T OBIAS D ÖRING Learning to charm: on the virtue of words and the forgetting of language in The Tempest In King James’s treatise Daemonologie, we learn that there are four parts to the devil’s arts: “the persons of the conjurers; the action of the conjuration; the wordes and rites vsed to that effect; and the Spirites that are conjured.” (King James 11) The central focus of this paper will be on the third part of this list, i.e. the verbal charms and ritual language used in magic, and in particular on the contested issue of how these relate to the second item on the list, i.e. the action and effects of conjuring. 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. 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