLT. Figure 19 below is the scene of the shipwreck. Working with Tim Yip, the stage and costume designer, the tempest and the shipwreck were portrayed through the costumes and body movements. This integration of scenes and costumes suggested a new direction for the stage design, imagery and per- 16 I was offered by CLT a letter written by Wang to both Wu Hsing-kuo and Lin Hsiu-wei about her comments on The Tempest. 17 The writing was kindly offered by the CLT Archive. R URU L I 196 formance. The “head” of the ship was formed by Ariel, who wore a phoenix hat, and the movements of her long cloak and of the performers depicting the people aboard created the storm-stricken vessel: Figure 19: Courtesy of CLT. As discussed earlier, Yip’s fascination lay purely in the materials and visual effect on the stage. Being a designer of both the set and costumes, he attempted to use the Chinese aesthetics of dialectic relations between fluidity and solidity, and concrete and abstract, to interpret the magic power of Prospero. To Yip, everything should be expressed by means of colour and shape. The most powerful character in the play, Prospero, not only seemed to know what and when something was going to happen but also managed to control everyone around him to a certain degree. Accordingly, Yip designed a most impressive red gown, 4 metres in length and 5 metres in width, which took twenty tailors to sew. Covered with golden symbols, the gown and backdrop created a fantasy world of the magical knowledge on the stage. The following image shows part of the width of the gown and the written characters: The Chinese reception of The Tempest 197 Figure 20: Courtesy of CLT. The design of the costume gave Wu Hsing-kuo, who acted Prospero, great difficulties to overcome in performing the protagonist’s movements. Moreover, to display the full length of the gown, Wu had often to stand on a high platform (this platform too was wrapped in a huge cloth with printed written Chinese characters). However, the flowing red, symbolic of Prospero’s power, together with the white colouration of Ailier and her retinue of spirits, enhanced the simplicity of the stage design to create a startlingly magical world. Yip referred to his work for The Tempest as ‘a costume theatre’ (Contemporary Legend Theatre). Figure 21: Photograph taken by the author. R URU L I 198 Challenged by the unusual costume and set design, Wu Hsing-kuo as a trained jingju actor and modern dancer had to be more creative. His versatility offers all kinds of possibilities for this intercultural work. The 2004 Tempest is not a Beijing Opera adaptation of the original play; rather it is an experimental work to blend vocal, musical, and physical elements from jingju, kunju, Taiwan aboriginal melodies, martial arts, and dance. Shakespeare’s plays have always offered Wu an opportunity to explore the Chinese tradition. Ailier-Ariel, the origin of the winged god Mercury (Vaughan and Vaughan 1998, 118) and the sea-nymph imagery from the text (1.2.302) stirred the Chinese practitioner’s imagination. As seen in the above images, in Wu’s production Ailier and her companions all wore large wings and qiao, a special type of high-heeled shoe used by female roles on the traditional stage to simulate the former Chinese custom of binding women’s feet. Unlike the traditional ‘hard’ wooden qiao, the modern-day reformed version is a soft type as depicted in fig. 22 with the rolled strips which are wrapped around the actor’s ankles to secure the shoes. Wearing qiao involves particular postures and steps expressed in light and speedy movements. Figure 22: Photograph taken by the author. It remains a matter of debate as to the effectiveness of Wu’s adaptation in articulating his concerns for aboriginal people and the environment in Taiwan or the zen he has sensed in the Tempest. Yet Wu takes a positive view of The Chinese reception of The Tempest 199 each of his attempts in intercultural theatre: “I’ve been on a difficult path. Every step was a fierce struggle, but every time these struggles brought me happiness” (Wang 2005a). The 2010 circus performance: from small dream to international coproduction Akin to the artists in Taiwan in 2004, the Italian artistic director Giacomo Ravicchio of the Copenhagen-based Meridiano Theatre chose The Tempest because of Shakespeare’s great creativity. The play could enable him to realize his dream of adapting a canonical work into a circus performance with clowns, acrobats, contortionists, magicians and ringmasters. Figure 23: A stunning scene at the opening. Courtesy of SDAC. Ravicchio saw the similarities between mariners and acrobats: I had in mind that the crew of a ship is very similar to the crew of a circus: they are people who come from different countries and travel constantly. Often they have problems with strings and tissue at the mercy of the wind. Shakespeare’s Tempest is a story made of numbers, one after another. It seemed to me that the idea of the circus was perfect for the show; the circus as we know it always mixes different styles and genres. (Nicholoson) R URU L I 200 Figure 24: The mariners and Ariel. Courtesy of SDAC. The Chinese-Danish Tempest premiered for the opening of the Danish Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. It employed a cast of five actors from the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, six actors from Meridiano Theatre, four acrobats from the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe, and eleven musicians from Batida Theatre orchestra. The language of the production was English, and Chinese side-titles were projected when it was performed in Shanghai. Figure 25: Miranda and Ferdinand. Courtesy of SDAC. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 201 Figure 26: And international cast added magic effect to the production. Caliban (front left) was played by a Chinese woman, while Ariel (far back) in white was played by a female acrobat. Courtesy of SDAC. This large-scale work of international cooperation had its origin in 2009 when Ravicchio was invited by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre to direct White Snake, a play adapted from a traditional Chinese folk tale with a wide variety of regional operatic versions. His bold exploration of homosexual themes added a modern twist to an old story, and his use of technology and digital images in the production impressed both the company and the audience. His idea of presenting a Shakespeare play in the form of a circus performance for the following year’s Expo was warmly accepted. It fits the current theatrical trend in twenty-first-century China: light-hearted, with extravagant visual effects and a show of pageantry. The production reduced the weight of the language and externalized the power and prominence in the canonical work by using colour, multimedia technology, music and acrobatic tricks. It is the “grand illusion” (2010) that the director Ravicchio attempted to create. The performance script follows the original structure of five acts but the Elizabethan poetic language is rewritten into more accessible everyday English apart from a few lines of Prospero’s monologues. Simple sentences from the original such as Ariel’s line “Do you love me, master? ” (4.1.48) are kept. In this 2010 work, Ariel repeated it whenever she was in a dialogue with Prospero, and the catchphrase helped the audience understand the master-servant relationship (Shanghai Spoken R URU L I 202 Drama Artistic Centre 2010). However, it is worth noting that the original “No? ” at the end of the line is dropped to further simplify Ariel’s motivation. Figure 27: The master and the servant. Courtesy of SDAC. Not only is the language made less ambiguous, but also the interpretation. Instead of getting into complex questions regarding Caliban’s enslavement, or the post-colonial analysis of Prospero, or the multi-vocal nature and the openness of the play, Ravicchio found the play “concerns a planned staging of events, an arranged performance, of which Prospero is the initiator and that ends in an ultimate reckoning between him and the royal thieves who have robbed him of his dukedom” (2010). The director’s interpretation was in tune with the dominant voice on the play among mainland Chinese Shakespeareans. Echoing Romantic criticism of The Tempest, Fang Ping, the translator of the latest Chinese version affirms that play is “a romantic comedy flying in the sky above the reality. […] a beautiful ode for mankind” (489-90). He also shares Wilson Knight’s view that “the poet presents a reflection of his whole work” (247). With a simplistic language and theme, the text afforded Ravicchio “a great opportunity to find previously unthought-of artistic approaches” (2010). The director paid his full attention to the theatricality involved in the original play and to the magic power as an outcome, when different cultures encounter and work together. At an interview with the China Daily, he said: I don't think it is very hard to integrate different elements. Diversity is the most interesting thing on this planet. […] The important thing is to take cultures, stories The Chinese reception of The Tempest 203 and styles, and, day after day, feel the crew getting more involved in the project. Only then will you probably get something special. (Zhang Kun) From the comments of the Chinese and Danish actors who rehearsed the play in both countries we can observe that conflicts occurred at all levels from the interpretation of the play, approaches to the character or to the acrobatic movements, to issues over language and even food. However, compromise was not difficult to reach because everyone was intrigued by what defines the play: a “process of poetic actualization” (Knight 247). The actualization involved all aspects, among which two were most noticeable. One was the music. The sounds that enchant Prospero’s island and accompany Ariel’s songs were performed by eleven musicians from Batida Theatre Orchestra, Denmark. Figure 28: Courtesy of SDAC. Prospero’s magic power was conveyed to the audience by means of the music, and sometimes by the strange percussion, played by the onstage band: it led Ferdinand to his meeting with Miranda and it awakened Gonzalo when the traitorous Antonio and Sebastian were plotting murder. The band also played at the masque. Red costume, ginger hair and huge prosthetic noses, a caricature of Danes in cartoons, gave the production a grotesque image tinged with humour. Chinese audiences welcomed the exotica. The other aspect of the production which received both wide acclaim and severe criticism was the style of circus performance of the canonical play. The challenging ‘sky-flying’ and breath-taking multimedia technology created a magical island on the stage. R URU L I 204 Figure 29: Courtesy of SDAC. Ariel’s first entrance was carried out on a ring hanging down from a bar high above the stage. When Ferdinand and Miranda recognized their fresh and natural love for each other they were floating as if on a cloud. (See fig. 3) Impressed by such stage imagery, Chinese audiences could more easily comprehend Miranda’s motivation in offering to carry logs for Ferdinand or her argument with her father concerning her beloved. The Sino-Danish Tempest developed a distinctive blend of spoken language, dance, music and acrobats. It was welcomed by audiences in Shanghai for its extravagant style of romance tinged with foreign humour and the grotesque. It was also criticized for being a cheap pantomime performance, losing the real poetry and drama of Shakespeare’s play. Indeed, to what extent could poetry be expressed through acrobatics, dance and music, with a group of grotesque musicians who sometimes participated in the plot and sometimes behaved as a chorus? All the practitioners seemed to have enjoyed participating in the work because they were testing potential artistic approaches to stretch the concept of what is theatre. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 205 Conclusion The three Chinese productions invite us to ponder a number of questions relating to the “struggle” (Bourdieu) or “war” (Knowles) between cultures. Perhaps the most obvious is that in all three portrayals Ariel is a female figure, which interestingly corresponds to an image of the character on the Victorian stage (Tempest, eds Vaughan and Vaughan, 30). Apart from some pragmatic considerations, for example, the number of female students in the class with which Tsai Chin had to work, and certain acting/ acrobatic skills that Wu Hsing-kuo and Ravicchio wanted to employ in their productions, there are possibly deeper issues. Chinese mentality tends to think of kind spirits as more feminine, reflected in the Chinese transliteration of Ariel in the form of three written characters: Ai (love); li (beautiful); and er (meaning “you” in classical Chinese but commonly used to express the sound of “l” in the transliteration). The apparent acceptance of a feminine Ariel reveals certain Chinese conceptions not only about the play but about gender roles in society as a whole. The Chinese female Ariel reminds us of Bourdieu’s argument of cultural structure cited at the beginning of the article. In this case, the Chinese concept of gender assimilates the Western mythology without producing too much trouble. However it does not represent the whole story. New elements, such as Shakespeare’s text The Tempest, practitioners from different nations/ races involved in the productions, and practitioners’ own artistic objectives, force people to struggle with their own identities and to take new positions. As the analysis in the article demonstrates, Tsai Chin and her students, the three leading practitioners in the Taiwanese production, and the Italian director, Danish actors/ musicians and Chinese actors/ acrobats all have their own ideas what a future production should look like. No matter it is “struggle” or “war,” necessary negotiation and compromise between the cultures have to take place. Otherwise, no production can be possibly staged. Since an intercultural performance always provides a special focus of struggle for both sides, the three Chinese (including Chinese-Danish) productions of The Tempest demonstrate that the Chinese understanding of Shakespeare and the interpretation of this particular play have evolved and transformed over the past thirty years. As I argue in Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China, “Shakespeare in China is […] as much a story about China as it is about Shakespeare” (2003, 223). The diversity of the three productions highlights the different paths chosen by these practitioners in formulating their individual answers to a question always confronting every theatrical practitioner: how to stage the modern when globalization reduces the distance between countries? Furthermore they open up new possibilities that The Tempest can offer to today’s audiences whose mental image of what constitutes theatre has changed so rapidly due R URU L I 206 to the impact of new technology. Nevertheless, one must not neglect a fundamental question arising out of intercultural practice: where are Shakespeare’s lines and language? Perhaps the twenty-first-century audience is now so used to absorbing knowledge via electronic imagery that it cannot cope with the complexity of human beings’ psychological range and the intriguing layers of language? After all, Chinese audiences do need to listen to Shakespeare, even in a translated language. The Chinese reception of The Tempest 207 Works Cited Bharucha, Rustom. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. London, New York: Routledge, 1993. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. R. Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Chen, Fang. Ed. “Zen and Wu Hsing-kuo’s The Tempest [Chan yu Wu Hsing-kuo de Baofengyu]”. A Theatre of Difference in Taiwan [Xiqu yirongshu zhuanti]. Taiwan: Tainanren Theatre, 2010. 92-117. Chin, Tsai. “Teaching and Directing in China: Chinese Theatre Revisited”. Asian Theatre Journal 3.1 (1986): 118-131. Fang, Ping. Trans. The New Complete Works of Shakespeare [Xin Shashibiya quanji]. Shijiazhuang: Hebei Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2000. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Interweaving cultures in performance: theatre in a globalizing world”. Theatre Research International. 35.3 (2010): 293-94. Huang, Alex. “Shakespeare, Performance, and Autobiographical Interventions”. Shakespeare Bulletin 24.2 (2006): 31-47. Knight, G. Wilson. The Shakespearean Tempest: With a chart of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Universe. London: Methuen, 1953. Knowles, Ric. Theatre and Interculturalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Li, Ruru. Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China. Hong Kong: UP, 2003. . “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am? / Lear’s shadow.’ - A Taiwanese Actor’s Personal Response to King Lear”. Shakespeare Quarterly 57.2 (2006): 195-215. Liang, Bolong. “Combined Internal and External Acting Training - Madam Zhou Caiqin’s Teaching in the Academy [Biaoyan de neiwai jiehe xunlian - Zhou Caiqin nüshi zai woyuan jiangxue suoji]”. The Drama Studies [Xiju xuexi] 4 (1982): 54-9. Nicholoson, Martha. “The Tempest”. Urbanatomy.com. 27 September 2010. <http: / / old. urbanatomy.com/ index.php/ arts/ theater/ 4127-the-tempest> (accessed on 18 April 2011). Ravicchio, Giacomo. “Director’s Foreword”. Programme of The Tempest. Shanghai: Shanghai Spoken Drama Artistic Centre, 2010. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Shanghai Spoken Dramatic Arts Centre. Programme of The Tempest. Shanghai: Archive, 2010. Sturgess, Keith. “‘A Quaint Device’: The Tempest at the Blackfriars”. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. New York: G.K. Hall, 1998. 107-129. Unknown. Contemporary Legend Theatre. The Tempest. Taipei: International Team Magical Masterpiece, no date. Vaughan, Virginia Mason, and Vaughan, Alden T. Eds. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: G.K. Hall, 1998. R URU L I 208 Wang, Yifen. “Wu Hsing-kuo Invokes The Tempest in the Theatre [Juanqi juchang ‘Baofengyu’]”. Global Views [Yuanjian zazhi] 2 (2005a): 224. <http: / / www.gvm. com.tw/ Board/ content.aspx? ser=10515> (accessed on 18 April 2011). Wang, Youhui. “Inaccurate Forecast - The Tempest by the Contemporary Legend Theatre [Shizhun de qixiang yubao - ping Dangdai Chuanqi Juchang ‘Baofengyu’]”. Performance Arts 147 (2005): 106-107. Wu, Hsing-kuo. “Tradition and Innovation in Chinese Opera - Professional Identity and Interculturalism”. Conference organized by the Centre for Theatre Laboratory Studies in the Institute for Aesthetic Studies. 29 September to 3 October 2004. . Interview after one-man show Li Er Is Here. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Festival, 14 Aug 2011. Wu, Peichen. “The Peripheral Body of Empire: Shakespearean Adaptations and Taiwan’s Geopolitics”. Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia. Eds. Poonam Trivedi and Minami Ryuta. New York, London: Routledge, 2010. 251-70. Zhang, Kun. “Ravicchio turns Tempest into circus act”. China Daily. 24 September 2010. <http: / / www.chinadaily.com.cn/ china/ 2010expo/ 2010-09/ 24/ content_113 41289.htm> (accessed on 29 January, 2012). S IMON J OHN R YLE Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest If there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled, Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss The second burden of a former child? William Shakespeare, Sonnet 59 Computer media return us to the repressed of the cinema. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media As Miranda notes, The Tempest is a particularly male play: “I do not know / One of my sex” (3.1.48-49). Despite their significance to the play’s back-story, mothers are notably missing from the narrative present. Equally, despite the close attention he pays to his history, all Prospero explicitly has to say about his wife is: “Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter” (1.2.56-57). Yet images of birth and pregnancy recur frequently in the play’s language, just as screen representations of the female body, pregnancy and procreation proliferate throughout Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991a). In considering the relation of Shakespeare and Greenaway, of vital importance is the time and technology of the adaptation - and subsequently this essay foregrounds the cinema’s shift to new media that is showcased in Prospero’s Books. How is Shakespeare’s poetry of pregnancy reworked in the audiovisual tracks of Greenaway’s adaptation, the first digital Shakespeare film? How does Prospero’s Books intertwine The Tempest’s poetic images of pregnancy with its use of new media technology? And how does this relation pertain to broader questions of cultural inheritance and transhistorical adaptation? To connect questions of media with issues of silence and loss, I employ Freud’s concept of “excavation.” For Freud the analytic “work of construction, or [...] reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried” (259). 1 Freud’s 1 As Mimi Yiu eloquently develops elsewhere in this collection, just as in Freud's alignment of reconstruction and remembrance, in the third of Prospero's eponymous S IMON J OHN R YLE 210 metaphor shares a topographical quality with Shakespeare’s images of pregnancy. Freud’s psychoanalytic “excavation” involves the expulsion of that which has been long hidden in the piecing together of the analysand’s repressed and traumatic memories. Similarly, in The Tempest Shakespeare frequently aligns the image of birth, as a figure of expulsion or exposure, with the representation of a lost scene. The ambivalence of Freud’s project is to be located at this site of exposure, centred on the conflated yet contrasting notions of “construction, or [...] reconstruction” that psychoanalysis combines (this conflation has long been a source of the criticism directed at psychoanalysis). To what extent, critics ask, is the analyst able to divide his/ her own constructions from the reconstructed lost memories of the analysand? Though problematic in psychoanalytic praxis, when turned towards cultural inheritance this ambivalence usefully suggests the transhistorical relation of adaptation and source. If Greenaway’s screen images of pregnant women might be said to “reconstruct” The Tempest’s poetic images of pregnancy, Prospero’s Books is also very much an independent “construction,” informed by the cultural and technological practices of its own historical period. The temporal ambivalence of Freud’s excavation is neatly caught in Shakespeare’s image of birth as a metaphor of representation. A concise exemplification of this is found in Sonnet 59, quoted in my epigraph. In the sonnet Shakespeare deploys and diverts the conventional Renaissance image of the poet who is pregnant with inspiration. In perceiving the experience of the present as inaccessible to writing except via that which has already been written (“that which is / Hath been before”), the sonnet figures its own representation in terms of a rebirth: the “second burden” of an already delivered child. Its expression diverted through existing channels, the sonnet is haunted by the sense of what it cannot say: the loss of experience that it must “bear amiss.” In the inverse of the problem faced by psychoanalytic praxis, the sonnet cannot construct because it must reconstruct. However, just as Freud’s ambiguous (re)constructions suggest the transhistorical relation of adaptation and source, so too the sonnet’s “second burden” figures representation as toujours-déjà adaptation. The Tempest makes a similar use of the figural sense of pregnancy as the belated recollection of that which has been lost. Yet in The Tempest the figural and narratological coalesce and intertwine in the poetic images of birth by which Shakespeare’s language resists the silence of Prospero concerning his wife. In considering Shakespeare’s intertwining relations of form, content and remembrance in the context of Greenaway’s digital cinema, it is insightful to turn to Lev Manovich’s claim that “Computer media return us to the repressed of the cinema” (308). For Manovich narrative cinema has served, since the 1920s, as a repressive force that restricts the possibilities of cine- Books, “A Memoria Technica called Architecture and Other Music,” Greenaway explicitly foregrounds the relation of architecture and memory. Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest 211 matic mimesis. Examining Manovich’s idea, I consider how Greenaway’s sequences of pregnancy and procreation align their excavation of The Tempest’s silence with a digital return to something that has been lost from the cinema - a return to what Manovich and others have termed the “repressed” pre-narrative “cinema of attractions” (Gunning 41). In so doing, I develop two strands of investigation, examining both what Greenaway’s excavations tell us about pregnancy as a figure in Shakespeare’s language, and the extent to which Shakespeare’s use of pregnancy may be read forward to provide a poetics of the digital in Prospero’s Books. Digital rebirth Released in 1991, Prospero’s Books offered a timely response to the new era of digital technology. In the first five years of the 1990s, computerized communication was materialized and globalized in the Internet’s arrival to the public domain and the fall of Communism in Europe. According to Manovich, 1995 opened “a new stage in the evolution of modern culture and media,” in which the computer has become “a universal media machine” (69). Laura Mulvey similarly refers to “the transitional period of 1995” (2006, 32). For Mulvey, the shift undergone by the photographic image in the early 1990s is characterized by the influx of new media into cinema: “the digital, as an abstract information system, made a break with analogue imagery, finally sweeping away the relation with reality, which had [...] dominated the photographic tradition” (2006, 18). A similar dynamic is important to Manovich, who remarks, “Exactly a hundred years after cinema was officially ‘born,’ it was reinvented on a computer screen” (313). However one should carefully consider Manovich’s connected claim, that digital media, in serving to interrupt the dominance of narrative cinema, “return us to the repressed of the cinema” (308). Manovich argues that new media allow cinema finally to return to the constitutive elements of its development, the non-narrative spectacle of Magic Lantern slide shows, and devices such as the Phenakistoscope and Zoetrope, breaking after one hundred years the hegemony of classical cinematic codes of narrativized representation. I would rather claim, while this notion usefully and accurately describes Greenaway’s aesthetic and stylistic use of the Quantel Graphics Paintbox in Prospero’s Books, that Greenaway’s film applies the potentiality of the new digital technology in a manner quite unlike the vast majority of contemporary commercial cinema. In order to delineate briefly the difference between the incorporation of digital technology in Prospero’s Books and the majority of commercial cinema, one might compare Greenaway’s film with James Cameron’s enormously successful Terminator Two: Judgment Day (1991). Both films were released in S IMON J OHN R YLE 212 the same year, and both used cutting edge digital image processing technology. It is certainly the case that the spectacular verisimilitude of Terminator Two’s computer generated images (CGI) disrupts the reality claims of the photographic index that concern Mulvey. However, in a manner quite unlike Greenaway’s film, the illusionism of Cameron’s special effects aspires to what Lister et. al. term “photo-realism,” which they explain offers “a representation that has not been produced by photographic techniques, but looks as though it has” (140). By these terms, Cameron’s use of digital technology is consistent with the historical paradigm of evolving cinematic technologies sketched by Michael Allen: “The drive toward much of the technical development in cinema since 1950 has been towards both a greater or heightened sense of ‘realism’ and a bigger, more breathtaking realization of spectacle” (127). This continuity of classical cinematic codes in the digital era is also noted in a recent essay by Thomas Elsaesser: “the contemporary industrystandard - the star-and-spectacle-driven blockbuster - dominates the audiovisual landscape more visibly than ever” (14). Brief consideration of the verisimilitudinous space invoked by classical cinema, Elsaesser’s “audiovisual landscape,” is here required. For Bordwell et. al., classical cinematic space has been defined and shaped by Hollywood. For various commercial, political and aesthetic reasons, they find Hollywood codes of filmic reality are dominant in world cinema to the extent that “our conception of film […] rests chiefly upon assumptions derived from the classical Hollywood system” (379). They explain representation of space in classical Hollywood, more-or-less fixed since 1917, is characterized by two factors: (1). An “apparently neutral” (30) filmic, narrational style, with consistent and anonymous spatial composition and little stylistic prominence - which Nöel Burch characterizes as a “zero degree style of filming” (110-13). The use of the camera to construct a consistent and realistic space, as if the screen offers a window-view upon reality: “a solid and integral diegetic world” (Bordwell et al. 30), with continuous and logical narrative spatial orientations. Such is the hegemony of the classical style, that they characterize international, art and avant-garde cinemas that do not conform to this model (German Expressionism, Nouvelle vague) as “oppositional cinemas” (383). Turning their contention of “oppositional” styles to Greenaway’s cinematic techniques, this essay argues it is the modes of new media screen formatting that Prospero’s Books employs against classical Hollywood spatial codes that screen a return to the femininity occluded in Prospero’s language. In a digitally facilitated “oppositional” stylistics, Greenaway supplants the silence of Prospero concerning his wife in The Tempest. However, before concluding that new media cinema overwhelmingly employs modes of classical cinematic verisimilitude, one must acknowledge a mode of film criticism that reads the hyperreal excesses of Hollywood CGI Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest 213 as self-consciously disruptive (rather in the manner that this essay characterizes Greenaway’s use of the Graphic Paintbox software to digitally manipulate his photographic images) because they “put the display of the digital artefact at the centre of entertainment experience” (Pierson 158). In this vein Sean Cubitt asserts that 1990s digital special effects provide an illusionism that “succeeds by exceeding the apparent limits of the media” (127). While this might be so, alongside CGI’s apparent excesses a key factor is their verisimilitude. An almost constant reality effect in commercial cinema situates special effects, such as are found in the morphing ‘liquid metal’ of Cameron’s second generation T-1000 Terminator, squarely within the spatial integrity of the classical cinematic mode of representation. For this reason I take issue with Cubitt’s assertion that CGI commonly supplies “fetishistic interruptions of narrative” (127). In this emphasis on the fetish as interruption, Cubitt surely does not refer to the Freudian sense of the fetish as the subject’s containment of potentially threatening disruptions of libidinous energy in the object of desire. Following Freud, it would seem more consistent to suggest the fetishistic element of the great majority of Hollywood special effects is that the impossible spectacle is contained within the seamless verisimilitude of photo-realism. One result of the digitally-enabled disruptions to classical cinematic space in Prospero’s Books, at the levels of both the narrative spaces the actors move in, and the film’s multi-layered screen presentations, is that they allow us clearly to perceive the demands that classical cinematic codes of representation make upon the use of digital technology in most mainstream cinema. Central to my investigation of Prospero’s Books are the gendered images that Greenaway uses alongside modes of new media screen formatting to destabilize classical cinematic codes of spatial representation. This destabilization to classical cinematic codes is used to bring to visualization the feminine element excluded by The Tempest’s protagonists, so that it is the digital in the film’s visual track that operates constantly to excavate the play’s narrative silences. A concise exemplification of this is to be found in Greenaway’s diegetic inclusion of Claribel, the daughter of Alonso the King of Naples, who is married to the king of Tunis shortly before the events of the play. As a daughter lost to the machinations of political dynasty building, Claribel refigures Prospero’s loss of his wife, serving to align loss and femininity, and to fix the lost feminine as a recurring element in the play’s representation. In the sequence Greenaway’s camera pans slowly from a shot of Claribel’s bedchamber in Tunis, to reveal Prospero observing her calmly from his writing desk (0.54.04-0.54.37). If this suggests that the entire Mediterranean is accessible to Prospero’s observational powers, one might argue it is quite contrary to the careful spatial restriction that Shakespeare employs in The Tempest. Antonio and Sebastian, for example, discuss the S IMON J OHN R YLE 214 impossible distance of Claribel in Tunis: “Ten leagues beyond man’s life” (2.1.247), and similarly Alonso has already stated “I ne’er again shall see her” (2.1.112). In using the pan to shift in an instant between distant locations, a shot conventionally used to preserve the integrity of represented space, Greenaway profoundly challenges, in a manner quite typical of his film, both Shakespeare’s narrative space and classical codes of cinematic space. As agent and, to use Christian Metz’s term, “first delegate” (418) of this representational destabilization, Prospero disinterestedly observes the young Queen of Tunis apparently moments after the consummation of her marriage, her body convulsing in misery on a bed, her hands held at her genitalia to staunch the blood pouring down her thighs (fig. 1). The careful composition of the shot, and the pause in the camera’s pan on the affectively loaded scene lend an evocative, painterly quality to the screen image. The sequence corresponds closely to the scopic fascination at violated bodies in evidence in the film’s earlier visualizations of the Milanese usurpation that in Shakespeare’s play is also not shown, lost to “the dark backward and abysm of time” (1.2.50). Yet the shot of Claribel also partially rethinks, or remediates, Albrecht Dürer’s self-conscious analysis of the gendered gaze both deployed and invoked by visual art in his woodcut of a draughtsman drawing a reclining woman, published in Unterweisung der Messung (1525) (fig. 2). Barbara Freedman writes of Dürer’s woodcut, though she might very well speak of Prospero’s observation of Claribel in Greenaway’s sequence, “The draughtsman’s need to order visually and to distance himself from that which he sees suggests a futile attempt to protect himself from what he would (not) see” (2). Freedman’s ambivalence concerning the agency and desire to see/ not to see of Dürer’s draughtsman catches something of the uneasiness of Greenaway’s sequence. With the controlling gaze of Prospero as delegate, the bloody female body excluded from the play is revealed and mediated for the film spectator. In an excessive, one might say uncanny manner, the sequence invokes the mechanisms of the male gaze commonly recognized in classical cinema by feminist critics. “The woman,” Stephen Heath argues, “is the omnipresent centre of the film’s world” (100). Tellingly, the screen images of Claribel suffering closely fit Mulvey’s prescient notion, in her delineation of the cinematic male gaze, of the woman “subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound” (2000, 483). It is an instance in which, for all his spatial destabilization, Greenaway’s intertwining quotations from the Renaissance and the cinema intersect to suggest the constancy of the male gaze across these historically divided modes of representation. Though the sequence uses no digital effects, one particular moment of image framing, which links the sequence aesthetically with the stylistic device of shot framing used throughout the film, borrows heavily and selfconsciously from the computer screen’s spatial formatting. As the pan moves Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest 215 fully away from Claribel’s bedchamber to fix on Prospero at his desk, it becomes apparent that a mirror or screen of some kind behind Prospero reflects the scene of Claribel (fig. 3). This framing composition repeats within the film’s narrative space one of the major contributions of the Quantel Graphic Paintbox, that throughout much of the film is used to lay an alternative visual track over the central portion of the screen. Of this stylistic feature Peter Donaldson remarks, “Though the film pre-dates the popularity of the World Wide Web, it shares with the Web the ‘page’ metaphor” (4). However, due to the problematic chronology of the Web comparison that Donaldson acknowledges, one might rather consider the tiled desktop ‘windows’ in existence on computer screens since the 1984 Apple Macintosh. Throughout the film’s multi-layered surfaces replicate very closely the format of the Apple Macintosh screen presentation. In the shot of Claribel reflected in the mirror the Graphics Paintbox is not used, and the framing of the shot is created entirely within the narrative space. Yet perhaps even more significant than digital manipulation of the photographic, this denotes an instance in which the photographic image itself is composed to resemble the digital: to resemble the Apple Macintosh with its concurrent coexistence of multiple spaces on one screen surface. It is a clear instance in which the digital aesthetic which Manovich terms “spatial montage” has bled over into photographic representation. For Manovich, in the era of new media, “The logic of replacement, characteristic of cinema, gives way to the logic of addition and coexistence. Time becomes spatialized, distributed over the surface of the screen” (325). So rich in associative representational links between Renaissance art and cinema, Greenaway’s film here further introduces a commentary on, or self-conscious reference to, the aesthetic conditions of its own era, the new media reformulation of the screen. Particularly telling, with regard to Greenaway’s cinematography in the Claribel sequence, is its revision of the time Antonio claims is required to travel to Tunis: “till newborn chins / Be rough and razorable” (2.1.249-50). In effect, the period of an entire childhood required for this hyperbolically posited voyage is in Prospero’s Books collapsed into Greenaway’s pan. The innovation in the sequence is thus founded on the use of cinematic technique to destabilize Shakespeare’s poetic invocation of narrative space/ time. Greenaway’s pan makes a visual-spatial refutation of Claribel’s distance, reckoned by Antonio to hinge between the moment of birth and the end of childhood, while simultaneously representing the precise and affectively poised moment of her symbolic entrance to adulthood: the consummation of her marriage. In Shakespeare’s matrix of space-time, Claribel serves as the excluded, abandoned female body - and it should not be forgotten that the evocation of distance by Antonio is made to facilitate and encourage a murde- S IMON J OHN R YLE 216 Figure 1: Claribel in Tunis. Prospero’s Books, Greenaway. Allarts, UK, 1991. Figure 2: The gendered Renaissance gaze. Albrecht Dürer, Unterweisung der Messung (1525), Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman. Figure 3: Claribel reflected. Prospero’s Books, Greenaway. Allarts UK, 1991. Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest 217 rous usurpation of the throne of Naples by Sebastian, a repetition of Antonio’s usurpation of Prospero’s dukedom. As an example of Greenaway’s unceasing drive towards visual representation of The Tempest’s narrative silences, Prospero’s Books returns the lost woman, excluded as impossibly distant ‘other’ of the play, in terms of an uncanny post-coital scene. The film finds a place for the excluded female body at the precise moment of the potential generation of the life by which Claribel’s distance from home, in Antonio’s calculation, may be measured. Furthermore, it aligns its various intersecting modes of representation with metaphorical and literal questions of reproduction. The spatial loss of Claribel that in The Tempest repeats the narratological absence of Prospero’s wife is refigured in discomfiting images of her potential impregnation, which at once reference Renaissance and cinematographic codes of representation, and which are themselves redoubled in a reflection that photographically replicates new media aesthetics. Representing loss As I have mentioned, even by comparison with other Shakespeare plays women are conspicuous by their absence from Prospero’s island. Equally, excepting her reproductive fidelity, Prospero has very little to say about his wife. One might conclude, with Stephen Orgel, that the legitimacy of Prospero’s heir is all that he requires of her. Yet, if Prospero’s narrative has no need of his daughter’s mother, he nevertheless invests heavily in a language rich with allusions to motherhood. Speaking of Miranda and his journey to their island following their exile, he reports: When I have decked the sea with drops full salt, Under my burden groaned, which raised in me An undergoing stomach to bear up Against what should ensue. (1.2.155-58) Orgel finds this language, rich with allusions to pregnancy, to be an “extraordinary [...] birth fantasy” (54). Ann Thompson similarly suggests that the images of feminine gestation depict their journey away from the civilization of Milan as “a kind of second birth to Miranda” (237). Though she does not acknowledge it, Thompson’s formulation is reminiscent of the metaphoric depiction, in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59, of poetic representation as “The second burden of a former child.” Paralleling and intersecting with The Tempest’s language of pregnancy, the theme of confinement and constriction runs throughout the play. Prospero’s “cell,” most frequently referring to his place of writing, at times confers prison-like status upon the entire island: “Canst thou remember / A time before we came unto this cell? ” (1.2.38-39). In his domination of Caliban, S IMON J OHN R YLE 218 Prospero also calls on an implicitly gendered language of constriction: “thou shalt have cramps, / Side-stitches, that shall pen thy breath up / [...] thou shalt be pinched / As thick as honeycomb” (1.2.326-30). Deploying computer-based analyses of word frequency, Mary Thomas Crane finds that Prospero’s tortures centre on “an exploration of […] painful confinement on the island, on the stage, and in the mortal body and also of its yearning for control, escape and transcendence of all these states” (184). She further notes in the images of his poetry “a nexus of confinement, penetration, ‘cramps,’ and loud groans, which also conjure up images of pregnancy and childbirth” (197). Crane’s analysis usefully highlights the stylistically pointed recurrence of alliterative words of confinement in Prospero’s speech: pinch, pitch, pine, and pen. Though one might quibble with Crane’s alignment of “confinement” and pregnancy (the OED gives 1774 as the first use of the term to refer to child birth), confining spaces were certainly aligned with pregnancy as early as the 1590s in English poetry. As I demonstrate below, Shakespeare is keen to emphasize that Sycorax pregnant with Caliban parallels spatially her entrapment of Ariel: “she did confine thee […] / Into a cloven pine” (1.2.274-77). Similarly, in Sonnet 84 “confine” invokes a spatial connection between the types of redoubling involved in usury and pregnancy: “you alone are you, / In whose confine immured is the store / Which should example where your equal grew” (2-4). This “confine” also suggests a generative-topographical relation between mines and the reproductive organs of female physiognomy: an image to be found in Leander’s persuasive rhetoric, in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and in Donne: “My mine of precious stones, my empery, / How blessed am I in this discovering thee! ” (1256). As is so frequently the case, at the level of the signifying surface Shakespeare’s language structures an innovative and influential array of hermeneutic and affective resonances and relations. The various confinements of The Tempest, we might say, are pregnant with an emergent semantics of pregnancy. The usurpation that Prospero suffers and then inflicts upon Caliban closely repeats the suffering of confinement by which Prospero depicts his own experiences at the hands of his usurping brother. Significantly, his image of Antonio in Milan as the ivy “which had hid my princely trunk / And sucked my verdure out” (1.2.86-87) offers an alternative figuration of the language of feminized birth fantasy that he uses to tell of the journey to the island, this time with himself as enclosed within. As David Sundelson notes, the “princely trunk” provides “an image of male strength defeated or replaced” (35). The imprisonment and subsequent extraction of his essence from the tree by his brother not only aligns his constriction within Antonio’s “ivy” with male impotence, further suggested by the image of his “most ignoble stooping” (1.2.116). It also prefigures imagistically another represen- Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest 219 tation of his exile, his extraction from confinement as a traumatic expulsion, or violent birth of sorts: “thrust forth of Milan” (5.1.160). Consistently Prospero deploys the language of procreation or pregnancy to figure escape from the recurring threat of confinement that he perceives, just as his tortures upon Caliban’s body involve a redoubling of the constriction he claims to have suffered. The theme of constriction returns centrally in Prospero’s Epilogue: “I must be here confined by you” (4); “release me from my bands” (9); “Let your indulgence set me free” (20). What is this entrapment that Prospero fears at the play’s close? To answer one should contrast Prospero’s recurring fear of constriction with his cautionary reaction to the attempt to remember the loss that accompanies Alonso and Ferdinand’s reunion in the play’s final Act: “Let us not burden our remembrances with / A heaviness that’s gone” (5.1.199-200). This use of “burden” borrows from the semantics of the word in Sonnet 59 as a “labouring for invention,” to figure an aversion towards the representational recollection of the usurpation. The sense of representation as the rebirth of a past event is caught in the double sense of Prospero’s “heaviness,” which simultaneously invokes (as absent) the discomfiting period of the brotherly split and the weight of the recollection as figurative pregnancy. Of course, this metaphor is hardly new. Shakespeare’s figurative use of pregnancy to represent representation develops a topos that reaches back to antiquity. As early as Socrates’s notion of himself as midwife of meaning in the dialogue Theaetetus, writing, artistic creation and philosophical enquiry have repeatedly been figured and fantasized (by men) as male birth. As part of his anxious, self-conscious recapitulations of the writing which precedes him, Philip Sidney comes belatedly to this tradition in the first sonnet of the Astrophil and Stella sequence. The poet, anxious to write yet unable to do so, feels himself “great with child to speak” (11). His flow of words interrupted by his sense of the belatedness of his writing: “others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way” (10), causes the inner burden that he feels. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59 makes a similar complaint concerning belatedness, but weaves into the topos of male birth a commentary on the inaccessibility of the present moment. For the speaker, the experience of the present is inaccessible to writing except via that which has already been written (“that which is / Hath been before”). As Joel Fineman suggests, the speaker “sees the object of his admiration only very indirectly, by looking backwards and through a literary image” (146). Driven by the pursuit of that object, all the sonnet can capture is the “second burden” of an already delivered child. If, as I have suggested, the sonnet is haunted by the sense of what it cannot say, a tension arises in the speaker’s unwillingness to accept this inevitability: his “labouring for invention.” The double sense of the poet’s “labouring” catches S IMON J OHN R YLE 220 this tension, inscribing both the conscious agency of the poet’s struggle to write his own experiences anew, and the pregnant burden of the past that he must “bear amiss.” Similarly the object of admiration’s “composed wonder” (Shakespeare 2011b, 10) invokes both the undeniable experience of the present that arises from the object’s wondrous presence, and the already written (“composed”) quality of that wonder. Unlike the self-consciously failing efforts of the sonnet to recall and represent that which has been lost, Prospero’s reconciliatory direction of The Tempest’s ending would avoid the pregnant “heaviness” of “remembrance.” Via his deployment of the dialectics of birth/ confinement, he would replace pregnancy with silence. As in the metaphor of representation as “second burden” in Sonnet 59, the repetition of the originary - mimetically unrealized - brotherly usurpation (Antonio’s seizing of Milan from Prospero), which The Tempest refigures in Sebastian’s plan to kill his brother Alonso, and in Stephano and Trinculo’s desire to rule the island, implicitly invokes the belatedness of all representation. To the degree that usurpation serves as the central plot impetus of the play, attention is required of Prospero’s figurative references to the play’s missing mothers in telling of Antonio’s theft of his Dukedom. If Prospero’s loss of his wife is that which is lost to The Tempest, his use of the language of pregnancy both recalls and seeks to evade the recollection of this loss in the play’s closing scene. Prospero’s plan of harmonic resolution would engineer a patriarchal reconciliation of political usurpation pointedly configured as an evasion of feminine reproduction. It would dissipate the representational “second burden” of the originary scene of loss into a weightlessness of nonrepresentation. So why Prospero’s paradoxical figurative invocation of the feminine reproductive function in arguing against memory? How does his poetic language of pregnancy work - at the level of the signifier - against his stated intentions? And if Prospero’s images of pregnancy invoke both reflexive reference to the “second burden” of representation, and the lost feminine of the Milanese usurpation that The Tempest mimetically evades, how do his poetic pregnancies inform the return to femininity as loss that is visualized in Greenaway’s screen images? One might turn to Fineman’s interest in the loss that recurs across Shakespeare’s late plays. The self-conscious concern with thematic and stylistic doubles and repetitions in Shakespeare’s Romances makes them “the genre of the twice-told tale […] the drama of the representation of representation” (Fineman 306). For Fineman the doubling-up of the Romances’ constant concern with their own representational recuperation expresses a desire for the “loss of loss” (306). Perdita, herself lost to Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, is given the name of loss by the dream of Hermione that comes to the unfortunate Antigonus (who is immediately after eaten by a bear). In the play’s second half, her developing romance and presence as potential incipient Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest 221 mother both signifies the loss of her own mother, Hermione, and makes good the loss. In both The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, the crisis point for the male protagonist is the generational coming to womanhood of the daughter of the lost mother - who seems both to redouble and stand in the place of the loss. Just this paradoxical recovery of loss (in the very loss of loss) is exemplified in The Tempest’s images of pregnancy. Constructing a hopeful image of the future, Gonzalo asks whether the generative patrilineal potential of Ferdinand and Miranda’s marriage will make good the loss of the past: “Was Milan thrust from Milan that his issue / Should become kings of Naples” (5.1.205-6)? In the lexical breaking apart of Prospero’s titular Dukedom from the geographic place of that authority (“Milan [...] from Milan”), Gonzalo repeats Prospero’s earlier image of his violent expulsion from Milan, emphasizing the birth-like outward “thrust” of the exile. In doubling the kingdom, the marriage both resolves the loss of Milan occasioned by the lexical split, yet vitally it does so by reinscribing the birth-like extraction of the usurpation. The descendants of Prospero’s “issue” will, at the level of Gonzalo’s poetic images, repeat the “thrust” of Prospero’s originary expulsion from Milan. The future of Miranda’s pregnancy-to-come will double the realms of Prospero’s lineage, healing the traumatic split of the usurpation by doubling the figure of loss. In this sense, the rebirth of representation in Sonnet 59 - the burden by which writing re-bears a “former child” - concisely delineates the “issue” by which the violent losses of the past are, for Gonzalo, to be healed. If the image-organization of The Tempest’s language expresses a novel arrangement of representation with regard to loss, Jacques Lacan’s claim is pertinent that the impossibility of ‘the real’ is implicitly ever-present in representation. Returning to Freud’s attempts to excavate loss, for Lacan the real names a primordial materiality that cannot be described by language, and is thus lost to language users. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Book VII of his Seminar, Lacan states: “the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or hole in the real is identical” (1992, 150). This is why four years later he claims, “For what we have in the discovery of psycho-analysis is an encounter, an essential encounter - an appointment to which we are always called with a real that eludes us” (1981, 53). The use of symbols, of language, divides mankind from the real - but this loss is felt constantly as an appointment to which we are called. After the subject accedes to the symbolic (at the end of infancy), thenceforth the real haunts his/ her speech with its absence: it “does not stop not writing itself” (Copjec 69). As is so often the case, Shakespeare’s language provides a visceral and illuminatng illustration of difficult philosophical topographies. Just as Sonnet 59 is haunted by that which it cannot say, so too Lacan’s real is sensed as an unspeakable absence in the symbolic universe. This loss plays a significant role in S IMON J OHN R YLE 222 directing human behaviour. A primary function of desire for Lacan is to evade the discomfiting awareness of the loss of the real. That is to say, the attempt to figure the loss of loss - typified in Prospero’s silences concerning his wife, and in Gonzalo’s vision of the birth that will heal the split - offers a quintessential image of Lacan’s topography of desire. Against this desire, Shakespeare’s language of pregnancy as a refusal of Prospero’s silence, and moments of cinematic uncanniness such as Claribel’s bleeding wound in Prospero’s Books, involve discomfiting yet enriching, partial recognitions of loss. As Copjec puts it: “This point at which something appears to be missing from representation, some meaning left unrevealed, is the point of the Lacanian gaze” (69). But how does this Lacanian gaze, as a disruption of desire, help in approaching Greenaway’s cinematography? How is Prospero’s Books, as a future of The Tempest, addressed by Shakespeare’s image of representation as a belated rebirth? And how does the emphasis that Prospero’s Books places on visual art suggest a vital relation between Shakespeare’s images of pregnancy and the position the womb takes in Renaissance anatomical art? Opened bodies / male gazes In considering visual precursors to Shakespeare’s language of pregnancy, one should turn first to Leonardo da Vinci’s tremendously influential anatomical drawing of a pregnant woman (1510-11) (fig. 4). In the sketch, Leonardo figures an opened cross-section of a female torso to allow depiction of a fully-developed child within the opened womb. As Greenaway has noted, Shakespeare’s magus, Prospero, is “a master enquirer like a da Vinci” (1991b, 50). In the anatomical sketch of pregnancy, Leonardo directs his enquiries towards the mysterious interior of the female body. He masters mystery by opening it to scrutiny. Of Leonardo’s drawing, Barbara Duden observes that, “With deceptive realism, Leonardo places a magnificent portrait of a newborn infant in the place and wrappings of an unborn” (38). In a seeming prefiguration of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59, Leonardo’s representation overcomes, or reaches back beyond loss - the deaths of the dissected corpses of the mother and infant - by engineering a “second burden.” In a potent metonymy of Jacob Burckhardt’s nineteenth century categorization of fifteenth and sixteenth century Italian culture as staging a “Renaissance” of classical antiquity, Leonardo’s rebirth reaches back beyond the infant’s and mother’s deaths to the lost moment of pregnancy. Yet, to properly recognize the highly-charged quality that the representation of pregnancy held for the period, and the mastery invoked by the opening of (female) bodies, one should recognise that depiction of the Renaissance as cultural rebirth is not itself original to nineteenth century scholarship. The figure of rebirth as Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest 223 aesthetic advance is specifically deployed, for example, by Leonardo’s contemporary, Andreas Vesalius, who claimed that his works facilitated the “reborn art of dissection” (Parks 243). The connection between Shakespeare and Renaissance visual art is repeatedly suggested by the recurring tableaux vivants references to Renaissance visual art in Prospero’s Books. However, in exploring this link it is necessary first to acknowledge how The Tempest’s thematic use of pregnancy intersects with the early modern anxiety concerning witches, especially with regard to Sycorax, another of the play’s lost women. Useful in drawing these elements together is Ernest Gilman’s recent consideration of the commuted sentence of exile suffered by Sycorax alongside the empty womb of the dissected cadaver of the woman pictured on the frontispiece of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) (fig. 5). Unlike Sycorax, Vesalius’s subject was executed after unsuccessfully and falsely claiming that she was pregnant (known in early modern legal terminology as “pleading the belly”). As Gilman notes, the same plea was made by Sycorax, though honestly, while pregnant with Caliban. Prospero explains, “For one thing she did / They would not take her life” (1.2.266-67). Prospero’s recollections of Sycorax centre on images of pregnancy. Enraged at Ariel’s request for freedom early in The Tempest, Prospero reminds the “brave spirit” (1.2.206) of his imprisonment with Sycorax, and his rescue, as Nora Johnson writes, “from enslavement to the earthy and abhorred commands of woman and matter” (690). Shakespeare intertwines Prospero’s depiction of Ariel’s entrapment with his telling of Sycorax’s pregnancy with Caliban: “This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child, / [...] she did confine thee / [...] Into a cloven pine” (1.2.269-77). Likewise, Prospero’s freeing of Ariel from the tree intersects oddly with Sycorax’s delivery of Caliban: “The son that she did litter here, / [...] It was mine art, / When I arrived [...] that made gape / The pine and let thee out” (1.2.282-93). In the poetic proximity of his telling of Sycorax’s biological delivery, and in his birth-like expulsion of Ariel from the tree, Prospero aligns his own liberating and confining powers with female reproductive physiology. It is surely this paired conflation of reproductive constrictions/ expulsions that inspires Jonathan Bate’s notion of Sycorax as Prospero’s “disturbing double” (254). In the manner that it repositions Prospero’s Caesarean-like attack on the pine’s constricting space, and its remarkable deployment of pregnancy, an important related sequence of narrative space/ time destabilization is to be S IMON J OHN R YLE 224 Figure 4: The dissected womb. Leonardo da Vinci: Studies of embroys (c1510-13), Royal Library Windsor Castle. Figure 5: The woman on display. Frontispiece of Andreas Vesalius, De humai corporis fabrica, 1543. Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest 225 Figure 6: Susannah’s self-dissection. Prospero’s Books. Greenway, Allarts UK, 1991. found in Prospero’s Books (0.20.29-0.21.40). This sequence begins with the film’s voice-track description of the eighth book in Prospero’s collection, Vesalius’s Anatomy of Birth. In a voiceover the book is described as “macabre in its single-mindedness” (Greenaway 1991b, 20). The description overlays visual-track images of Prospero’s wife (who is named as Susannah), nearnaked, laid on a dissection table. This anatomical demonstration reworks photographically Vesalius’s Fabrica frontispiece (which is explicitly cited as source in the film’s published screenplay). The camera moves back, to reveal this scene as represented on a screen of some kind (a further instance of the framing technique I have already discussed), the screen image fringed by a bookshelf and some of the island’s naked female “indigenous spirits” (Greenaway 1991b, 12). As the voice-track narration continues, the camera cuts away from the framed image to reveal its observer, Susannah (the first definitive shot of her as a living being, rather than as a stilled image overlaying moving images via the Paintbox technology). In the astonishing following shot, the camera moves slowly away from her, naked and pregnant, shown in three-quarter close-up, as she peels back the skin of her torso and belly to reveal her internal organs and a foetus, reworking the theme of the anatomy demonstration via a grotesquely self-dissecting body (fig. 6). At the end of the sequence, again the shot cuts to a reverse view (Susannah is all the while in view, holding her torso open). Prospero walks from Miranda’s bed, where his grown daughter (to whom he tells his story) lies asleep, to the corpse of (another) Susannah laid out in funereal cloth. In this concisely hyperbolic film moment, Greenaway’s film presents a more problematically complex thesis than Lia Hotchkiss’s assertion that “the film de-emphasizes The Tempest as an embodied performance in favour of S IMON J OHN R YLE 226 stressing its textuality” (96). Though books and written representation are central to the film, the “macabre […] throbbing” film-book (in the screenplay’s words) is supplanted in the camera’s cut away, by a film-body that self-anatomizes, opening uncannily like a book. Stylistically the sequence closely conforms to Manovich’s notion of “spatial montage,” or to the “spatial density” that Yvonne Spielmann’s formalist analysis of digital media terms a “cluster”: “a simultaneity of different levels within one single image unit” (57). Yet beyond stylistics, at the level of content, the stripped and/ or horizontal female forms that fill the circling and suddenly reversing camera movements indicate a collapsing of time periods, and of the registers of representation, into one place with one traumatically dominant theme. Using new media technology to figure this simultaneity within one space, and aesthetically mimicking the computer screen’s multi-layering in overlaying various photographic representations of space both digitally and in a photographic duplication of digital layering, Greenaway’s cinematography both destabilizes and feminizes the realistic space of classical cinematic representation. Moreover, it does this specifically as visual corrective to the absences of Prospero’s narrative silences. Like Gilman, Prospero’s Books herein stresses the connection between The Tempest and Vesalius’s frontispiece. Greenaway’s film in effect demands that one consider further the commuted sentence of exile suffered by Sycorax alongside the empty womb of the dissected cadaver pictured on the frontispiece of Vesalius’s Fabrica. Vesalius’s executed witch provides a poignant example of the many thousands of women murdered across Europe by the institutions of Church and State in the early modern period. Though unique in many ways, this transnational outburst of gynophobic violence resonates with the way that during the Renaissance philosophical, theological and aesthetic questions were demanded of the female body. In Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (ca. 1545), Venus’s voluptuous body is presented as a façade that conceals the suffering inflicted by time. Likewise Hamlet’s accusation made to Ophelia - but directed at all women - that “God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another” (3.1.144-45), exemplifies how womankind figures for the period as image of artificial display. The violent stripping of Duessa in Book One of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene similarly locates eroticized female display as obstruction to the truth. For the Renaissance loss is to be located behind, beyond or within the woman-as-representation. If Greenaway’s film returns to these questions, importantly Prospero’s Books supplements the faux-pregnancy of Vesalius’s subject, which Greenaway uses to visually supplement Shakespeare, with a foetus and a grotesquely self-dissecting refiguration of birth. The significance of this sequence for Peter Donaldson is the manner in which Greenaway replicates the frequent alignment in Renaissance science Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest 227 (as in art and writing of the period) of “the search for ‘truth’ […] represented visually by the opening of the (often eroticized) female body” (8). In accord with this claim, Katharine Parks argues that “understanding the secrets of women became one of the principle goals of fifteenthand sixteenth-century medical writers” (26). She adds, “representing the female body came to stand […] for the powers of dissection based anatomy to reveal its hidden truths” (33-5). The uterus took the central position in this project, as mysterious unknown site of generation in Renaissance imagination. The new truth of science found its epistemological epitome in the anatomically opened female womb. This being so, a definite shift in representation occurs with Vesalius’s Fabrica. For Parks, the frontispiece of Fabrica involves “a significant step in ‘desacrilization’ of the anatomical cadaver” (231). The transgressive and sensational arrangement of the dissected body of Vesalius’s frontispiece emphasizes the display and scientific opening of the female genitalia and uterus. Duden likewise argues it is with Vesalius that ends the womb’s privileged figuration in a light of revelation that resists the visible: “the last feature the anatomist was freely able to scrutinize” (45). For Duden it is particularly the depiction of the womb that resists a representational shift that occurs in sixteenth century anatomical art, away from the ideogramic treatment of light in medieval painting, in which “each object is meant to be luminous, to gleam in its own light” (36), to a representation of objects visibly lit by an external light source. Vesalius’s frontispiece completes this transition. As representational innovation it was enormously popular, copied and developed notably in Juan Valverde de Amusco’s Anatomia de corpo humanio (1560), and Adrianus Spigelius’s De formato foetu (1627), in which the female abdomen is represented as opened like the petals of a flower, its “inner organs arranged as seeds and stamens” (Kemp and Wallace 172). However, if Vesalius’s depiction of the womb both contextualizes historically some of the thematic stresses laid on The Tempest’s repeated poetic invocations of pregnancy, and serves as acknowledged source of Greenaway’s visualization of Susannah, it is important to scrutinize further the absence of the foetus from the sixteenth century anatomical drawing. If the absence of the pregnancy, brought to light in the anonymous body of Vesalius’s dissection, testifies to his subject’s guilt - the falsity of her attempt to “plead the belly” - this empty space in her codifies, by a starkly new form of representation, justification of the death penalty that she suffered. This emptiness, located as the spatial centre of the frontispiece of Vesalius’s Fabrica, and initiating a new era of representation, answers finally “the anatomical journey [...] in search of ‘female nature’” (Duden 45). If the locus of visual fascination driving this “journey” is one that Prospero’s Books shares cinematographically, Vesalius’s emptiness is precisely that which Greenaway’s film refuses. S IMON J OHN R YLE 228 Within a mimetic space that refutes classical cinematic spatial representations via the aesthetics of new media, Greenaway’s cinematography discomfitingly opens (as had early modern anatomists before him) the female body conventionally to be found at the extreme point of cinema’s conventional “determining male gaze” (Mulvey 487) - yet opens this space as site of pregnancy. Conclusion Developing the Lacanian notion of the real for film theory, Mary Ann Doane explains at the extreme point of the gaze “the ‘I,’ no longer master of what it sees, is grasped, solicited, by the depth of field (that which is beyond)” (63). Turned towards Greenaway’s Susannah sequence, the uncanny object of the spectator’s gaze - the foetus of Susannah’s self-dissection - would seem similarly to grasp the spectator, disrupting the mastery of the male gaze. However, as Heath writes of the repeated, repeating role of the woman in representation (also deploying a Lacanian framework): woman is not the ruin of representation but its veritable support in the patriarchal order, the assigned point at - on - which representation holds and makes up lack, the vanishing point on which the subject that representation represents fixes to close the division of which it is the effect. (83) One might argue, with Heath, that Greenaway’s Susannah functions not as Doane’s ruinous depth, but as the vanishing point that is so frequently at the heart of representation - the loss central to The Tempest, that is aligned - in the silence of Prospero concerning his wife, and in Claribel’s abandonment - with pregnancy and with woman. Or might one perhaps claim that combined with the spectator’s problematized orientation of the film’s space, the reflexive redoubling of types of representation and media, and the film’s visual excavations of Prospero’s language of pregnancy, that Greenaway selfdissected/ dissecting pregnancy achieves a ruinous, destabilizing depth? This crux is a vital one: in digitally reinstating the feminine, does Prospero’s Books objectify its female bodies in a manner parallel to Prospero’s metaphorical usurpation of the feminine in his language of pregnancy? Might the visual force of Greenaway’s affective cinematic inscription be said to redress The Tempest’s silence concerning the originary scene of maternal loss? Or is the radical force of this narrative excavation constantly problematized by the silence of Greenaway’s female bodies, whose visual presence is overlaid by a verbal audio track dominated by Gielgud’s voice? At the heart of this question one should consider the effect on the male gaze of the shift in the agency ascribed to the film’s female bodies, between the castrated feminine of Claribel’s bleeding wound and Susannah’s self-dissection. Does Susannah, in uncannily combining anatomical object and agent, invoke a view alternative to the male gaze as it is characterized by feminist film schol- Excavating loss: rebirth and new media in Prospero’s Books and The Tempest 229 arship - a more radically Lacanian gaze, that is to say: a uncanny recollection of the impossible real that ruptures the mastery of spectatorship? To reformulate these questions - synthesizing, or side-stepping Doane and Heath - in Manovich’s terms might the sequence be said to return digitally to the preclassical Hollywood codes so long “repressed” from commercial cinema? If this is indeed so, Greenaway’s “return” also stresses a broader diachronic relation. At once drawing from, and resisting, patriarchal techniques and concerns that have been recirculated and reappropriated, transnationally and transhistorically, across four hundred and fifty years of visual and verbal European representation, Greenaway’s digital return to the cinematic past uses an uncanny refiguration of Renaissance anatomies to excavate The Tempest’s language of pregnancy. My focus on pregnancy would thus rethink The Tempest’s “buried literary history,” by which, in Gilman’s account, “Prospero’s speech finds its echo in Medea’s power to run backwards in order to restore” (117). As in Freud’s method, Gilman figures his own critical endeavour as excavating the buried sources to Prospero’s speech - rather as I have argued that Prospero’s Books offers an archaeology of Prospero’s silences. The excluded female (Sycorax, Medea) is similarly suggested by Gilman, in the necromantic powers that Prospero claims: “graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, ope’d, and let ‘em forth” (5.1.48-49). While I argue for the primary importance of pregnancy over burial images in the play, further work might align the metaphorical relation of Prospero’s necromancy with the structure of release so central to Prospero’s gendered presentation of his power. The potent conflation of the dark and confining spaces of the female body and the tomb is, for example, a link strategically deployed in Romeo and Juliet: “The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb: / What is her burying grave, that is her womb” (2.3.5-6). In both image schemata, as with Freud’s (re)constructions, representation is configured as expelled from an interior space, but also as reaching back toward an originary moment, while simultaneously enclosing, or delimiting access to, that past. These enclosed spaces are materialized visually in the entrapping, claustrophobic tension of Greenaway's cinematography: the stylistically pointed, strictly lateral movements of his camerawork, and the digitally overlaid, concurrent screens that reformat the classical cinema's presentation of narrative space. Yet beyond entrapment, at issue in this cinematic and digital reformatting is the relation of the adaptation to the poetics of representational return constructed by The Tempest's images of pregnancy. If Prospero would evade the rebirth of remembrance, nevertheless, as Sonnet 59 suggests, the representational future cannot but “bear amiss” that which has been lost. Following The Tempest's manner of interweaving the figural quality of the rebirth with its own narrative silences, in Susannah's uncanny self- S IMON J OHN R YLE 230 dissection Prospero’s Books offers a reflexive image of its own excavations. 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M IMI Y IU Prospero’s Book of Architecture “For architecture, write film: for architect, write filmmakers” Peter Greenaway 1 Like a filmic Book of Hours, Prospero’s Books (1991) runs a course partitioned into twenty-four units, a number that evokes the organic wholeness of day but also the artificial division of clockwork. In director Peter Greenaway’s fallen world, a world coming to terms with itself after a tempest, a flood, the structuring units are not temporal but textual: Prospero owns twenty-four books, each of which a voice-over narrator displays and explains at a crucial juncture. In this respect, Greenaway’s narrative resembles an Advent calendar that counts down the twenty-four days before Christmas; instead of cardboard windows that children open with each passing day, however, viewers are treated to the vision of anonymous hands that open a series of books like presents. While the subject of each book often relates to a key theme about to emerge in the film - the Book of Love, for instance, prefaces the meeting of Miranda and Ferdinand - the books themselves do not segment regular chunks of narrative, nor do they foreclose the meaning of vignettes by imposing an interpretive rubric. 2 The books sometimes appear close together in short bursts, sometimes reappear much later in the film, sometimes present themselves with a numbered title, sometimes without a number, sometimes without a title. Neither bookmark nor book-end in the filmic structure, the unpredictable rhythm of these volumes pulsates across the fabric of Prospero’s Books like variations on a theme, making the film a surreal fugue that stacks and staggers twenty-four voices. Indeed, Prospero’s Books suspends any sense of linear order to create a visual artifact that resembles writing in its semantic and structural density, producing in cinematic form a differential space between each book - not to mention between Greenaway’s film and its source, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. If twenty-four frames make up one second of film, 3 then Greenaway breaks apart the clockwork sequence of this medium to construct a digital 1 Quoted in Marcia Pally (112). 2 Although at least one DVD version uses the books as chapter headings, this practice highlights the odd eddies in the film’s rhythm. 3 Peggy Phelan notes how the number twenty-four marks both the hours in a day and the frames of film in a second (cf. esp. 45). Greenaway himself makes this connection twice (Pally 132 and 150). M IMI Y IU 236 network of meaning, one that jumps from node to node. In the parlance of twenty-first century technology, Prospero’s Books embraces a digital textuality that layers frame upon frame, breaking through traditional borders by building hyperlinks between windows. Instead of effacing the lacuna between frames to create an impression of continual movement, an optical illusion engineered by unspooling film, Greenaway’s postmodern architectonic celebrates the fissures that destabilize relations between topoi, making each opened book a desultory microcosm of disjunctions, as we shall see. Despite this stormy roiling of the cinematic waters, an insistent directionality orients Greenaway’s visual language at times, not least because the film borrows heavily from the vocabulary of classical architecture. For Greenaway’s Prospero inhabits no ordinary island, no castaway’s wilderness with only a rough cave for shelter. While Shakespeare makes Prospero the “master of a full poor cell” (1.2.20), an ascetic monk devoted to his books, Greenaway reshapes this character as “an eclectic architectural scholar, perfectly capable of prophetic borrowing” from Piranesi’s eighteenth-century drawings of oversize arches and sweeping staircases (Greenaway 1991, 32). 4 Prospero’s island retains virtually no trace of its native topography, what Caliban describes as “all the qualities o’th’ isle: / The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile” (1.2.338-9). Instead, the film showcases a grand estate that resembles a dictator’s compound more than a scholar’s retreat, a denatured place where even beaches and cornfields are strewn with the remnants of antique construction, a dwelling suitable for an Ozymandias. Such an overbuilt island realizes the director’s vision of “an architectural capriccio planned and invented and built by a man yearning for the classical architecture of Europe - of Renaissance Italy” (Greenaway 1991, 55). Yet how could this figure of desire not point back to Greenaway himself, the architect-filmmaker? How could this architectural capriccio be anything other than Prospero’s Books? Wrenched from a time and place remote to the viewer, if not most characters in the film, Greenaway’s postcard-worthy buildings function as literal metaphors, as carriers of meaning that travel from one culture to another, from one semiotic system to the next. 5 While the boat that carried Prospero to the island, loaded by Gonzalo with books “prized above” his “dukedom” (1.2.168), constitutes one vessel for the migration of material texts and bodies, the travelling library also provides the cornerstones for an intellectual crossing of oceans, a crossing that assumes physical shape when Prospero draws upon designs in these books to build an elaborate collection 4 Greenaway published the volume Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a companion to the film. 5 Cf. Michel de Certeau’s explication of metaphorai as means of transport, as spatial stories, in The Practice of Everyday Life (155). Prospero’s Book of Architecture 237 of edifices. Borne on the back of an ostensibly barren island, this rebirth of Renaissance architecture derives from Prospero’s textually mediated desire to create another empire, to project another Rome from the memories locked in his head and in his books. Greenaway’s notion of Prospero as an “eclectic architectural scholar” (Greenaway 1991, 32) thus demands that we attend to how the film’s built spaces perform - like books - as material objects, vehicles of cultural transmission, and instruments for self-fashioning. If Prospero indeed neglected his political duties as the Duke of Milan by turning inwards to his books, “being transported / And rapt in secret studies” (1.2.76-7), then the island’s magnificent complex of buildings makes clear that architecture is his open secret, his occult fantasy of world-making. Transporting his book knowledge from mental to physical ground, unwrapping his rapt studies to construct buildings all’antica, Prospero curates a ‘greatest hits’ collection of mainly Renaissance buildings that surpasses what any locale in the Old World can offer. Greenaway thus disarms that old chestnut of why Prospero did not simply use his magic to sail back to Milan, there to regain the throne from an unkind brother: Prospero was too busy usurping Milan elsewhere, dreaming up a master plan that expresses in stone and plaster his matchless sovereignty. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was Prospero’s island. During his twelve years of exile, this architect-magus has conjured into being an architectural corpus with as much care as the script we see him crafting in scene after scene. According to Greenaway’s map of the island, included with his published film-script, Prospero has constructed replicas of such landmarks as Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, the Pyramid of Cestius, the Alhambra gardens, the Fire of London monument, and the Aracoeli steps near the summit of Rome’s Capitoline Hill. 6 Magically turned from books to marble, from memories to buildings, this constellation of celebrated architecture realizes a miniature version of the Old World, a well-edited library of spatial design. Yet the symmetries of Prospero’s classical idiom seem distinctly off-kilter in this anomalous locale, an insular setting that abstracts buildings from their original location and history. Assembled on a tropical isle of “a thousand twangling instruments” (3.2.137), Prospero’s idiosyncratic palace, his Xanadu, necessarily resonates in a different register than if we encountered these same edifices in their respective homes across Europe. Spliced together from parts of other buildings, other cultural bodies, such an architectural collage risks coming across to viewers not as a clever postmodern gesture, a pastiche to be understood in quotation marks, but 6 Greenaway’s map labels these sites, though not all the structures are visible in the film. His designation “Arcoli Steps on the Capitoline” likely references the famous steps to the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, located atop the Capitoline Hill in Rome. For more on Greenaway’s usage of maps, see Alan Woods (116-8). M IMI Y IU 238 rather a theme park that makes early modern culture into kitsch. Absent any other architecture to provide contextual meaning, deprived of a historical matrix that sediments identity, the island’s built spaces undergo a semantic drift as they float upon a self-referential sea. Indeed, the sole certainty that anchors this solipsistic universe is Prospero’s will-to-build, his desire to found and imprint a second Rome - a reborn empire - upon what he deems a tabula rasa. O brave new world that has such goodly buildings in it! Prospero’s Books implicates built space in the workings of power by teaching a “primitive” island to articulate the language of classical architecture, by taming this strange land with an uncannily familiar aesthetic. As the most visible marker of how Prospero establishes an alternate centre of dominance, this architecture necessarily structures every frame around the problem of cultural politics and imperialist history, troubling the sumptuous tableaux of a film that only seems to celebrate visual artistry for its own sake. According to Bridget Elliott and Anthony Purdy, “the reading of power in the play which, in most post-colonial productions and interpretations of The Tempest, has focused almost exclusively on the Prospero-Caliban relationship, is here displaced onto the question of textual control and technical mastery” (74-5). What counts as textual control and technical mastery, however, includes not only the lines of dialogue that Prospero records on the page, but also the architectural lineaments he inscribes on the ground: both are forms of built space. Thus, scattered among the books and papers on Prospero’s desk are various scale models that depict basic elements of architecture, including fluted columns and a circular pavilion in the classical style (fig. 1). Not only does Prospero himself appear framed between two miniature, marbleized obelisks as he writes The Tempest, but even his black strokes of calligraphy resemble the distinctive curves of Baroque architecture. In short, Greenaway composes a scene of writing that visually equates the building blocks of space with those of language, hence suggesting a certain fluency in translation between the two media. For an “eclectic architectural scholar” (Greenaway 1991, 32) who has graduated from reading to writing, the spatial plots that he inscribes with his designs seem no different from the dramatic plots that he devises on paper. Once brought into critical focus, this parallel between architecture and writing complicates how we understand the power dynamics of Prospero’s Books, especially in relation to issues of textual authorship and appropriation. After all, the film rewrites not only a literary masterpiece but also a variety of architectural masterpieces, which furnish a radically innovative setting for The Tempest - thus nesting the expression of one medium within another. By attending to the material history of architecture, we see more clearly how the film’s authorizing strategies map onto the questions of imperialist power so Prospero’s Book of Architecture 239 Figure 1: Prospero writes architecture: desk as construction site. Prospero’s Books (1: 05: 22). crucial to Shakespeare’s original narrative. Indeed, even as Prospero usurps and melds the creative faculty of numerous Renaissance figures, Greenaway extends this dictatorial control to the usurped and melded voices that the actor John Gielgud dictates. Beyond replacing Shakespeare by writing and staging The Tempest during the film, Gielgud’s Prospero also speaks the lines of every character as other actors lip-sync to recordings of his voice. Yet despite reducing family, foe, noble, and sailor to the same base level of mute obedience, forcing them as mere subjects to accept his words and cadences in their mouths, this authoritarian displacement of subaltern voices must be situated in the decentring architecture that Prospero himself erects and inhabits. For just as the home that he calls his own is not really his own, but rather a copy of someone else’s intellectual and physical property, the words that issue from his mouth resound to viewers, first and foremost, as Shakespeare’s. After all, the film’s entire premise rests upon a conceit that we might call textual squatting, a premise that involves occupying someone else’s premises. Like Caliban, this Prospero proves to be a trickster who speaks in another’s language, an interloper dwelling in another’s home; ironically, even as Caliban plots to steal Prospero’s book, the symbol of an imperial power so inexorable as to merit the name of magic, Prospero has already stolen his own mantle of authority from Shakespeare. In much the same fashion, just as the sorcerer’s or cardinal’s robe endows Prospero with a hieratic aura, the grandiose architecture that surrounds him furnishes a stage for political spectacle of the highest order, impressing upon subordinates his god-like ability to conceive wondrous new worlds ex nihilo. M IMI Y IU 240 Yet since even the fanciest garments seem no more than “trash” (4.1.225) when demystified as material “luggage” (4.1.232), the buildings hand-picked for their exquisite design come undone when revealed as borrowed trappings, as theatrical façades that bear no weight in the world. While the fine clothes that form the “trumpery in [his] house” (4.1.186) serve as “stale” (4.1.187) to catch naïve eyes, Prospero devises on a much larger scale the “trumpery” of his own house, a trompe l’oeil that deceives the senses into accepting his transcendent sovereignty. Yet as Prospero famously bemoans: The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (4.1.152-6) When the spaces that he occupies appear to disillusioned viewers as an “insubstantial pageant,” when the little globe of his island feels like a playhouse, the most visible exponent of Prospero’s god-like power dissolves into the stuff of dreams, or perhaps the masks of parody. If architecture’s “rough magic” can be stripped away as easily as his cloak (5.1.50), then the omnipresent sight of these buildings always threatens to expose Prospero as a copyist rather than a master builder, as a reader who timidly parrots back rather than a writer who boldly forges anew. By cloaking himself in the cultural capital of others, Prospero finds his own mouth invaded by the words and ideas of others, his own hands suborned into executing another’s designs. What the island’s built spaces bring into stark relief, then, are the complex power relations that obtain when cultural texts not only descend through history but also travel across geographic terrain. Prospero’s edifices demand an account of intertextual mobility that includes both metaphor and metonymy, both linear time and contingent space. 7 Thus, when Amy Lawrence notes that Greenaway’s work can read as “the usual postmodernist shuffle through the rubble of Western culture, a leisurely stroll beneath the calves of England’s literary colossus,” a telling conflict emerges between a horizontal “shuffle” through historical debris and a vertical cowering beneath a “colossus” (144) unbowed by the centuries. Does a modern artist like Greenaway merely forage through a temple in ruins, a Renaissance now reduced to a clutch of stylistic motifs like those on Prospero’s desk? Or must this same artist always venerate the cult statue of an immortal father, a quasidivine Bard who casts a broad shadow of influence, whose words still make flesh, cinematic or otherwise? Lawrence’s spatialized tropes of cultural 7 I draw upon Roman Jakobson’s correlation of metaphor with causal time and metonymy with contingent space. Prospero’s Book of Architecture 241 transmission also raise the question of what counts as architectural and literary “rubble,” what remains of textual artifacts preserved in some inner sanctum of our collective memory. After all, the film begins with the sinking of a model ship and concludes with the drowning of books; the dissolution of these interior spaces forces viewers to consider the imbrication of archive and architecture, the intertwining of stories and spaces that renders both suspect, possibly seditious. While Audre Lorde argues that the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house (cf. 112), the island spaces forced to speak in a colonizer’s tongue may learn to curse. Such a means of refuting the dominant order might seem unlikely when Greenaway, a trained artist, has mapped the entire island like a master architect. On his beautifully rendered ground-plan and elevation, Greenaway charts a cohesive articulation of space that extends clear across the island, while inserting labels that specify which historical buildings inspired Prospero. This founding map-book of architecture thus schematizes the island both metonymically and metaphorically: Greenaway’s layout enjambs otherwise disjunct architectural parts into a contingent unity, while his linguistic references supplement this horizontal chain with historical depth. Despite his meticulous plotting of a cartographic language that considers both syntax and inflection, Greenaway refuses to anchor the viewer through panoramic shots that establish a totalizing overview of the island, or even of key facades. Instead, each appearance of a book from Prospero’s library serves to “wall off” one scene from the next, to section one unit of cinematic space no matter how uneven and elastic the terrain. Just as Greenaway’s map presents the island in linear profile, the film takes our eyes on a journey along a bookshelf, through the insular space of an archive that nevertheless roils from the dislocating forces of imagination. Prospero’s Books thus embraces an architectonic based profoundly on books, while its diegetical architecture springs up from lines drawn on a page. For in this world born not from hag-seed but book leaves, Prospero dwells within buildings that derive from, house, and even produce texts: the original twenty-four tomes seem to have multiplied like viruses to occupy the cavernous voids of Prospero’s study. Early in the film, Greenaway establishes the crucial relationship between book and building by presenting the Book of Architecture, an ur-text that enables other texts to flourish. In the show-and-tell tour through Prospero’s library that structures the film, a voice-over narrator introduces first the Book of Water, which details the qualities of that element most vital to The Tempest, and then the Book of Mirrors, which deals with subjective development. This foundational trinity reaches completion when an unusual volume entitled A Memoria Technica Called Architecture and Other Music appears on the screen M IMI Y IU 242 (fig. 2). Greenaway’s script describes this book as a magical, miniature world unto itself: When the pages are opened in this book, plans and diagrams spring up fullyformed. There are definitive models of buildings constantly shaded by moving cloud-shadow. Noontime piazzas fill and empty with noisy crowds, lights flicker in nocturnal urban landscapes and music is played in the halls and towers. With this book, Prospero rebuilt the island into a palace of libraries that recapitulate all the architectural ideas of the Renaissance (cf. Greenaway 1991, 21). 8 Figure 2: Book of Architecture, A Memoria Technica Called Architecture and Other Music. Prospero’s Books (0: 12: 44). In other words, this book contains a collection of plans that constitutes a library for the building of libraries, providing an interior space that generates other interior spaces. As the template for buildings that transform the island into “a palace of libraries,” a sovereign theatre for the staging of interior space, the Book of Architecture shelters Prospero’s dreams of empire and defines the ground of his ideal city-state, his cell, his cella, his mind. Indeed, when a later scene reveals how Prospero directs the harpy banquet from a pyramid inscribed “Ex Libris Prospero” (fig. 3), likely an allusion to the ex libris label that marks a book’s source, this conflation of book and building confirms that Prospero regards the island itself as his library, imprinted with his mark of possession. 9 8 In the script, this book doesn’t appear until a later sequence when Prospero describes his building on the island. 9 Under the title “Ex Libris Prospero”, Greenaway also published a short narrative that recounts Prospero’s exile from Milan, see Parkett 26 (1990): 137-139. Prospero’s Book of Architecture 243 Figure 3: Ex Libris Prospero. Prospero’s Books (1: 11: 30). While water gives both life and death, while mirrors allow identities to form between these temporal markers, architecture constructs an inner/ outer binary that moves the world to sing. Despite the script’s allusion to “noisy crowds” in piazzas, 10 the paper models that emerge from this Book of Architecture appear devoid of people and sound; instead of music played in halls and towers, music stems from the halls and towers themselves, from the harmony of proportions so important to a classical aesthetic. The book’s structure reinforces how architecture resonates as a musical form, perhaps even as the prime musical form, by interspersing the two genres so that music formally underpins architecture, and vice versa. That is, while the open book initially shows several prints of Renaissance buildings, Prospero’s hands soon turn over the page to reveal a musical score inscribed in black, a score whose staves form as rigorous a frame as any edifice. Inhabiting opposite sides of a page as though inhabiting opposite chambers of a heart, architecture and music combine to create a textual pulse as they alternate recto, verso, tick, tock. Yet not only does this sonic and spatial music flow into a seamless unity, layering the counterpoint of two distinctive textures into a kind of chamber music, but the contours of such a harmonic structure also serve as a memoria technica, or mnemonic device. Inevitably, the term memoria technica recalls the memory palaces once used to guide orators through speeches, 11 providing a textual structure legi- 10 This description, “Noontime piazzas fill and empty with noisy crowds,” is cut from the film. 11 For a classic account of memory palaces, see Frances Yates. M IMI Y IU 244 ble only to the mind’s eye. While constructing an imagined palace assists the classical orator in remembering parts of a speech, allowing him to place objects in unique locations throughout the interior, this mental itinerary through built space parallels the journey that any reader and writer takes through a text. Unlike most books, then, the Book of Architecture does not simply examine a topic that bears no intrinsic relation to the page, swapping in a field of knowledge to produce the next generic “Book of ________.” While Prospero’s magical library attempts to mitigate this schism by making books “embody their contents” (Greenaway 1991, 28), the Book of Architecture yokes “book” to “architecture” even more closely than, say, a Book of Mirrors that merely describes mirrors through words and images, or contains a panoply of mirrors within its covers. Since writing itself forms a memoria technica, a method intended to prevent both personal and cultural amnesia, the Book of Architecture holds a mirror to itself by examining the very nature of books, by turning its critical lenses upon the constructed spaces of language and memory. 12 This self-reflexive function suggests why parsing the title as simply A Book Called Architecture and Other Music seems inadequate, and thus why Greenaway may have added the term memoria technica to spotlight the engagement of space and repetition, music and text. 13 As a mnemonic that conceives the mind as built space, thus enabling the mapping of linguistic structures onto a mental terrain, the memory palace makes architecture a tool for marrying spatial to rhetorical topoi, spurring the powers of recall by integrating form and content. Such a paradigm of space reveals that Prospero’s architecture concerns the processes of memory as much as the erection of actual buildings, or even the skills of design. Although the memoria technica genre seems to implicate architecture in techne rather than poiesis, the island’s grand building project not only resonates against the drama that Prospero continually writes into being, but also imbues every frame with a vital rhythm, a musical articulation. That is, while the film opens with the “establishing sounds” of water, writing, and voice (Tribble 166), the constant musical surround of architecture proves equally relevant to how we understand the sonic landscape, the interplay of cadences and intervals that comprise an ‘other music’ to most viewers. As a memory palace that begets a palace of libraries, the Book of Architecture creates a world whose interiority thrums with past events and past topoi, a world that marks its textual and architectural spaces as constructs of artificial memory. As a result, while other magi- 12 Peter Schwenger observes that the books “serve as an ars memoriae, each book representing a topos for Prospero’s past as well as the story he now develops” (96). 13 In both the script and the list of books that Greenaway provides, the book is known merely as the Book of Architecture and Other Music — thus, the “memoria technica” aspect seems to be a later refinement. Prospero’s Book of Architecture 245 cal books that “embody their contents”(Greenaway 1991, 28) tend to negate the printed surface, or at least transform the page into something rich and strange, the Book of Architecture draws its greatest power from the materiality of paper, from the stroke of inscription that breaks ground and raises a creative edifice. Figure 4: Pop-up in the first book, looking from the library interior (reading room) towards door. Prospero’s Books (0: 12: 49). Like Athena from the head of Zeus, buildings emerge wholesale from the wondrous interior spaces nestled within the Book of Architecture. An endless abyss that disdains orientation, the book consists of leaves that flip over from left to right, then unfold vertically to open a pocket of space tucked between the original pages. For the musical notation that we noticed earlier, this second gesture uncovers a pop-up building whose contours have been cut from paper, rendered purely with cut paper, which springs into shape as the interior of Prospero’s library (fig. 4). With a start, we realize that we are looking at a miniature version of the very room where we are reading this book; in other words, the Book of Architecture contains a paper cut-out of the library that now houses it. Travelling across media in a game of stone, paper, and scissors, Prospero’s library derives from cardboard designs that in turn derive from Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, trimmed in dark sandstone. Before we can absorb these self-reflexive moves, however, the camera quickly roams beyond the Book of Architecture to reveal what seems to be an identical book lying in the background, a textual double whose pages unfold to disclose another pop-up structure (fig. 5). Since this second pop-up shows the outside of Prospero’s library, more specifically, the Baroque staircase that M IMI Y IU 246 leads from the atrium to the reading room (fig. 6), the books together construct an interior cross-section of Prospero’s library as well as an exterior façade. Greenaway thus devises his own twist on the classic draftsman’s techniques of elevation and section, echoing the dual modes of representation seen on his island map. Figure 5: Camera reveals second book being opened in the background. Prospero’s Books (0: 12: 51). Yet while an architectural drawing permits us to assume different perspectives without actually moving, Greenaway’s paper buildings force us to occupy a spectrum of visual and spatial positions that destabilize our relation to the cinematic world. For instance, the first pop-up situates viewers inside the library, looking down its length towards an exit, but the second pop-up situates viewers in the atrium outside, looking back towards this same door. Without changing the camera angle, Greenaway effectively swivels our gaze 180 degrees to survey our former position, a spatial reversal that evokes the operations found in the preceding Book of Mirrors. Indeed, given the synchronized opening of the two architectural books, identical down to the hand motions of a blue-cloaked figure, we might suspect the second book to be an immaterial reflection of the first. While our inability to see a mirror neither proves nor disproves this premise, we also cannot see ourselves, or rather, the camera that serves as our surrogate eye, even when we zoom straight into the second book’s façade. The wall common to both pop-ups thus divides our sense of self, prompting us to imagine ourselves as other - inaccessible behind the façade. Stymied by a paper whose writing we cannot interpret, a Prospero’s Book of Architecture 247 mirror that vanishes into smoke, we can only project a fullness of interior space beyond this screen, a fullness that nurtures our other self. Figure 6: Pop-up in the second book, looking from the library exterior (atrium) back towards the same door. Prospero’s Book (0: 12: 56). That other soon arrives in unexpected form. As the camera focuses in on the cardboard façade of this second book, the shot dissolves into an image of an identical, full-size façade not the Laurentian Library itself (fig. 7), but rather the ad hoc copy built for filming (fig. 8). As the illusion of books yields to the illusion of cinema, the architecture incised from paper seems no different from the flimsy sets we construct for our fantasies, if not our everyday lives. To further alienate us from the spaces we inhabit, to dislocate our point of view, Prospero and his attendants emerge from a door opposite the camera, then descend towards our implied location. While previously we had followed Prospero’s journey at his side, we have evidently taken a quantum leap through space, catapulted by the mirroring book into a discrete position ahead of ourselves, contra ourselves. Such progress allows us to wait for ourselves to appear; at any time, we expect our other self to trail in Prospero’s wake and come through the door. After all, Prospero doubles as The Tempest’s writer and hero, alternating red and blue cloaks to signal changes in his role, even walking past himself on occasion. But since the architecture that splits our subjectivity refuses to gratify this dream of a reunited self, we wander through the rest of the film watching for a spectral other lurking in a remembered place. Just as Gielgud’s voice undergoes various electronic distortions to distinguish each character, thus sowing disorder within a uni- M IMI Y IU 248 Figure 7: Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, Florence. Scala/ Art Resource, NY. Figure 8: Pop-up becomes ‘real’ as Prospero exits. Prospero’s Books (0: 13: 01). Prospero’s Book of Architecture 249 tary soundscape, the architecture that should anchor both viewer and actor keeps repeating with an uncanny difference. On the one hand, Renaissance architecture inherently repeats classical architecture with a difference by rethinking ancient rules of proportion, by reviving ancient techniques for use in new contexts. Striving for a perfect symmetry based upon a recurring module, a resonant interval, neo-classical architecture is complicit with the construction of single-point perspective, a method of representing space that becomes, arguably, the dominant visual ideology of modernity. As Brunelleschi discovered in the fifteenth century, objects painted on a two-dimensional surface can appear to have threedimensional volume under certain geometrical conditions. Artists must foreshorten their landscape using gridlines that recede towards a vanishing point on the horizon, while viewers are reduced to a solitary eye directly opposite this “distance point.” By locking the gaze along an axis that extends into infinity, or so the artist wishes us to believe, single-point perspective demands that viewers sacrifice bodily movement to luxuriate in the optical illusion of depth, to make space in the mind’s eye. Such a visual contract allows the subject to achieve poiesis through techne, to wield a world-making power through the gaze, to construe “I” through the eye. By constantly dislocating the viewer, however, Greenaway breaches this singular vision of space as the camera sutures an array of viewpoints to achieve the illusion of a holistic world. Indeed, Prospero’s Books subverts how we gaze upon the built space of classical architecture, not to mention the built space of a cinematic frame. While the measured distribution of columns and arches often impart a rhythmic quality to the scene, these markers of spatial regularity balance against the historical movement towards greater disorder, against the entropic forces that level even the most magnificent palaces. Not only do fragments of classical architecture litter the island from the “Antiquarian Beach” to Prospero’s innermost study, but even the intact places should be understood in the future anterior tense of postmodernism: this island will have been ruined. The film’s opening sequence exhibits these competing impulses to construct and destruct, as Prospero splashes in a pool while sinking a toy ship. Aptly, for a site analogous to a civilized ocean, this bath-house stands enclosed within serried rows of arches that Greenaway uses to frame multiple shots. Indeed, when viewed through columns, the bath-house evokes the painting of an ideal Renaissance city (fig. 9, 10), albeit a blue-tinted interior version. Yet some of the arches visibly support nothing but the film’s aesthetic, serving mainly as props that fill out a desirable pattern and conjure a sense of pastness. Casting shadows that resemble inky loops of calligraphy, these arches foretell architecture’s role in the struggle between control and chaos, utility and ruin, as we follow Prospero further into his compound. M IMI Y IU 250 Figure 9: Bath-house shot through columns. Prospero’s Books (0: 05: 59). Figure 10: Francesco di Giorgio Martini (? ), Ideal City (Berlin), bpk Berlin/ Germäldegalerie/ Joerg P. Anders/ Art Resource, NY. Fussed over by attendants in a ritual that evokes a French king’s levée, Prospero rises from the pool, dresses, and embarks on a stately procession along a corridor. This arcaded passage resembles sections of Vasari’s outdoor corridor in Florence (fig. 11), one of the first such linking structures in Renaissance architecture; sometimes known as the “Prince’s Route” (Percorso del Principe), this enclosed walkway was built in 1565 for Cosimo de Medici to connect his various residences and offices, allowing him to move between these spaces without entering the public sphere. While Greenaway retains Prospero’s Book of Architecture 251 this sense of a privileged route that navigates through a princely complex, he plunges his version into a darkened interior that leads from a bath-house to a library, providing a transitional passage from physical to mental inwardness, from piracy (the shipwreck) to privacy (the enclosed study). To emphasize the ceremonial length of this corridor, Greenaway employs a sinuous long take that not only follows Prospero and his attendants across the screen, but also immerses us into their world of fantasy, drawing us “[f]ull fathom five” (1.2.397) into an exotic realm whose inhabitants seem already made of coral and pearl (fig. 12). Indeed, as we delve further into Prospero’s court, our gazes are seduced away from his calm, central figure to feast on riotous frames crowded with dancers, jugglers, and assorted “freaks” who compose a spectacular pageant: this Tempest is all masque all the time. As a formal constraint upon this revelry that threatens the measured, boxed-in movements of Prospero’s retinue, columns and arches punctuate regular intervals of space along both sides of the bath-house corridor. Although passages also branch off from this corridor at right angles, Greenaway forecloses these alternate routes either because too much activity in the foreground blocks our view, or because dim lighting renders these recesses mere shadows. Figure 11: Vasari Corridor, Florence. Author’s photograph. M IMI Y IU 252 Figure 12: Prospero and his retinue processing along colonnade. Prospero’s Books (0: 08: 17). The inward journey promised by the corridor thus proves to be a sham, as the tracking camera steadily refuses to deviate from its sanctioned route, shrouding the secrets of Prospero’s cosmos from our curious eyes. Denied the possibility of a visual line of flight into the distance, precisely the extension in depth that single-point perspective idealizes, we must accept a superficial cosmos that unfurls across a single horizon of meaning, unfolding a narrative in sequence. Indeed, the columns form vertical markers that frame units of space like a film spool, defining miniature tableaux vivants that move past at an unhurried pace. Yet no matter how richly eccentric the surrounding characters may seem, the totalitarian control that Prospero exerts over his itinerary exposes this dense vitality as an illusion. Although Prospero briefly disappears behind a huge open book - thus showing this corridor to serve also as a reference library, or a library of references - even the implied, spectral presence of his body keeps the whole retinue moving at the same steady pace. Just as Prospero’s all-powerful voice brooks no distraction, his linear trajectory proceeds like a single expelled breath, an imperative. Indeed, as the opening credits that flash on-screen punctuate and overlay this procession, we are reminded that Prospero’s spatial journey always beats with a linguistic pulse, compelled by a narrative drive that in some respects eludes his control. As though echoing the regular syntax of this spatial scroll, Michael Nyman’s score furnishes a percussive accompaniment that features a repeating motif, driving the music forward with a momentum that matches Prospero’s. Yet shortly after the procession begins, a mysterious anvil-like Prospero’s Book of Architecture 253 sound also insinuates itself with insistent repetition into the aural fabric, adding a metallic clang whose syncopation disrupts Nyman’s wash of sound. Soon, the music ceases entirely as the clang continues, with minor variations in timbre and rhythmic motif, thus reducing the aural landscape to a stark temporal beat, a plangent knell with no obvious source or meaning. 14 While Timothy Murray associates this noise with the “loud clanging of tools and printing press,” rendering the corridor akin to a “loud, mannerist printing hall” (118) this link to print culture also returns us to the memoria technica whose allusion to “architecture and other music” dissolves any boundary between the two arts. After all, the German philosopher Friedrich von Schelling defined architecture as “music in space” (165), a kind of a frozen or congealed music (cf. 177). If the columns and clangs inflect Prospero’s space with a sense of harmonic proportion, then these regular intervals of space/ sound inspire a hypnotic trance in viewers, conditioning them to recall this corridor when the same motifs appear in other contexts - thus making Prospero’s palace itself a mnemonic. Like Caliban’s dream of an island “full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (3.2.135-6), the “thousand twangling instruments” (3.2.137) heard in this corridor transform space into a fantastic and resonant music. This harmonic progression through space must be juxtaposed against the distinctive mini-frames that Greenaway layers onto the cinematic image using Paintbox software. Just as Prospero’s library contains a smaller “cell” within (fig. 13), recalling Antonello da Messina’s portrait of St. Jerome (fig. 14), 15 these Paintbox frames often create nested spaces that reveal the interior space of a book, embed a digital animation within a book, or display a scene that occurs elsewhere. Yet rather than cloister ever-inner images, such digitized spaces violate our expectations of a coherent temporal, spatial, and textual logic. Just as Prospero’s voice negates a bounded corpus to jump from interior to interior, our gaze roams from frame to frame without a map, without a pre-set track that makes sense of this cinematic architecture. While single-point perspective aims to punch a window through a wall, granting viewers the illusion of unfettered exteriority, Greenaway undermines such confidence in linear extension by unfixing the relation between inside and outside, text and context. Like the doubled books of architecture, each frame 14 These sounds may be related to the way Pythagoras formulates his theory of musical intervals, and by extension to the music of the spheres, by listening to the pitches of blacksmiths’ anvils. George Hersey relates this episode to Schelling’s notion of frozen music, cited below (25-27). 15 David Pascoe explores the art-historical links to Jerome in Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images (166-71). Woods compares how Greenaway treats architecture versus other art forms (78-90). Paula Willoquet-Maricondi argues that Prospero’s isolation in his cell is a form of mastery related to Michel de Certeau’s notion of “strategy” (esp. 188). M IMI Y IU 254 Figure 13: Prospero’s cell within his library. Prospero’s Books (1: 33: 18). Figure 14: Antonello da Messina, St Jerome in His Study (c.1475), National Gallery London/ Art Resource, NY. Prospero’s Book of Architecture 255 is enclosed by an interface that may function as a mirror or window, signalling reversal or continuity; like pages that turn in every way, each frame remains flexible in orientation. Indeed, using a myriad of editing techniques, Greenaway playfully obviates which frame comes first, which forms a copy, which rests within another, and which prevails atop another. Such indeterminacy haunts the Book of Architecture’s return in a later sequence. Although Greenaway repeats the trick of having doubled pop-ups, we see clearly that the two books are not mirrored: the book behind stands already open while the camera swoops over the first book, whose pop-up never deploys fully. Once we focus on this second pop-up, ostensibly of Prospero’s palace, the image is soon overlaid by a page on which Prospero inscribes lines from The Tempest (figs. 15-18). Both pop-up and page shimmer on screen, as though Prospero envisions an after-image, a memoria technica, before the pop-up dissolves into “real” architecture - first as a faint image that resembles a watermark on the page, then slowly gaining solidity as the page disappears. While the first pair of pop-ups decentre the self while seeming to animate paper buildings, this subsequent episode destabilizes the relationship between textual space, textual architecture, and architectural space. Which comes first? Figure 15: Opening pop-up in the first book. Prospero’s Books (1: 02: 30). M IMI Y IU 256 Figure 16: Mirroring book in the background. Prospero’s Books (1: 02: 32). Figure 17: Focus on pop-up in second book. Prospero’s Books (1: 02: 34). Prospero’s Book of Architecture 257 Figure 18: Page overlays second pop-up. Prospero’s Books (1: 02: 42). The question of priority becomes more complicated when we consider Greenaway’s borrowings from a Renaissance archive of design. On the one hand, edifices magically “pop up” on Prospero’s island as though jumping digitally from text to text, context to context. Yet since the “original” buildings in Europe exist outside the film’s diegetical world, Prospero does not so much recapitulate as simulate architecture, in Jean Baudrillard’s sense of a copy without a model. 16 Indeed, most viewers untrained in architectural history would assume the designs to be Greenaway’s, or perhaps just the “baseless fabric” of Prospero’s “vision” (4.1.151). 17 In this floating world without a head to recap, or a base to build upon, we must nevertheless remember the architectural corpus by returning to our initial understanding of a memoria technica. After all, as Greenaway notes in an interview: one must remember that Rome, both in the ancient empire and certainly in the Second World War, was the home of fascism. Ultimate power, ultimate narcissism, personified in someone like Mussolini, taken to extremes. And Rome is full of monuments to death and glory, ruins, enormous pyramids to Sestius [sic], triumphal arches representing slavery. (Rodgers and Greenaway 17) 16 See Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1-42). Peter Donaldson argues that the film’s digital technology engages a mode of “post-mechanical reproduction” that aims to make “copies that are as different as possible from each other, but constrained by a set of initial rules (176). More traditionally, Barbara Mowat claims that the film cannot achieve its full effect unless viewers recognize intertextual links (cf. 27-36). 17 In contrast, Lia Hotchkiss argues that the “drive to render the books cinematic” gives the actual buildings precedence over their pop-up versions (111-2). M IMI Y IU 258 Replete with arches, monuments, ruins, and even a pyramid to Cestius, Prospero’s island simulates a Rome that stands for Renaissance glory as well as twentieth-century Fascism. 18 By putting into spatial dialogue some of the most striking monuments from imperial powers of the past - Italy, England, and Islamic Spain, for instance - Prospero conjures an architectural fabric that disdains national borders to cohere through a shared fantasy of empire. Figure 19: “Real architecture emerges from page. Prospero’s Books (1: 02: 54) Such an ideology, rather than stand frozen in time, echoes through history with local shifts in tone; in Greenaway’s visual lexicon, for instance, the classical arch resonates with accreted meaning as the style fetish of Fascist rulers. After all, in the simplified outlines of the bath-house arcade, repeated later as a book pop-up (fig. 20), viewers may recognize one of Mussolini’s best-known buildings in Rome: the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a square tower whose arched façade evokes the Colosseum (fig. 21). Hence known as the “Colosseo Quadrato,” this civic showpiece featured in Greenaway’s earlier film, The Belly of an Architect (1987), which follows a Prospero-like architect’s physical and mental breakdown during an extended stay in Rome. 18 As James Tweedie notes, “Greenaway’s work makes heritage itself an object of inquiry and destabilizes many of its most precious monuments” (122). . Prospero’s Book of Architecture 259 Figure 20: Pop-up of arches as cluster of geometric motifs. Prospero’s Books (0: 37: 48). Figure 21: Colosseo Quadrato. Backcat/ Wikimedia Commons. Repeating with a difference this theme of external spaces that signal internal corruption, Prospero’s Books employs the clean, futile contours of Fascist arches virtually everywhere on the island - including the cornfield where Miranda first meets Ferdinand (fig. 22). As empty frames that stand but fail to deliver, as abortive “bad copies” of antiquity run amok, these arches comprise a species of architectural writing that foretells doom. When the young lovers’ romance unfolds within arches that support no greater edifice, can their pairing truly herald a fertile dynasty that makes the Old World new? M IMI Y IU 260 Figure 22: Arches that support nothing in the cornfield. Prospero’s Books (0: 42: 45) Pregnant with meaning yet functionally sterile, the arch that forms the arch-symbol of hubris reaches its logical end in Flying over Water (1997), an exhibition that Greenaway curated on the theme of Icarus. To reach the main gallery, visitors passed under a triumphal arch of “glass stuffed full with pure white feathers, accompanied by the sound of the sea” (Greenaway 1997, 1). Likewise, passing through the overarching frame of Shakespeare’s Tempest, viewers who arrive on Prospero’s sea-swept island must activate a historical and aesthetic remembrance that overlays his neo-classicism with whispers of neo-Fascism, tempering the soaring ambitions of feathers with the fragility of glass. While “Prospero’s books are those of a Renaissance imperialist” (Keesey 102), Prospero’s architecture inscribes a collection of imperialist memories that always threatens to collapse, an archive on the verge of tumbling into oblivion like the textual pages and building fragments that litter the filmic landscape. As Greenaway himself muses, almost nostalgically, on the future of grand building projects: Maybe the original Michelangelo staircase will be gone in a millennium, to join those earlier ascents of architectural history, the ziggurats and those de-marbled, de-stoned exposed stairs of the stepped pyramids, and every hypothetical Tower of Babel that fascinated Brueghel with the vanity of reaching the impossible, of reaching Heaven, of making a stairway to God. (Cf. Greenaway 1994, 57) The Book of Architecture thus works in tandem with Prospero’s Love of Ruins, an essential “volume for the melancholic historian who knows that . Prospero’s Book of Architecture 261 nothing endures” (Greenaway 1991, 124) 19 - and for the melancholic filmmaker who knows that all worldly matter comes down to a matter of words. If the bath-house arches can be reduced to paper cut-outs, perhaps the island’s buildings will vanish not by falling into disrepair, but by folding again into a book. Just as the memoria technica of Prospero’s books may drown, the memoria technica of his architecture may shimmer and dissolve, a mirage like the “insubstantial pageant faded” of Greenaway’s film itself (4.1.155). Yet rather than figure an Icarus soaring beyond permitted bounds, a stairway to God, might Prospero’s attempt to rebuild the Renaissance produce only an architecture for the birds? In a 2008 project entitled “Super Kingdom,” the artistic partnership known as London Fieldworks constructed a series of birdhouses that were “a sculptural installation of animal ‘show homes’ in a woodland environment, based on the architecture of despot’s palaces.” 20 One of these birdhouses drew upon the Colosseo Quadrato’s motif of an arched opening within a rectangular module, but exploded the geometry of a modernist frame (fig. 23). Like the Lego-set of a child - or dictator - who has gone wild, this birdhouse stacked blocks of different volumes in an absurdist syntax, wrapping a madcap cubist fantasy around the trunk and two main branches of a mature tree. In contrast to the relentlessly horizontal layout of Prospero’s architecture, emphasized by Greenaway’s tracking shots through mysterious interiors, the Mussolini birdhouse sheers upward into a verdant canopy, offering multiple perspectives from below and multiple pathways into the interior. Prospero may dictate architecture into being, collecting museum-quality design to create an insular cabinet of curiosities, but the birdhouse that climbs upon a tree allows its structure to be dictated by nature, exposing its wooden blocks to the elements and leaving its arches open to all comers. “Super Kingdom” thus dissipates the neurotic control suggested by an island empire and embraces instead an arboreal ecology whose borders extend as far as birds can take flight. 19 Greenaway’s script uses “indispensable” instead of “essential” (124). 20 London Fieldworks consists of artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson. Their project statement can be found at http: / / www.londonfieldworks.com/ projects/ super-kingdom / index.php. M IMI Y IU 262 Figure 23: Mussolini birdhouse. London Fieldworks. Such a creative response to Fascism deconstructs the structure of centralized power, breaking down the division between human and monster that totalitarian regimes seek to uphold. If Caliban could write his curse as architecture, he may well devise a Mussolini birdhouse that playfully thumbs its nose (or beak) at the arrogance of human domination over the landscape. In the devolution from bureaucracy to birdhouse, the arches that once composed an impenetrable façade now became apertures in a democratic range of sizes, ready to shelter winged creatures great and small. Although Greenaway often treats the classical arch as a pure signifier, a paper motif devoid of any purpose, the Mussolini birdhouse transforms the triumphal arch into a homely entrance, making the grandly imposing into the whimsical but utilitarian. Rather than resign itself to an abject relation with history, London Fieldworks scavenges cultural artifacts to create a colossal birdhouse that deforms and dethrones the architectural corpus. In so doing, they succeed in building a surreal theatre where the revels have just begun, where actors have truly melted into spirits of the air. Prospero’s Book of Architecture 263 Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Donaldson, Peter S. “Shakespeare in the Age of Post-Mechanical Reproduction: Sexual and Electronic Magic in Prospero’s Books.” Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video. Ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt. London, new York: Routledge, 1997. 172-89. Elliott, Bridget, and Anthony Purdy. Peter Greenaway: Architecture and Allegory. Chichester: Academy Editions, 1997. Greenaway, Peter. ”Ex Libris Prospero.” Parkett 26 (1990): 137-150. . Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991. .The Stairs: Geneva. London: Merrell Holberton, 1994. . Flying over Water/ Volar Damunt L’Aigua. London: Merrell Holberton, 1997. Hersey, George. Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. 25-27. Hotchkiss, Lia. “The Incorporation of Word as Image in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books.” The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory. Eds. Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002. 95-120. Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” Fundamentals of Language. Eds. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. The Hague: Mouton, 1956. Keesey, Douglas. The Films of Peter Greenaway: Sex, Death and Provocation. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Lawrence, Amy. The Films of Peter Greenaway. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984. Mowat, Barbara. “‘Knowing I loved my books’: Reading The Tempest Intertextually.” “The Tempest” and its Travels. Eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. London: Reaktion, 2000. 27-36. Murray, Timothy. Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Pally, Marcia. “Cinema as the Total Art Form: An Interview with Peter Greenaway.” Peter Greenaway: Interviews. Eds. Vernon Gras and Marguerite Gras. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2000. 106-19. Pascoe, David. Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images. London: Reaktion, 1997. Phelan, Peggy. “Numbering Prospero’s Books.” Performing Arts Journal 14.2 (1992): 43- 50. Rodgers, Marlene, and Peter Greenaway. “Prospero’s Books - Word and Spectacle: An Interview with Peter Greenaway.” Film Quarterly 45.2 (1991-1992): 11-19. Schelling, Friedrich von. The Philosophy of Art. Trans. Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. M IMI Y IU 264 Schwenger, Peter. Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Tribble, Evelyn. “Listening to Prospero’s Books.” Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 161-9. Tweedie, James. “Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books.” Cinema Journal 40.1 (2000): 104-126. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula. “Prospero’s Books, Postmodernism, and the Reenchantment of the World.” Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/ Postructuralist Cinema. Eds. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary Alemany-Galway. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008. 177-202. Woods, Alan. Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966. E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ Adapting The Tempest : from performance to MetAdaptation Unlike Miranda, we live in information-rich environments. Just as for Prospero, furnished with his books by Gonzalo and empowered by Ariel, the wisdom and the folly of the world are at our fingertips, with low barriers to participation. Given these facts, I decided against interpreting Julie Taymor’s 2010 Hollywood movie of The Tempest, a movie that makes obvious computer-generated imagery choices in providing spectacular visuality (along the lines of a ‘cinema of attractions’ suggested by Tom Gunning) 1 . This would have been an obvious choice for a scholar specialising in adaptation studies, but it seems to me that social-media environments and online video platforms such as YouTube which provide a global stage without (or rather: nearly or presumably without) gatekeeping ask more pertinent questions about the play. In spite of its indisputable visual attraction, therefore, Taymor’s The Tempest (first encountered as a YouTube trailer) looked much less attractive as a cultural indicator of performing and adapting Shakespeare. Instead, then, this essay will address communityrather than industry-generated content on YouTube (‘fan-fic’ vs. ‘pro-fic’, i.e. ‘professional fiction’). As it is a novel way of adapting The Tempest on stage that I also first encountered on YouTube, I will focus on the 2009 lecture-performance project Pornstorm (Hildesheim University). In her recent study of The Tempest in performance, Virginia Mason Vaughan (2011, 1) remarks “a recurring tension between what is tried and true and what is experimental“, and, noting the 400-year time span since its first performance in the Blackfriars theatre, she continues to wonder “what comes next“ and, facetiously, suggests we mine Ariel as a technology buff for his IT expertise (2011, 214-215). It is, indeed, tempting to cast the Web as an island to be peopled by the inane 1 This may be seen to reduce The Tempest to just another fantasy vehicle on which to pin the display value of CGI cinema. Broeren (154) acknowledges that the funfair attractions of cinema diagnosed by Gunning may be successfully applied to big-budget Hollywood CGI (which is what I imply here). Nevertheless, he makes an interesting case for online video as “attractional dispositif“ (164). E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 266 offspring of media amateur ‘CalibanMirandas’ against the attempts of the censoring Prospero and his books (software), Ariel (search engine), enforcing functional tasks (fetching fuel; 1.2.367) 2 and censorship (to Ferdinand: “I’ll manacle thy neck and feet together“ (1.2.462)) on an anarchic space full of Sycoraxian mischief (“earthy and abhorred“ (1.2.273), “unmitigable rage“ (1.2.276)). 3 I would like to appropriate at least Prospero’s final plea for freedom in his epilogue to answer those who still think that the meaning of The Tempest resides solely within the covers of the Arden edition or on the boards of the Globe or the RSC: “Let me not [...] dwell / In this bare island by your spell“ (EPILOGUE.5-8). As Vaughan and Vaughan gloss in the new Arden edition, Prospero refers not just to the island as setting, but also metatheatrically to his stage here (307). The meanings of The Tempest, as Shakespeare indicates here via Prospero, reside crucially in its protean performances and adaptations beyond the confines of a text or even a canon of text and performance. Vaughan rightfully observes that no “person could see and comment“ on all of the performances of The Tempest in the world (2011, 192), but, we may add, we may glimpse a number of them on YouTube as a global rehearsal space, performance stage and archive for The Tempest. A YouTube ‘YouStorm’ and a Tempest lecture-performance might be some of the things that are coming next for The Tempest. On YouTube and elsewhere on the Net, creative originality may be in peril, but we may be grateful if Shakespeare continues to be a presence, his avatars “as the sun is daily new and old,/ […] still telling what is told“ — the Shakespearean version of intertextuality (in Sonnet 76). The Tempest is one of the most palimpsestuous and metatheatrical of Shakespeare’s plays, having been “re-read and re-written more radically, perhaps, than any other play“ (Hulme and Sherman 1). It is also experimental “from the beginning“ (2011, 214) as Vaughan notes. Arguably, it is a very special case among Shakespearean texts in triggering rich actualizations and versions that appropriate the play to specific cultural moments, such as gender revisions and postcolonial re-writings (Forbidden Planet, Prospero’s Books, Une Tempête, Indigo, The Forest Princess, No Telephone to Heaven, etc.). Studies of The Tempest on film and on stage in the context of cultural appropriation are legion (see Vaughan 2011, the essays collected in Hulme and Sherman, as well as Nixon; Dobson etc.). 2 Quotes from the text refer to act and scene divisions in the Arden edition, 3d series, by Vaughan and Vaughan (2011). 3 It is fascinating to note how the claims made in traditional media rage against YouTube recall Prospero’s account of Caliban: “Juvenile, aggressive, misspelled, sexist, homophobic, swinging from raging at the contents of a video to providing a pointlessly detailed description followed by a LOL, YouTube comments are a hotbed of infantile debate and unashamed ignorance“ (Owen and Wright). Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 267 Why these continuing re-writings and re-stagings, these Bearbeitungen (literally: re-workings) of The Tempest? An argument might draw three concentric circles around Shakespeare’s text that focus on (1) the attraction of adaptation and appropriating in general, (2) the attraction of Shakespeare’s work in particular, or (3) even the very specific case of The Tempest. (1) In studying the “what (forms), who (adapters), why (adapters), how (audiences), when (contexts), and where (contexts) of adaptation“ (Hutcheon xvi), Linda Hutcheon has laid out very clearly the inevitability and the attraction of adaptation and appropriation: Repetition with a difference breeds recognition and remembrance as well as change. (2) Shakespeare — himself an arch-adapter — has proven to be attractive to these modes of engagement for a variety of reasons associated with recognition and change. He is out of copyright, he is instantly recognisable, most of his works come with a baggage of adaptations and performances; as the most renowned playwright of all he represents Western culture; as the most important literary figure of Britain he represents its national and imperial past. The lure of quasi-automatic cultural capital and dignity bestowed on any project associated with Shakespeare has proved irresistible, regardless of whether the actual outcome has always lived up to the legacy invoked by the name of Shakespeare. From the viewer/ reader’s perspective any performance of Shakespeare is likely to be experienced as a re-performance. His authorial weight and a history overseen by guardians of fidelity, however, have meant that for a long time variations and appropriations have seemed provocative, daring, original and fresh. When Jean Marsden introduced her collection on The Appropriation of Shakespeare, in the wake of the pioneering reception studies by Gary Taylor (Reinventing Shakespeare) and Jonathan Bate (Shakespearean Constitutions), she quoted the foundational principle of Constance School reader-response criticism as articulated by Hans Robert Jauss: “A literary event can continue to have an effect only if those who come after it still or once again respond to it“ (1). I shall come back to the interesting initial phrase used by Jauss, “a literary event“ (my emphasis) as it seems to combine the idea of reading and the idea of literature as a performance. Since then, Shakespeare studies have compartmentalized their interest according to the media involved (adaptations on film, theatre, novels etc.) or the cultural re-positionings intended (national, gendered, ethicized etc.), so that now we have a hyphenated Shakespeare adaptations culture worthy of a Polonius. (3) Thirdly, The Tempest is a very special case in the history of appropriating Shakespeare, as the sequence of rewritings quoted at the beginning of this essay suggests. Issues of postcolonialism, gender, and aesthetics have dominated these re-readings. From Charlotte Barnes’s The Forest Princess (UK 1844/ USA 1848, see Loeffelholz), which re-mixes The Tempest and Pocahontas, E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 268 to Philip Osment’s 1987 play This Island’s Mine, colonial rewritings and postcolonial writings-back have been most prominent. Thomas Cartelli (106) has criticized these writings-back as “questionable“. He isolates a first phase, in which the Prospero-Caliban relationship is subverted and criticized in an attempt at postcolonial national articulation, from a second phase marked by a Shakespearean shorthand for postcolonial repositioning. To radicalize Cartelli’s point, it might indeed seem as if mentionings of Caliban (defiant aggression), Miranda (not-yet liberated cultural dependency) and Ariel (idealised post-colonial subject) have served to stereotype to some degree the attitudes of ‘writing back’. Indeed, Vaughan (2011, 214) suggests that postcolonial readings of The Tempest may deteriorate towards a pro forma, “obligatory gesture to political correctness“. Attempts to ‘equalize’ the central text such as The Tempest, to rewrite a Caliban as good as Prospero, tend to reinforce its cultural status and thus the colonizer’s perspective. Cartelli, interestingly, has also noted a diminishing importance of Shakespeare as a reference point, as the colonizer’s cultural icons have become at least partially superseded with a cultural iconicity ‘of one’s own’. As Vaughan (2011, 212) concludes her study of The Tempest in performance, it is a play that is conscious of the stage technology and “consists of plays-within-plays that comment on the transient power of dramatic art“. This metadramatic and metatheatrical appeal, Vaughan argues, accounts in particular for numerous experimental media-conscious adaptations of the play. Given this media consciousness and ubiquity of The Tempest, we can safely assume that Shakespeare’s play has entered the stage of meta-adaptation (or “MetAdaptation“, Voigts-Virchow 2009), in which adaptations and appropriations, from a variety of viewpoints, adapt not necessarily The Tempest, but what has been done to The Tempest in a variety of media, forms, genres, and discourses. YouTube: understanding in rehearsal Taking recent theories of appropriation/ adaptation (Sanders; Hutcheon) and academic research into YouTube (Snickars and Vonderau; Strangelove) as a basis, this paper seeks to go beyond the standard questions asked of every new adaptation of The Tempest, and bring into close focus the re-adaptation and re-performance of The Tempest’s adaptations, appropriations, and performances. My approach is certainly not unique — for instance, at the 2010 ESSE conference at Torino, Maurizo Calbi and John Joughin offered a panel focussed on “online hypermediatisation (e.g. Karaoke Shakespeare)“ and “You Tube Shakespeare”. Desmet (66) has argued in favour of YouTube as a didactic tool and praised YouTubers as Shakespeare bricoleurs. YouTube Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 269 makes performances of The Tempest readily and globally available. It is a ‘prosumptive’ space. Let us pause briefly to comment on the idea of a ‘prosumptive space’. The portmanteau word ‘prosumption’ was coined by Alvin Toffler in 1980 to reflect the increasing role of the consumer in shaping the process of production. The (often self-referential) co-presence of producers and consumers is constitutive of this culture of ‘prosuming’ and YouTube or blogs are the transient Net spaces for these communities of ‘prosumption,’ spaces that are “characterized by, among other things, the sharing of knowledge and expertise based on voluntary affiliations“ (Jenkins 2006, 280). The exploration of affinity spaces has begun in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Henry Jenkins whose Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) describes the mechanisms and acceleration of text migrations across media boundaries, with attendant problems of legitimacy and authorization: “[c]onvergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others“ (Jenkins 2006, 3). These early investigations of fanfiction as “participatory culture“ and “collective intelligence“ (Jenkins 2006, 2) often, at least implicitly, occur within a discussion of the potential and limits of social participation, along the lines of media ‘empowerment’ vs. media ‘disempowerment’ — classic questions in Cultural Studies. What is the effect of the platform/ distributor/ database YouTube on this particular intertextual space of The Tempest? Its most interesting qualities are those of a wild, transient, non-commercial, self-referential archival space of re-formatting and performances — and their re-appropriation and reformatting by commercial interests (Strangelove 4-5). Clips on YouTube appear within a highly structured media environment and infrastructure that organises the interchangeable co-presence of producers and consumers. In the case of The Tempest, for instance, we find: Clips and trailers from commercial movies, theatre performances, adaptations etc. Educational material, for instance from the BBC — since 2007 on the YouTube auxiliary TeacherTube (an Oprah Winfrey-like talk show host interview Miranda, Ferdinand, Prospero (in white socks and tourist outfit) and Ariel — apparently Caliban was too uncouth and unpalatable for the key stage 3 Shakespeare (aimed at children from 11 to 14 years old). Mash-ups of trailers and other ‘professional’ material Amateur versions (live-action, but also lego/ playmobile performances) E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 270 Examples of amateur performances are often low-tech antitheses of The Tempest as a template for the display of spectacular visuality (as in the 2011 film version by Julie Taymor). They are often infused with all kinds of hybrid popular textualities. Key examples include: “a[n] animated version of the Tempest, by William Shakespeare, which was made for the manchester cs animation contest in under 2 weeks. All the voices were done by me, in one take.“ (32.019), Andrew Watts, Warwickshire. The Tempest in arcade game-style raster graphics (2.789) by “Petter and Simon”. “William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as performed by the cast of Banana-nana-Ninja - in one minute! “ (5.103): animation, all the characters are cartoon fruits. Examples of ‘professional’ performances on YouTube include: The first clip from the BBC Animated Tales “The Tempest“ (207.820) The official trailer for the 2010 Julie Taymor movie by Touchstone Pictures — incorrectly advertised as “Shakespeare’s final masterpiece“ (686.542) Whereas ‘official’ material, therefore, garners a much higher number of views and may be the reason for most YouTube users to access YouTube in the first place, the relative importance of non-publicized amateur material — rich in variety — seems to be much higher. I do not take these short Tempest clips to be endowed with depths of meaning that require intense interpretative endeavours. This paper takes the transient pastiches and parodies of The Tempest on YouTube as instances of a trend toward ‘presentification’ (Hans- Ulrich Gumbrecht). Gumbrecht uses this word in the context of his attack on a furor hermeneuticus — the idea that our relationship to the world is governed exlusively or primarily by reading it — when in fact its manifold ‘meanings’ are quite as often established through mere ‘material’, ‘preinterpretative’ contact — by ‘simple’ presence. Anyone who has ever watched The Tempest in performance will be able to testify to the impression that its manifold meanings have rushed past him or her in the course of the stage transactions. For me, it is the information-saturated situation of contemporary media culture that gives weight to Gumbrecht’s ideas of a ‘culture of presence’ (in brief: focused on a pre-meaning aesthetics; focused on material signifiers, not just signifieds; body is just as legitimate as mind as location of significance). As any theatregoer can confirm, interpretation is not the only way to relate to The Tempest — the co-presence of actors and audiences in a theatre and the visceral experience of the show may be just as (or more) important. Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 271 Manifold adaptations, appropriations and performances of The Tempest have passed before various audiences’ eyes as (often non-interpreted) instances of ‘presentification’, as a consequence of the specific proclivity of Shakespeare towards being presentified, and in view of the long history of adaptations and stagings of The Tempest. We might, therefore, direct our interpretative energies towards its metatheatrical dimension and the media context of its textual presence in YouTube. Any contemporary version of The Tempest is likely to be experienced as already appropriated, invoking and actualizing a memory of earlier re-positionings. Thus, a contemporary film version of The Tempest will follow the rules of Hollywood Shakespeare, but will also be experienced as a ‘MetAdaptation’. Clearly, one might read Helen Mirren’s Prospera (or Russell Brand’s Trinculo) in the context of their Hollywood personae, but also in the light of earlier stage performances by Vanessa Redgrave in the new Globe (2000), or, in the Münchener Kammerspiele 2007, Hildegard Schmahl, the movies by Greenaway or literary and even academic gender revisions of Shakespeare of, say, Stephen Orgel or Marjorie Garber. YouTube is an obvious, low-barriers outlet for Tempest performances in a context of intensely intertextual ‘MetAdaptation’ — it is, among other things, a stage. This is suggested not only by the metaphorical use of the term ‘platform’ for the database (Snickars and Vonderau 13), but also by its exhibitionist affinity towards film and theatre, maybe in particular to vaudeville (Broeren 159). Just as the rehearsal room, YouTube is a special instance of an affinity space. What emerges in these affinity spaces is both an interpretative ‘culture of meaning-making’ and a non-interpretative ‘culture of presence’ (Gumbrecht). With Gumbrecht, the desire for presence might be addressed as the single most important motivator in these communities: reading alone just won’t do. And as it is a communal activity: Reading alone just won’t do. Any scholar of drama and theatre will be alert to the difference between hermeneutics and performativity. Hermeneutics casts the reception of art as a solitary process of interpretation, in which individual or even cultural horizons merge and historical gaps are bridged in the reading process of ideally, humanistically educated or abstractly idealized readers. Clearly this version of a reading process has been somewhat fetishized at least in the German tradition of hermeneutics and reader-response theory, and therefore, has given rise to severe criticism. Recent German theories of performativity (Wirth; Fischer-Lichte) that have their roots in speech-act theory (Austin and Searle) and gender studies (Butler), have indeed cast hermeneutics as their bête noire. For Fischer-Lichte (19) hermeneutics and semiotics (i.e., the reading and decoding of texts) are incompatible with performativity (i.e. staging, ‘Aufführung’). Most importantly for any approach to YouTube performance, a performative approach to E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 272 texts explodes the difference between the subject and the object of interaction: re-situated and re-contextualized on a stage shared by audience and performers, texts are not being read and interpreted, but rather, performed. If we apply Fischer-Lichte’s ideas to social media, her argument is all the more pertinent: this kind of aesthetic event (rather than aesthetic object) calls for a new theory of production and reception (22). Let me remind you at this point that Jauss explicitly addressed “literary events“. In contrast to Fischer-Lichte, I think that this difference between reading and performing is collapsed in the readers/ doers of participatory cultures: we can both read the YouTubers’ texts (just as they have read Shakespeare) and observe their rehearsals as (in a sense) there is no end to rehearsal in the theatre. Avid readers are keen to perform what they are sharing in what has been called ‘affinity spaces’ (Gee) rather than in film studios, publicly-funded theatres, classrooms or lecture halls. Rather appropriately, Pugh has used the language of performance to describe fanfic writers, addressing them as “puppeteers“ (Pugh 13). This is a leisure-time Shakespeare in a terrain where he possibly has never gone before. YouTube may be one of the new spaces where Shakespeare loses his quality of transcendental artist and where his work re-joins the world in a presence shared with a great diversity of other human emanations. 4 In our context, the post-hermeneutic slant of studies of performativity is particularly illuminating. Mere reading is not enough — its place is taken by the agents of presentification. What is crucial in participatory culture is the dynamic, divergent, and even divisive appropriation of texts in performances staged by performative communities. These communities use spaces such as YouTube primarily as an archive for records of presence — the re-performance of Austen’s texts as lived-in intertextual ‘universes’ composed of quotation, pastiche, parody, but with very little critical distance. What we see on the potentially borderless stage of YouTube is ‘understanding in rehearsal’ in a situation of conspicuous prosumption: the thresholds to offer one’s individual understanding and performance to the (presumably indifferent) world have never been so low. I will look at the video of Pornstorm by the group ‘Horst Majeure’ a lecture performance based on The Tempest, that had its first night at the Lindemannspeicher, Hildesheim, in July 2008. It was kindly sent to me by 4 The reference is to a conundrum of hermeneutics picked up by Gadamer in Truth and Method. Gadamer addresses a situation that can be found in Kant’s transcendentalist view of art, namely that the work of art and the artist emerge at the cost of a loss of “world space“ and transfer into “aesthetic consciousness“ (Gadamer 93). According to an “aesthetic of presence“ (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; Martin Seel), this split must, and can be overcome. Thus, invoking Seel, YouTube offers glimpses of processes of understanding rather than of the final products of these processes. It is understanding in rehearsal. Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 273 Margret Schütz after I had come across its trailer on YouTube. One encounters the short video via its suggestive title, and the number of ‘views’ is the key criterion of popularity. According to the online Urban Dictionary, a ‘pornstorm’ results from “surfing for porn and getting bombarded with popup windows“ (UD Online 2012). Probably the group deliberately coined a title that would serve well as a teaser in YouTube and elsewhere. As Schütz told me in an e-mail, she thinks that the word ‘porn’ in the title is the key reason for “a couple of thousand views, [...] chiefly from male North American users“. YouTube statistics show that, while the general user tends to be the middle-aged and male, the predominant fan-base of the trailer is in Germany. 5 Thus, even the allusion resulted in a meta-effect, in provoking a response similar to what it alludes to. Short, amateurish, experimental, updating, and parodic, Pornstorm is representative of defining features of the YouTube clip. To be more precise, Pornstorm is a lecture-performance, that is, a performance that collapses the categories of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary texts’ and ‘presentifies’ both The Tempest and its long reception history, albeit admittedly in a rather fragmentary version. By definition, the lecture performance is a critical re-positioning of materials that embeds and comments on earlier ‘positionings’. It is precisely the ‘about-ness’ of lectures that makes it an interesting format as an adaptive practice that is able to adapt not just The Tempest, but a history of readings and performances of The Tempest — particularly in academic contexts. In this sense, it is a ‘MetAdaptation’ much more appropriate to You- Tube than many of its countless other clips from performances of The Tempest: It is quite aware of how a past text or script becomes a presence or is ‘presentified’. I am thus not arguing for the superior quality of the acting or the performance or even the concept of Pornstorm, but for the superior significance of the text as a cultural practice. Presentification and the lecture-performance As Sybille Peters has pointed out in her study on lecture performances, a lecture is essentially a performance: “We basically understand a lecture as performance — as a specific combination of ‘show’ and ‘tell’/ (watching and listening) that can be described along categories of performance-analysis 5 “Wir haben schon ein paar tausend Klicks. Ich denke aber das hängt mit dem Wort ‘Porn‘ im Titel zusammen. Die YouTube-Statistik zeigt, dass über 90 Prozent der Nutzer, die dieses Video sehen männliche Nordamerikaner sind“ (Schütz, the exact number of views as of December 2011 is 13.517) [We already have a few thousand clicks. But I think that is because of the word ‘porn’ in the title. The YouTube statistics show that over 90 percent of the users who view this video are North-American males]. E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 274 such as space, time, persona, media and public“ (2010). 6 Peters adds that under the conditions of the ‘broadcast yourself’ slogan of YouTube, a lecture is more likely than in former years to present the lecturer with or against or above his/ her material: a lecturer is a performer and has been, at least since the 18 th century, but is only now, being perceived as located in between the performing arts and science (cf. Peters 2011, 11). Peters calls the current situation a Präsentationsgesellschaft, ‘society of presentation’, but, invoking Gumbrecht and Seel, I prefer ‘presentification’ as this key word has a much larger remit than pertaining just to academic presentations. Performances and lectures share, of course, a number of important categories: the style and habitus of delivery, the role of the performing/ lecturing body, the activation of other media (cf. Peters 2011, 15). Pornstorm is palpably inspired by the Giessen school of postdramatic theatre as laid out in Hans-Thies Lehmann’s influential manifesto, which was formulated in 1999 and translated into English in 2006. In fact, the controversial and successful 2007 Tempest at the Münchener Kammerspiele, which was subsequently invited to the prestigious Berlin Theatertreffen, was the collaboration of the translator Jens Roselt (now Professor at Hildesheim) and director Stefan Pucher. The post-dramatic team presented a pop-cultural Tempest in which Caliban accosted Prospero as a “humanist asshole“ (“Humanistenarschloch“). The Roselt/ Pucher Tempest is indicative of the experimental attitude towards the text in the tradition of the German Regietheater, in which Shakespeare’s text is seen as material that may be transformed at will. As a mode of postdramatic theatre of this ancestry, the format of the lecture-performance has become very popular since its beginnings in the work of Fluxus artist John Baldessari, from artists Walid Ra’ad or Xavier le Roy to the infamous PowerPoint Karaoke by the Berlin-based Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur. 7 The lecture performance or “Diskurstheaterabend“ (‘evening of discursive theatre’) Pornstorm aims at merging aesthetics and the dissemination of knowledge. It may be high-concept, but it is low-tech and can be easily performed by amateurs. Prospero’s island is represented by a Yucca tree, and, later in the show, by a plastic paddling pool that — somewhat deflated — also serves to suggest a vagina. A lecturer explains that the deflated pool represents Miranda’s half-awakened desire, finally satisfied through “Shakespeare’s clever idea“ to “bring a sexual partner, Ferdinand, to the island via the medium of acceleration” (that is, the ship). Among other things, the performance lecture is a meta-lecture, asking the question of what academics are doing when they are delivering lectures on, say, “Shakes- 6 Peters’s monograph is in German. Key ideas can also be found in her blog, which also provides this quote. 7 This is an impromptu lecture based on a number of randomly ‘sampled’ slides. Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 275 peare’s The Tempest in the age of a postcolonial economy of desire“ (Shakespeares Sturm im Zeitalter postkolonialer Triebökonomie, the subtitle of Pornstorm). Of course, we do not expect to witness a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but to witness the dissemination of knowledge about Shakespeare’s The Tempest and we are expected to judge a lecture to some extent according to its production of evidence (in this sense: knowledge that emerges or seems to emerge in the performance). Pornstorm works two ways — it parodies the dissemination of knowledge in humanities classrooms, but at the same time it reinforces the presence of thinking culturally about The Tempest. It may have been influenced by Andrea Fraser’s lecture-performances — parodies of pseudo-intellectual pontifications, in this case on post-colonial interpretations of The Tempest. Its key device is a basic relocation: Prospero is not present, but has transformed into the academic lecturing apparatus; the island is a seminar room. We are supposedly witnessing a lecture in a lecture series “Shakespeare Revisited“. First, a variety of female sub-lecturers in poignantly ‘authoritative’, ‘masculinist’ and ‘academic’ dress code of dark suits and white shirts announce that the key lecturer Dr. Anna Dresemann of the Hamburger Institut für Sozialökonomie is late as her train was caught in a storm. This failure initiates a parody of academic lecturing, subsequently highlighted in moments of embarrassing silences and padding. This may reflect the framing devices of the Shakespearean Renaissance stage, but it clearly subverts the voice of academic authority and makes the importance of the bodily presence of the lecturer/ performer immediately evident. Pornstorm’s starting point is an argument put forward for instance in Vaughan and Vaughan (1991, 43-44), who argue for a more than tenuous link (via John Smith’s 1608 report) between Pocahontas and The Tempest, with Powhatan a possible source for Prospero and Pocahontas re-cast as Miranda. They also present wild but likely interpretations of Gauguin’s Tahiti, and Walt Disney. The group seems to criticize — again, working two-ways, in the very Freudian terms the group itself criticizes — the sublimation of bodily need — the id or libidinal desire, which sets the Triebökonomie in motion, its investment represented and rewarded by dance, nakedness and bodily contact. Behind a lecture by authoritative academics as contemporary Prospero stand-ins and the vestiges of (western) cultural ritual and respectability there seems to be lurking the perennial Caliban. Pornstorm says: we are implicated ourselves in the academic structuring of The Tempest — therefore its parody and travesty oscillates at times towards pastiche and the performance changes seamlessly from disseminating knowledge towards satirizing the dissemination of knowledge in academia. Gradually, the cultural veneer comes off and Caliban reclaims his island. The use of water — itself an essential category in The Tempest — is E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 276 exemplary: from the wild splashing in Caliban’s appearance to its presence as a controlled tool to enable speech during the lecture. Overhead transparencies are used for palimpsestuous writings-over (see fig. 1), so that anonymously uniformed lecturers become ‘indigenised’ through feathers, amulets, etc. The island, complete with governing staff, emerges on the overhead slide. Bits from Caliban’s speech in 1.ii are performed at the bidding of the female lecturers by a white, male student actor in loincloth and fur cap, whose excessive rendering of “the poisonous slave“ (1.2.320), the “tortoise“ (1.2.317) and “hag-seed“ (1.2.366) that would have violated Miranda and “peopled [...] This isle with Calibans“ (1.2.351-52, see fig. 2) does not do justice to the noble savage he has become in recent rereadings. One of the female lecturers is herself gradually unclothing, magnetically attracted to his ‘indigenised’ body. Another keeps spouting the received opinions of New Historicism and supplies the travesty of visual analysis of the Disney Pocahontas. In an overly sexualized reading, she sees “phallic rule”, “male gaze” everywhere in John Smith and his gun, (“iron phallus”), positioned behind Pocahontas to suggest “anal desire”. In Paul Cadmus’ 1939 mural, John Smith’s “steely, male” colonizer’s body becomes “feminized, turned into a hip, a breast, by its convulsion“. The Caliban performer daubs himself in mud — after all Prospero does call Caliban “earth“, while the first female lecturer whose rational lecturer-self has gradually been decomposing, testifies to the increasing attraction of this earth. Linking Prospero’s island to the current obsession with brown skin, she introduces her own master’s thesis on the cultural history of tanning. Suggesting that “ethnic marking“ and “self-fashioning“ are excellent links between The Tempest, Pocahontas and tanning, she proceeds to display the timeline in the cultural history of ‘brown-ness’ (Josephine Baker to Buena Vista Social Club) by spraying tan marks on her own leg. Echoing notions of gender performativity (Judith Butler) and the recent re-performance of the implied gender structure in The Tempest, Pornstorm also seeks to undermine the holistic view of male domineering via Prospero’s arranged marriage (among all of his other arrangements). Thus, the Caliban actor, hired, after all, by the female ‘academics’ to perform scenes from The Tempest, can easily also don a bikini to perform Miranda’s speech: “‘Tis a villain, sir/ I do not love to look on“ (1.2.310-11). The Hawaiian flower necklace (in German national colours, a leftover of the 2006 football world championship) gradually intrudes on the discursive modes of academia. Under conditions of increasing nakedness and disorder, the pseudo-academic readings of The Tempest culminate in a computer-beat-driven staccato on the identical features of the names of Miranda and Caliban (“two a, one i“, see fig. 3). Finally, the muddled discourse on ethnic ‘Othering’ and ‘Otherness’, on the clichés of the savage as well as on jargon-ridden orthodoxies of Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 277 Figure 1: Pornstorm, Lecture performance, Hildesheim 2011: The Tempest as palimpsest (Photograph: Ellen Coenders). Figure 2: Pornstorm, Lecture performance, Hildesheim 2011: Caliban in furs (Photograph: Ellen Coenders). E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 278 Figure 3: Pornstorm, Lecture performance, Hildesheim 2011: savagery intrudes on academia (Photograph: Andreas Hartmann). Shakespearean criticism and Freudian analysis, is drowned in the stamping beat and dance routines that overturn the order of the sober classroom. Interpretation is replaced with presentification. The white body as recolonized by ‘black’ popular music asserts itself over language, again reworking and reversing themes prevalent in The Tempest. The performance does not lend itself to ‘interpretation.’ It merely quotes and presents its intertexts as a directionless and possibly cynical collage. Pornstorm is a peculiarly apt appropriation of a text that asks crucial questions about the uses, dissemination and ethics of knowledge. It asks the question that is at the core of this essay: How does The Tempest become a presence, how does it claim a space, in the contemporary cultural climate? From Pornstorm to WeStorm It follows from the analysis of this example, a lecture performance which is representative of the short, parodic and metatextual space YouTube, that appropriation on YouTube not only “extends far beyond the adaptation of other texts into new literary creations, assimilating both historical lives and events […] and companion art forms […] into the process“ (Sanders 148), but also redefines the very ways in which the palimpsestuous Tempest becomes a presence in the contemporary cultural field. It is indicative of a growing Lecturing / Performing YouStorm: ‘Presentification’ and ‘MetAdaptation’ 279 unease with a traditional hermeneutics (i.e., text-based readings of The Tempest and hermeneutic strife enacted between book covers) in a tendency towards ‘presentification’: there is no outside-of-the-stage. Whether we see this as an empowerment of consumers at the mercy of Shakespeare readings controlled by the culture industries — or as the final nail in the coffin of academic readings of Shakespeare — is open to debate. It is clear to me, however, that the lecture performance is one of the more promising ‘presentifications’ of Shakespeare in this age of conspicuous prosumption. Adapting Henry Jenkins’s statement that YouTube is a misnomer for what is actually a WeTube (Jenkins 2008), we can conclude that the omnipresence of YouTube performances has indeed whipped up yet another intertextual, if possibly transient WeStorm. This is the situation in social media. For a moment, at the cost of order and gatekeeping, Prospero has left for Naples, his ‘chick’ Ariel is free to the elements, and it is quite doubtful if Caliban will indeed “seek for grace“ (5.1.296) with new Prosperos only a storm away. E CKART V OIGTS -V IRCHOW 280 Works Cited Bate, Jonathan. 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Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 2.2 (2009): 137-152. Wirth, Uwe. Ed. Performanz. Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. V IRGINIA M ASON V AUGHAN Un-Masquing The Tempest: staging 4.1.60-138 1 In 2007, when I interviewed Libby Appel, the retiring Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Director for that season’s Tempest, she confided that she found the act 4 masque “impenetrable and boring” (Vaughan 2007); indeed, to her mind, the masque seemed simply unplayable in the twenty-first century. Judging from recent Tempest productions in Britain and the United States during the last two decades, many directors share her viewpoint. In its 2008 Tempest, for example, Boston’s Actors’ Shakespeare Project made the masque into a comic farce. Underneath a rainbow banner the male actors playing Antonio, Trinculo, and Adrian (Richard Snee, John Kuntz, and Daniel Berger-Jones) appeared on the upper stage dressed in drag, each in a colorful but frumpy dress and sporting a clown’s red nose. On the stage below, Alvin Epstein’s Prospero mouthed Iris, Ceres, and Juno’s lines from behind a curtain, while the actors above spoke the words in an exaggerated singsong - stage business that was clearly intended to remind the audience of the Wizard’s behind-the-scenes manipulations in The Wizard of Oz. Instead of the text’s dance of nymphs and reapers, the men’s drag routine gave way to an athletic sword dance performed on the lower stage. Although Shakespeare’s words were indeed spoken in Patrick Swanson’s ASP production, their import was entirely lost in a calculated effort to make the audience laugh. Directors often substitute visual images for all or some of the text. In 2000 James MacDonald’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford’s Swan Theatre set Iris before a light-induced rainbow, Ceres in front of huge video projections of sheaves of wheat, and Juno astride visually constructed peacock feathers. Aaron Posner’s 2007 Tempest at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre featured a circular screen on the upper stage, from which Ariel’s face and voice emanated, with the audience seeing only Ariel’s projected image and the actor never interacting face to face with the other characters. In the masque, ocean waves were projected from the circle and Ariel was heard singing, her face superimposed over the waves. Sam Mendes’ Bridge Tempest of 2010 combined shortened versions of the goddesses’ lines with home movies of Ferdinand and Miranda as little children 1 Quotations from The Tempest are taken from the Arden edition, third series, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London, 1999, rev. ed. 2011). V IRGINIA M ASON V AUGHAN 284 projected onto the theatre’s back wall, followed by a line dance around the stage’s white circular platform. Directors who approach The Tempest from a postcolonial perspective are more likely to abandon the text entirely, or at most keep Juno’s and Ceres’ song that promises Ferdinand and Miranda “Honour, riches, marriageblessing“ (4.1.106-17). George C. Wolfe’s 1995 production for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival employed three Brazilian stiltwalkers in the goddesses’ roles. Margaret Loftus Ranald describes what followed: The orchestra engaged in hypnotic drumming, the singing turned into a quasi- Indian chant, and the stage filled with dancers manipulating puppets. The mood escalated into a total communal dance, with even Prospero abandoning his high seriousness to boogie with the rest [...] [u]ntil a scream of shocking suddenness - an intrusion of masked creatures violated the celebratory moment, returning the forgetful and newly enraged Prospero to the realities of conspiracy. (11) In this production Wolfe initiated the now-common practice of substituting communal ‘native’ dances for Shakespeare’s text. Ron Daniels’ Tempest, produced in the same year for the American Repertory Theatre, is a case in point. The set designer, John Conklin, explained the staging of the masque in an A.R.T. newsletter; they decided to make it a Brazilian carnival “because we think that it will have meaning for today’s audience. [...] These popular celebrations are more familiar than the masques of the seventeenth century.” Instead of Iris, Ceres, and Juno, the masque was recast with characters named America, Africa and Europe, “the three major continents (and races) of the world” (ibid.). When these new goddesses appeared from under giant colorful parasols, they encouraged the audience to join in rhythmic clapping. Instead of Shakespeare’s text, each goddess led the audience in a chant: Africa chanted for Ormulú, god of infinite knowledge and wisdom; America sang “Shaking the Pumpkin,” with choruses that suggested Native American themes, such as “herezsometobaccozhere” and “hereszomekettlezhere” (ibid.); finally, Europe sang a traditional madrigal, “Many Colored Messenger,” that echoed Ceres’ song. The program provided the audience with refrains so that they could sing along. Daniels noted in the program that unlike Shakespeare’s mythological figures, Africa, America, and Europe “will more adequately represent the world in which we live, where the union of several cultures has transformed the identities of many people. Thus the new masque for this production will symbolize La Raza Cosmica (The Cosmic or Fifth Race)” (1995). Kate Whoriskey’s 2005 Tempest for Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre extended Daniels’ international theme even further. Iris, Ceres, and Juno descended to the stage, their introductory lines cut, and burst into the song of honor, riches, and marriage blessing, only this time the lyrics were in Arabic Un-Masquing The Tempest: staging 4.1.60-138 285 and Swahili, ostensibly in reference to Caliban (who was portrayed as a displaced Palestinian) and Ariel (played by an African American actor in dreadlocks, suspended from the flies in a harness). The dance that followed was even more eclectic, with Thai, Arabic, and African dancers illuminated by spinning wheels of light. In the midst of the hubbub, Caliban entered and grabbed Miranda, but it was not clear whether this was to be taken as really happening or as a reflection of Prospero’s sudden remembrance of the threat posed by Caliban. Rupert Goold’s 2006 Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company, set in an Arctic wasteland, abandoned the masque’s text for a native purification ritual. Three women, dressed in Inuit costumes and ululating in quasi-native style, grabbed Miranda and Ferdinand, blindfolded them, plunged their heads in a bucket of cold water, dabbed their faces with soot, and gave them candles to hold while rhythmic drumming sounded in the background. The Inuit women ended the ritual by biting Miranda and Ferdinand in the neck and removing the blindfolds. Then, in what seemed a cultural non sequitur, they sang “Honour, riches, marriage blessing” (4.1.106) in a European madrigal style. After this frenetic initiation rite, Ariel brought in the court party and everyone ran madly around the stage. Janice Honeyman’s production, which originated in the Baxter Theatre in Capetown and moved to Stratford and London in 2009, set The Tempest in Africa’s bush country. Antony Sher’s Prospero made one think of Stanley and Livingston, while Tinarie Van Wyk Loots’s Miranda was more like Tarzan’s Jane. The masque scene began when Prospero called the “spirits” (4.1.58), friendly natives dressed in tribal body paint and colorful raffia, to a dance. One spirit brought Ferdinand and Miranda an animal skin, a second a gourd, and a third a broom. The spirits exited, then returned with colorful marionettes, singing an African song as they came. Puppets on stilts helped stir up a carnival atmosphere. When Caliban entered to the spirits’ loud exclamations, Prospero angrily ended the fun. Other recent productions have resorted to musical interludes. Garland Wright’s production for Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre in 1997, for example, was set in an eighteenth-century philosopher’s library. The masque was performed by puppets who joined in a Mozartian rendition of “Honour riches, marriage-blessing,” sung rapturously to Ferdinand and Miranda. The goddesses’ ornate and colorful costumes suggested an entertainment at the court of James I. In contrast, the Globe’s three-man production of 2005 presented the spirits as three dancers clad in jeans and leather jackets. To music provided by a musical consort from the upper stage, six singers in classical togas and plastic wigs sang a madrigal while the three spirits danced a ballet. In the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2007 production, Libby Appel also abandoned Shakespeare’s text for a musical interlude. During our conversation, she told V IRGINIA M ASON V AUGHAN 286 me that she saw the masque as Prospero’s wedding present - he wants to give Miranda and Ferdinand a piece of his art - and because Appel believed there was a strong connection between Prospero the magician and Shakespeare the dramatist, she selected a sample of Shakespeare’s own art as a substitute for the masque’s text: sonnet 116. The choice seemed appropriate because that sonnet begins with a reference to marriage and celebrates a lasting love relationship. The spirits in this production, clad in simple tan outfits spotted with blue cloud-patterned shapes, appeared on the upper stage, three standing and two hanging from ropes. Stars shone from the sky behind them, while below the spotlight highlighted Ferdinand and Miranda who looked up in amazement. The performance concluded, once again, with “[h]onour, riches, marriage blessing” (4.1.106) set to music. Given the frequency with which The Tempest is performed in theatres across the globe, there are surely many other ways the masque has been performed. This sampling does make it clear, however, that few contemporary directors are willing to stage the masque as it is scripted in the First Folio. In what follows this essay will try to explain why this is the case and suggest some criteria by which we can judge whether or not a particular director’s decision on this matter is appropriate. The first Folio masque To determine just why so many directors find the masque unacceptable for contemporary productions requires a careful examination of the masque itself as it appears in Shakespeare’s text. At 4.1.39-41 Prospero tells Ariel, “I must / Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple / Some vanity of mine art,” a statement that supports Appel’s contention that the masque is Prospero’s wedding present (an idea Julie Taymor also suggested in a separate interview). That the masque will be “[be]stow[ed]” upon the “eyes” also indicates the importance Shakespeare placed upon its visual impact. After Ariel’s exit, Prospero turns to his future son-in-law to warn him against succumbing to sexual desire before his wedding to Miranda, and only after Ferdinand’s fervent assertion that “The white cold virgin snow upon my heart / Abates the ardour of my liver” (4.1.55-6) does the masque begin. Today’s audiences, unaware that the liver was considered the seat of sexual desire in early modern humoral discourse, generally laugh awkwardly at Ferdinand’s response, but to Prospero it is no laughing matter. The integrity of Miranda’s marriage and the legitimacy of her offspring are crucial to his dynastic project. (The Tempest was written at the same time as other Jacobean dramas set in Renaissance Italy, many of them tragicomedies like John Marston’s Malcontent or tragedies like Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, that featured deposed Dukes caught in a labyrinth of court intrigue Un-Masquing The Tempest: staging 4.1.60-138 287 and figured political corruption through illicit sexual liaisons.) Prospero’s insistence on his daughter’s chastity reflects his concern not just for her but for the future of Milan and Naples and his hope that Ferdinand and Miranda’s joint reign will be a model of good government. Thus it is hardly surprising that Ceres inquires of Iris whether or not Venus and Cupid are attendant on Juno, who - according to the Folio stage direction - is descending from aloft even as they speak. Iris assures her that Venus, the goddess associated with sexual passion, and her irrational (blind) son Cupid are not present. Although the masque will celebrate fertility and procreation, it will eschew illicit desire. The masque proper that runs from lines 4.1.60 to 138 is, as Stephen Orgel so aptly describes it, a dramatic allusion to the Jacobean court masque, a highly stylized entertainment reserved for celebratory occasions at James I’s court that was also intended to underscore the monarch’s power and virtue. 2 Ben Jonson, the most prominent author of Jacobean court masques, established the basic pattern. In the first part of the pageant, forces threatening to the monarchy were incarnated as wild men, Moors, Indians, or other symbols of disorder; eventually these anti-masque figures were dispersed, often yielding to heavenly figures - gods and goddesses - who represented royal virtue and its ability to dispel disorder and darkness. In The Tempest Shakespeare reverses this disorder/ order pattern. He begins the masque with the three goddesses - Iris, Ceres, and Juno - who bestow blessings on the newly betrothed couple and celebrate their future prosperity. Then the dramatist suddenly disrupts the goddesses’ harmonious vision with Prospero’s angry outburst, spurred by his remembrance of Caliban’s conspiracy and its possible consequences: regicide (Prospero’s murder) and sexual impurity (Stephano’s plans for Miranda). In this moment, contends Gary Schmidgall, “the forces of evil subvert the wedding masque’s majestic vision” (150). The conspirators’ entrance, their dressing themselves in borrowed robes snatched off of Prospero’s line, not to mention the spirit/ dogs that chase Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo offstage at line 4.1.257, comprise, in effect, the antimasque. Shakespeare begins his version of the court masque with a stage direction for “soft music” (4.1.58), followed by Iris’ entrance. In classical mythology Iris was Juno’s messenger, her presence signified by the rainbow. According to Vincenzo Cartari’s The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction, a compendium of classical lore that was translated into English and published in 1599, she was the daughter of Thaumante, which signifieth admiration, insomuch as the strange variety of the colours thereof, possesseth the beholders minds, with a continuing wonder and admiring continuation. And shee is appareled in loose 2 See Stephen Orgel (43-50) for an astute discussion of the masque scene and its relationship to Ben Jonson’s court masques. V IRGINIA M ASON V AUGHAN 288 vestures for the more nimbleness and dispatch of the goddesses affaires and negotiations. (sig. Liiv-Liiir) Clad in the rainbow’s bright colors, Iris was thought to signal the promise of sunshine after rain, and her appearance to evoke wonder in the beholders’ minds. Her inclusion in the masque suggests that just as Prospero intended the masque to impress Ferdinand and Miranda with its harmonious vision, Shakespeare intended it to awe his audience with visual splendor. Iris is soon joined by Ceres, ancient goddess of the harvest and maternal fertility. Iris’ and Ceres’ opening conversation alludes to the familiar myth of Proserpina, Ceres’ daughter. Abducted by Pluto (Dis) and carried to the underworld, Proserpina seemed lost forever, but Ceres persuaded Juno to allow her to return on the condition that she had not eaten anything while in the underworld. Alas, Proserpina had consumed seven pomegranate seeds, and in a Solomonic judgment, Juno and Pluto split the difference: Proserpine could spend six months each year above the Earth, but remained confined to the underworld the other six months. This mythological explanation for the change of seasons is elided in Shakespeare’s text, when Ceres offers Miranda and Ferdinand a world without winter’s barrenness: “Spring come to you at the farthest, / In the very end of harvest” (4.1.114-15). Juno, too, sings her blessings on the young couple. Most in Shakespeare’s audience would have known that Juno, Jove’s wife and sister, was the goddess of marriage and childbirth. Cartari explains the way her visual image conveys the connection between marriage and fecundity: Some have depictured the Statue of Iuno in Matrones habite, holding in one hand the head of the flower Poppie, and at her feet lying a yoke as it were, or a paire of fetters: by these was meant the marriage knot and linke which coupleth the man and wife together; and by the Poppie the innumerable issue of children, which in the world are conceaued & brought forth, alluded to in the numberless plenty of seed contained in the head of that flower. (sig. Miir) As she does in Shakespeare’s masque, Juno frequently appears with (or perhaps, on) a peacock, whose many-colored feathers, according to Cartari, “enticeth the beholders’ eyes more and more to view, & to gaze upon them” (sig. Liiv-Liiir). He also explains that “shee is also oftentimes pictured with a scepter in her hand, to shew that shee hath the bestowing of governments, authorities, & kingdoms” (sig. Liiv). Juno’s stunning entrance accompanied by colorful peacocks in 4.1.73 was no doubt intended by Shakespeare to entice “the beholders’ eyes,” while her status as a powerful female monarch perhaps embodied Prospero’s hopes for his daughter as queen of a united Milan and Naples. The lines Iris, Ceres, and Juno speak (4.1.60-105) are formal and difficult to understand, their meaning dependent upon the audience’s familiarity with the myths they represent. The tribute to Ferdinand and Miranda culminates Un-Masquing The Tempest: staging 4.1.60-138 289 at line 106, when Juno and Iris join in the song, “Honour, riches, marriageblessing [...] Scarcity and want shall shun you, Ceres’ blessing so is on you” (4.1.106-117). After the song, Ferdinand and Prospero briefly converse, the young man clearly impressed with the majestic vision Prospero has provided. The stage direction then reads, “Juno and Ceres whisper, and send Iris on employment” (4.1.124). Her job, as she explains it in lines 128-38, is to introduce a troupe of “nymphs” (4.1.128) and “sunburned sicklemen” (4.1.134) who join in a graceful dance. Toward the dance’s finale, “Prospero starts suddenly and speaks; after which, to a strange hollow and confused noise, they heavily vanish” (4.1.138 SD). Prospero’s majestic vision, his aspirations for his daughter’s future as a prosperous and powerful European monarch, cannot withstand the reality of Caliban - not to mention all that he represents to Prospero. The goddesses’ conversation, song, and the ensuing dance of nymphs and reapers may at first seem like a light-hearted interruption in the play’s major plot lines, but it serves, as Orgel observes, to re-enact central concerns of the play as a whole. It invokes a myth in which the crucial act of destruction is the rape of a daughter; it finds in the preservation of virginity the promise of civilization and fecundity, and it presents as its patroness of marriage not Hymen but Juno, the goddess who symbolizes royal power as well. (49) As the play’s most celebratory example of Prospero’s art, the masque illustrates the magician’s strange power to create a golden world that fills the “beholder’s eyes” with wonder, a world without sickness, decay, or winter’s chill. At the same time, it embodies the dangers posed by that vision. Prospero first lost his Dukedom by devoting himself to his books and to the arcane powers they offered, thrusting his worldly duties on his ambitious brother Antonio. Losing himself in the pleasure of sharing his creation with Ferdinand and Miranda, Prospero nearly repeats the mistake that cost him Milan twelve years earlier. Prospero’s angry start and interruption of the illusion he has created indicates what early modern writers would call a sudden ‘perturbation of the mind.’ However one views Prospero, the creation of the masque and its interruption are not only crucial to the play in general, but also to his development as a character - its sudden disruption may explain why he decides to relinquish his magic in the drama’s final moments. Prospero’s anger in 4.1.139 is directed at himself as much as at Caliban. Once again he has succumbed to the seductive appeal of his own creation, and in the process forgotten his royal responsibility to be vigilant. If he intends to return to Milan as Duke, especially since Antonio cannot be trusted, Prospero cannot afford such distractions. To be an effective ruler, he must abandon his art. This moment can also be understood from a postcolonial perspective; Francis V IRGINIA M ASON V AUGHAN 290 Barker and Peter Hulme argue that Prospero’s excessive reaction to the masque represents his disquiet at the irruption into consciousness of an unconscious anxiety concerning the grounding of his legitimacy, both as producer of his play and, a fortiori, as governor of the island [...] [H]is difficulties in staging his play are themselves ‘staged’ by the play that we are watching, the moment presenting for the first time the possibility of distinguishing between Prospero’s play and The Tempest itself. (202-3) Regardless of one’s critical stance, Orgel’s claim that the masque “functions in the structure of the drama not as a separable interlude but as an integral part of the action” (44) is surely correct. So why do so few productions take it seriously? The masque in the twenty-first century As much as we like to consider Shakespeare ‘for all time,’ much has changed in the four centuries since The Tempest was first performed. Shakespeare could count on the more aristocratic members of his audience being familiar with the lavish entertainments Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones mounted at James I’s court. Shakespeare’s allusions to this elite and highly stylized dramatic form are opaque to contemporary audiences because court masques are never performed today and are seldom studied except by scholars of early modern England. To be sure, the well-informed director can provide copious program notes, but historical explanations tend to make the masque seem more like a museum piece than a vibrant dramatic form. In shaping Iris, Ceres, and Juno’s dialogue, Shakespeare no doubt wanted to use elevated language befitting their status, but the result is sometimes impenetrable. Obscure agricultural references to “flat meads thatched with stover” (4.1.63), “bosky acres” and “unshrubbed down” (4.1.81) make little sense to a contemporary urban audience. The rhymes are often stilted, as in Iris’ explanation that the goddesses join “A contract of true love to celebrate, / And some donation freely to estate / On the blessed lovers” (4.1.84-6). Who uses “estate” as a verb? The masque’s clearest language comes in the song Juno and Ceres sing in lines 4.1.106-117. Their promise to the young couple of “Honour, riches, marriage-blessing / Long continuance and increasing […]” (4.1.106-7ff.) is much more accessible than the dialogue that precedes it, so it is not surprising that even if directors dump the rest of the masque and modernize the music, they keep these lyrics. Without the goddesses’ preliminary conversation, the complex themes discussed above are discarded; what remains is simply a wedding toast. The goddesses, as we have seen, are also a problem. Many in Shakespeare’s audience had some familiarity with classical mythology because, if Un-Masquing The Tempest: staging 4.1.60-138 291 nothing else, Ovid’s Metamorphoses was commonly used to teach schoolboys their Latin, but few schoolchildren in the twenty-first century receive any grounding in mythological material. The director once again has to rely on program notes to identify Iris, Ceres, and Juno, why Iris is wearing that multi-colored outfit, why Juno comes in on a peacock, and why Ceres keeps talking about agriculture. No wonder so many directors switch Shakespeare’s goddesses for native spirits, however ill-defined they may be. Another difficulty with the masque is changing attitudes toward Prospero. Postcolonial productions that underscore the injustice of Caliban’s slavery and Ariel’s servitude make him the villain of the piece. Whatever substitutes for Shakespeare’s masque generally switches the focus from Prospero’s indulgence in his art to an emphasis on Ferdinand and Miranda. Natives join in a carnival dance to celebrate their betrothal - the spectacle emanates from the islanders, not from the magician showing off his art. Such interpolations ignore the Barker-Hulme contention, noted above, that the masque is centered on Prospero and crucial to our understanding of his psychology. Lastly, despite the efforts of religious fundamentalists, in the twenty-first century men and women in developed countries have access to reliable means of birth control. As a result, sexuality and fertility are not ineluctably linked in the contemporary mind the way they were in Shakespeare’s England. It is doubtful, for example, that many wedding celebrants understand the significance of throwing rice (or for the environmentally conscientious, bird seed) at a newly married couple. The masque reflects an early modern concern that those who are married bear fruit, and certainly Prospero’s vision of a united Milan and Naples depends upon Miranda’s fecundity. For generations the primary purpose of marriage was the orderly conceiving, bearing, and raising of children. Today, judging by recent newspaper accounts of the number of couples who live together without marrying and nevertheless bear children, not to mention the many who marry and decide not to procreate, the link between marriage and fecundity is tenuous at best. Even if the goddesses’ identities and the words they speak were entirely transparent to contemporary audiences, they might still seem irrelevant to twenty-first-century cultural practices. Some directorial choices What’s a poor a director to do? How can a production preserve the masque’s integral role in the play and yet be made accessible and relevant to a contemporary audience? Each director will arrive at his or her answer to these questions, of course, but a close examination of Julie Taymor’s filmic version suggests two kinds of choices, one that preserves the spirit of Shakespeare’s text V IRGINIA M ASON V AUGHAN 292 without using its words and another that eschews any connection to the original. In preparing her film adaptation of The Tempest, Julie Taymor made a conscious decision to cut the masque. She confided to me in an interview, “[t]he masque is so foreign to our culture; it has no meaning” (Vaughan 2010). Instead, Taymor begins the masque scene with Prospera’s (Helen Mirren) instructions to Ariel (Ben Whishaw) to bring “the rabble” (Taymore 136) - Ariel’s corollary spirits - to perform “some vanity of mine art” (ibid.) for the young lovers. From the top of a cliff overlooking a rocky shoreline, she sends Ariel off to the heavens. The film then cuts to “another part of the promontory” (ibid.) where Ferdinand (Reeve Carney) and Miranda (Felicity Jones) “are sitting quite close to one another on the soft grass. He turns and begins to whisper a love song into her ear” (ibid.). Ferdinand then sings Feste’s song from Twelfth Night, “O mistress mine, where are you roaming? ” (ibid.) to music composed by Elliot Goldenthal. Taymor explained to me that her decision to borrow Feste’s song was sparked not simply by the conviction that Shakespeare’s masque is inaccessible to contemporary audiences, but also by a desire to showcase Carney, a young singer well known in America’s youth culture and the future lead in what would become the ill-fated musical, Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark. Taymor conveys the lovers’ passion through their actions as well: “During the song, his hands and hers slowly begin a cautious tour of each other’s bodies until they are entwined and lost in each other’s embrace,” action that provokes Prospera’s charge, “Look thou be true” (Taymore 137). The song Taymor selected does underscore The Tempest’s emphasis on the swift passage of time. In the play’s long exposition Shakespeare’s Prospero explains to Miranda that if he doesn’t take advantage of the moment - “If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes / Will ever after droop (1.2.183-4). The time for Ferdinand and Miranda to marry is now, for “Youth’s a stuff will not endure” (Taymor 137). All the same, Feste’s song suggests that what the lovers feel now will not last, a message that undercuts Prospera’s dynastic project of bringing them together in the first place. In addition, Taymor’s choice focuses the spectator’s attention solely on the lovers’ private relationship without regard to Prospera’s political aspirations or her desire to display her powers in an impressive majestic vision. Carney’s love song seems, in other words, like a bad choice, a mundane interruption irrelevant to the central import of the Folio’s masque. But Taymor redeems herself in the next shot (fig. 1). Called to attention, Ferdinand and Miranda gaze at the heavens to see “A thrilling spectacle of sea creatures and constellations dance together and explode like fireworks before the eyes of the young couple, melding sky and ocean in an animated alchemical chart” (137). This choice fits with what we know about Prospero. Un-Masquing The Tempest: staging 4.1.60-138 293 Figure 1: The celestial vision of the union of man and woman in the masque scene of Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, 2011. In 1.2.181-82, the magician indicates that his “zenith doth depend upon / A most auspicious star”; the study of the heavens is central to his magical repertoire. Taymor shows these stars moving in a celestial dance, shaping the patterns one might find in early modern alchemy. They soon outline a figure akin to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, a human figure whose outstretched arms and legs form not just a study of proportions, but a statement that the human body is a reflection of universal harmony. Taymor’s Vitruvian man soon morphs into the androgynous image of a man and woman joined as one. They face each other, the female’s arms outstretched, the male’s reaching in the opposite direction. Like a shooting star, this vision is fleeting, and it is soon interrupted by Prospera’s remembrance of Caliban’s conspiracy and her reflections on the ephemeral nature of her art. Although the second part of Taymor’s masque, like the first, eschews the Folio’s language, it captures some of Shakespeare’s most important themes. Like Shakespeare’s ornate masque of goddesses, Taymor’s pageant of light offers the kind of visual wonder Prospero wishes to bestow “upon the eyes of the young couple” (Taymore 137). It uses, as most successful film adaptations do, visual imagery to signify ideas and emotions that are signaled verbally in a stage performance. While Taymor’s vision of the heavens does not link Ferdinand and Miranda’s marriage to the themes of fecundity and prosperity found in Shakespeare’s text, the camera’s shift from the lovers’ admiring faces to the celestial dance suggests that their union has significance beyond their personal love affair. Moreover, the superimposition of Mirren’s face over ornate alchemical designs takes the viewer back to Prospera and indicates how much this display of her magical powers means to her. The stars’ alchemical designs also continue a motif established by the glassmaking equipment and other scientific paraphernalia in Prospera’s cell; together these images establish her expertise in early modern scientific inquiry. Addi- V IRGINIA M ASON V AUGHAN 294 tionally, the vision’s culminating androgynous image, refracted in pixels of light, works especially well with a female Prospero who wishes her daughter to be an equal partner in marriage. In the medium of film, the visual is paramount. As Prospero’s words in 4.1.40 indicate - the spectacle he creates is for this young couple’s eyes, not their ears - the visual mattered at the Blackfriars as well. The masque must be beautiful. In addition, Prospero’s masque culminates in Ceres’ and Juno’s song of blessing and a graceful dance. The masque must also include some kind of musical harmony. After all, Ferdinand describes the effect of the goddesses’ appearance as a “majestic vision, and / Harmonious charmingly” (4.1.118-19). Because the masque is a creation of Prospero’s magic, the play’s prime example of his art, it must emanate from him and be seen to matter to him - he can’t be a casual bystander caught up in a carnival parade. Indeed, whatever spectacle a director or designer selects for this scene, it must evoke wonder, not just in Ferdinand and Miranda but also in the audience. If a director or designer can make the masque work in the context of an entire production, maintain its wonder and beauty, and somehow reiterate the important themes embedded in Shakespeare’s text, he or she will deserve our gratitude, and Shakespeare’s. Un-Masquing The Tempest: staging 4.1.60-138 295 Works Cited Barker, Francis, and Peter Hulme. “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive contexts of The Tempest”. Alternative Shakespeares. Ed. John Drakakis. London: Methuen, 1985. 191-206. Cartari, Vincenzo. The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction. Facs. New York: De Capo Press, 1973 [1599]. Conklin, John. American Repertory Theatre Newsletter Vol. 17. Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 1995. Daniels, Ron. Program of The Tempest. Cambridge, Massachusetts: American Repertory Theatre, 1995. Ranald, Margaret Loftus. “The Tempest: New York Shakespeare Festival”. Shakespeare Bulletin 13: 4 (Fall 1995). 10-11. Schmidgall, Gary. Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Stephen Orgel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Arden Third Series, revised. Eds Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Taymor, Julie. The Tempest. New York: Abrams, 2010. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Private interview with Libby Appel. 26 July 2007. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Private interview with Julie Taymor. 14 July 2010. Call for Papers Reading Practices Edited by Winfried Fluck REAL invites contributions on different practices of reading in history and in contemporary culture. The rise of academic literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century has established the search for meaning as the dominant mode of reading. Critical theories have turned this mode of reading into a hermeneutics of suspicion. In a recent counter-movement, symptomatic readings in search of hidden meanings are challenged by a new hermeneutic of surface readings. Models of reading such as these raise a number of questions. What are historical, social, and cultural reasons for their emergence and institutionalization? How do they envision the reading process? What reading practices were displaced or reclassified along various scales of higher or lower readerly practice (academic/ middlebrow, rigorous/ sloppy, reflective/ consumptive, creative/ schematic, suspicious/ naive, ethicopolitical/ aesthetic-therapeutic, etc.)? To what extent and in what way do reading practices in contemporary culture reflect the rising influence of literary theory and criticism, the growth of college-educated readerships, and the influence of certain academic and non-academic gate-keeping institutions (book clubs, The New York Times Book Review, the Pulitzer Prize, Oprah Winfrey, etc.)? In what way has the institutionalization of academic reading practices contributed to the emergence of new forms of the literary avantgarde? How have dominant academic reading practices influenced debates about the proper uses of literature - such as, for example, reading for meaning rather than for “enchantment,” cathartic pleasure or therapeutic selfculture? We wish to encourage reflection on different reading cultures, how they relate to specific fields of practices or social locations, and how struggles over different reading practices translate into struggles over cultural authority. Papers (MLA Style sheet with end notes and Works Cited) should be sent to Prof. Winfried Fluck, John F. Kennedy-Institut, Lansstr.7-9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG ! "#! $ % www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Philipp Gwerder Gothic Identities War, Atrocities and Doubles in Philip Caputo’s Fiction & ' ( ) ( ) * + % , ,* & ) -. / 0 * 1& * ISBN 978-3-7720-8460-7 2 3 4 5 46)" 7 % " ) " 4 ) 6 8 ) "6 9 ) : 2 : : " * ; ) " " $ 7 ") 7 % ) : : "6 ) "! )) ) " 2 : " ) "! ) " 8 ) % )" ) 9 ) : 2 ) : * ) 8 ) : 8 % ! ! ) 4 ) " % % % ! ! ) ) : 4 "% ""$ ) ; ) )" ) ) " $ "! ; ) " ": 4 7 8 <) ) $ "6 ) "! " 3 4 5 46)"= ) % " $ ! " 6 " ) " "! 6 : % ) )8 7 " ) ) 6 * % " ) $ )" ) >") ) % ) " ; ) " )" ; % 4 ) " ! 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