9
In the first few pages of this book, I recalled the story of my fellow audience member, confused by the rain in a performance of King Lear. Her question, ‘how are they doing this’ pertains as much to The Tempest as to Lear. For as the Boatswain in the opening of The Tempest argues with the courtiers, who are ‘louder than the weather’, his exasperation is articulated in the phrase ‘if you can command these elements’.1 An innocuous expression, perhaps, lost as it may be in the tumult and commotion of the scene, and yet, on reflection, it is a line which echoes throughout the play. As the meticulous presentation of the storm gives way to more and more obvious magic, the Boatswain’s phrase, the desperate futility of the desire to control the weather, becomes less and less unreasonable. In this chapter, I will explore the ways in which the play’s opening storm allows for a reading of the rest of the weather in the text. I will give particular attention in the first part of my argument to the staging of the storm, in an effort to expose the implications of its realism. It is my contention, furthermore, that the first scene of The Tempest must be read in conjunction with Shakespeare’s previous directions for thunder and lightning, if we are to attempt to come to terms with the process of meaning in which the storm is engaged.
In Back To Nature (2006), Robert N. Watson, exploring As You Like It, ‘interprets the longing for reunion with the world of nature as a sentimental manifestation of a philosophical problem: the suspicion that our cognitive mechanisms allow us to know things only as we liken them’.2 Watson finds in the imagery of the play ‘the impulse of the human family to impose its familiarities’.3 Because Watson’s study is broadly concerned with the pastoral, it does not examine The Tempest in depth. However, an approach comparable to that which Watson takes with As You Like It is rewarding in reading The Tempest. As You Like It is involved in, and examines, pastoral fantasy and the human will both to succumb to nature and to re-appropriate it through language. Similarly, The Tempest is concerned with, and implicated in, strategies of representation of the natural world and the human will to power over it. In the second half of this chapter, I will argue that the possibilities and the connotations of the theatrical storm are repeatedly investigated during the play and that this process is part of The Tempest’s wider concern with the dramatic representation of nature. Although the ecocritical will become more explicit in the latter part of this chapter, however, it is always at stake in this reading, not least in the following paragraphs, which examine the play’s first scene.
A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard;
enter a Shipmaster and a Boatswain.
MASTER Boatswain!
BOATSWAIN Here master. What cheer?
MASTER Good, speak to th’ mariners. Fall to it yarely or we run ourselves aground.
Exit.
BOATSWAIN Heigh, my hearts; cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! Yare! Yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to the master’s whistle! Blow till thou burst thy wind, if room enough.
(1.1.0–8)
The opening storm of The Tempest can be read as an example of what Timothy Morton has termed ‘rendering’.4 For Morton, rendering is a ‘main element’, and indeed a ‘result’ of ‘ambient poetics’ or ‘ecomimesis’, that is, the critical language developed in Ecology Without Nature that deals with the environmental form of art.5 This vocabulary of ambient poetics, Morton contends, is necessary if we are to discuss the environmental form of literature without falling prey to its ostensible ecological content. Hence rendering, along with other elements of ecomimesis, is one way of critically evaluating works of art from an ecocritical direction, and this will become clearer below. Morton’s source for the concept of rendering is cinematic theory and it is clarified by Michel Chion.6 Chion stresses the need to ‘distinguish between the notions of rendering and reproduction’, arguing that for cinematic ‘sounds to be truthful, effective and fitting’, film should less ‘reproduce what would be heard in the same situation in reality’ and more ‘render (convey, express) the feelings associated with the situation’.7 Whereas Chion’s definition of rendering is restricted to ‘use of sounds’, Morton’s use of the term is extrapolated to all texts and media.8 Morton, then, asserts that rendering ‘attempts to simulate reality itself: to tear to pieces the aesthetic screen that separates the perceiving subject from the object’.9 Morton concentrates mainly on Romantic poetry for his literary examples, but this concept of rendering may apply to any medium and, as Morton elaborates on the idea, its pertinence to theatre becomes clearer:
When ecomimesis renders an environment, it is implicitly saying: ‘This environment is real; do not think that there is an aesthetic framework here’. All signals that we are in a constructed realm have been minimized. Alternatively, even when the perceiver proceeds by ‘cynical reason’, we know very well that we are being deceived, but our disbelief is willingly suspended. Or we choose to enjoy the rendering as if it were not artificial. Rendering encourages us to switch off our aesthetic vigilance. But even if we know very well that it is a special effect, we enjoy the deception.10
This is how I wish to use the term rendering in my argument, that is, as a name for the process by which a text presents itself as reality and encourages the reader or audience to accept it as such. This is a helpful way to think about The Tempest’s first scene for two main reasons, each of which is important in an ecocritical approach to the play. The first reason is that however the King’s Men staged the storm, everything in the text points towards an attempt to present a theatrical tempest which is as close to a real one as possible. In so doing, the scene works to diminish the obviousness of its own ‘aesthetic framework’; that is the mechanics of representation which draw attention to the drama’s artificiality. The second reason that rendering is a helpful concept in reading the play is that the ‘aesthetic vigilance’ which Morton describes is distracted – or ‘switched off’ as Morton puts it – not only by the scene itself, but by the history of Shakespeare’s storms and their relationship with the supernatural. Thus, it is more likely that an audience will accept the scene as a ‘natural’ and therefore non-theatrical, perfectly rendered storm, if they are familiar with Shakespeare’s tendency to stage storms without theophanies or devils. Doubtless this may appear to be too sophisticated an audience for some. In response, I suggest that the regular Jacobean theatregoer, having seen popular plays such as Julius Caesar and Pericles, and possibly King Lear, may justifiably accept The Tempest’s storm as ‘natural’ thanks to the ‘natural’ storms which recur in the earlier work of the playwright.11 These reasons outline the ways in which Act 1, Scene 1 of The Tempest can be seen as inviting a reading informed by Morton’s concept of rendering. In order to develop such a reading, I will deal with each of these points in detail.
In his essay ‘The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars’ (1989), Andrew Gurr discusses the various possibilities for staging the play’s first scene.12 Although, as with any attempted explication of early modern staging, Gurr is necessarily speculative, his closing remarks are persuasive: ‘If The Tempest truly was the first play Shakespeare planned for the Blackfriars, his opening scene was a model of how to épater les gallants [startle the fashionable gentlemen]. The shock of the opening’s realism is transformed into magic the moment Miranda enters’.13 As with Julius Caesar and the Globe, the notion that the storm could define the character of the playhouse is an attractive one. Gurr’s approach may appear to reflect this notion, but a crucial difference is that the indoor theatre already had an established mode of practice when Shakespeare’s play was staged there. The Children of the Queen’s Revels played there from 1600 to 1608. As Sarah Dustagheer has shown, ‘the Children of the Queen’s Revels’ repertory at the Blackfriars did not contain extensive and integral use of sound effects. The plays written for the indoor theatre between 1600 and 1608 are remarkably quiet in comparison to the Globe repertory’.14 Hence, the impact of the storm in Shakespeare’s play is as much to do with surprise as with impressive spectacle. It is less a matter of the play determining an aesthetic for a new playhouse (as was the case in Julius Caesar); more a matter of subverting the expectations of any audience member familiar with the pre-existing character of Blackfriars performances.
The stage direction ‘tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard’ was probably written by the scrivener Ralph Crane, who seems to have prepared the script of The Tempest for publication.15 If we are to take it literally, as ‘the earliest evidence we have of how the play was staged by the King’s Company’, then it is unusual in specifying lightning as an auditory effect.16 John Jowett has proposed that ‘this is a possible indication of an original direction having been reworded’ and implies that a visual lightning effect was likely.17 However, as Gurr notes, ‘Fireworks [were] unpopular at the halls because of the stink’, and so the offstage noise of the stage direction was unlikely to include pyrotechnics.18 Given that lightning is a visual effect (i.e. not ‘heard’) elsewhere in contemporary drama, it is more likely that Crane used ‘thunder and lightning’ as a phrase to casually depict the noise of a storm. The formulation was a commonplace occurrence in early modern English: a pamphlet of ‘strange newes’ roughly contemporaneous with The Tempest, for example, describes ‘a horrible noyse of both of thunder and lightning’; John Foxe writes of a ‘warre … presignified by terrible thundering and lightning heard all England over’ and Leo Africanus describes a mountain that ‘is called … lyon in regard of the dreadfull thunders and lightnings which are continually heard from the top thereof’.19 ‘Thunder’ and ‘lightning’ are different theatrical effects, but ‘thunder and lightning’ is a compound phrase synonymous with ‘storm’.20 There is, therefore, no decisive contradiction in the stage direction for ‘thunder and lightning heard’. In light of this, and the unpopularity of indoor fireworks, the ‘tempestuous noise’ is likely to have been only a noise. This might, in the context of the spectacular pyrotechnics of the open-air playhouses, seem disappointing. However, it is important that whilst lightning effects are a visual extravagance, the noise of a rolling cannonball to represent thunder is convincing and accurate. This fact, and the notion that the cannonball was the only noise effect in the opening scene, supports my reading of the scene as invested in rendering the storm. As I will argue, this realistic quality of the noise is necessary for the aesthetic of the play; if the play’s language, as well as the stage effects, is considered, it becomes clear that accuracy of representation is a priority of the play’s opening.
Once again, Shakespeare is careful to complement the staging of the storm effects with the dramatic language of his characters. Although the storm is an illusion, the actions and diction of the crew are firmly grounded in Jacobean reality. Shakespeare paid great attention to the accurate portrayal of contemporary nautical procedures in his writing of the scene. The Boatswain’s instructions to the crew reveal a determination on the part of the playwright to be as precise as possible: ‘Take in the topsail’, ‘Down with the topmast’, ‘Bring her to try with the main course’ and ‘Set her two courses off to sea again! Lay her off!’ are all valid instructions (1.1.6, 33, 34, 48). In fact, the extent to which Shakespeare deals in nautical technicalities is remarkable, as A. F. Falconer, in Shakespeare and the Sea has explained. In response to the commands of the Boatswain, Falconer writes:
The ship is sound, the seamen are disciplined, the right orders are given. Some of the newer manoeuvres of the day, even one that was debateable, have been tried, but all without success … Shakespeare could not have written a scene of this kind without taking great pains to grasp completely how a ship beset with these difficulties would have to be handled.21
This detail of the scene is indicative of the authenticity at which Shakespeare is apparently aiming. Why the playwright would adhere to such specifications is puzzling: it is certainly highly unusual in Jacobean drama.22 Perhaps there is a concern that mariners in the audience would need to be as convinced by the scene as the rest of the crowd. Perhaps the possibility that there would be, amongst the audience, theatregoing gentlemen who had been to sea and absorbed some knowledge of shipping, was of greater bearing. Whatever the reason, it is apparent that the scene draws attention away from its aesthetic framework by including valid nautical commands in a correct and justifiable order. We might fruitfully contrast this with Shakespeare’s anatopisms elsewhere, not least his notorious propensity to insert coastlines and seaports on to landlocked countries and inland towns.23 Whilst Shakespeare is so often casual with the factual accuracy of his details, The Tempest’s opening scene presents a precision perhaps unmatched in the rest of his work. In this precision lies the singular aesthetic of the play: the minutely detailed storm that is unravelled in subsequent scenes.
The consideration with which the ship in the storm is rendered is made even clearer as Falconer goes on:
[Shakespeare] has not only worked out a series of manoeuvres, but has made exact use of the professional language of seamanship, knowing that if this were not strictly used aboard ship, the seamen would not know what they were required to do; and that, without it, the scene would not be realistic and lifelike. He could not have come by this knowledge from books, for there were no works on seamanship in his day, nor were there any nautical word lists.24
The scene, then, represents a ship in a storm by going through the motions of nautical manoeuvres, but does not draw those manoeuvres from stage practice, nor even from public literature. Falconer makes clear that these particular manoeuvres are only described in print in nautical texts that postdate the play.25 The first of such texts, Henry Mainwairing’s Seaman’s Dictionary, published in 1623, when Shakespeare had been dead for seven years, advertises its novelty even at that late date:
To understand the art of navigation is far easier learned than to know the practice and mechanical working of ships, with the proper terms belonging to them, in respect that there are helps for the first by many books … but for the other, till this, there was not so much as a means thought of, to inform any one in it.26
So Shakespeare was employing language that was not found in other plays or printed texts. The framework of the scene is therefore hidden by the fact that it is not a recognisable, book-based framework. By employing language not associated with theatre or with the written word, Shakespeare here relies on the fact that associations with artistic forms and with factual literature are concealed. Whether the manoeuvres were learned from a private manuscript, or Shakespeare gained his knowledge from conversation, the point is the same: the scene effectively broadcasts ‘this is not taken from drama, this is not taken from books; this scene is not the descendant of any kind of artificial world: what you are watching is real’. To recall Morton’s definition of rendering, ‘All signals that we are in a constructed realm have been minimized’.27 Whether or not this rendering is recognised by the audience, this is the way in which the scene operates. The success of rendering depends not on the exactitude of the illusion but on the ease, facilitated by The Tempest’s use of stage effects, with which the audience is enabled to accept it as reality: the convincing noises are heard, but, as I have suggested, the extravagant – unrealistic – fireworks are absent.
The scene minimises ‘signals that we are in a constructed realm’, then, through its use of stage effects and its unprecedented nautical precision. Moreover, this rendering is not simply found in the accuracy of the Boatswain’s commands, but extends to the way in which they are expressed. Figurative language barely makes an appearance for the majority of the Boatswain’s speech, and the imagery he uses when speaking to the nobles, or to the Mariners when his orders have failed, is pointedly contrasting: ‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ and ‘What, must our mouths be cold?’ (16–17, 51). When the Boatswain does use figurative language, that is, he puts it in the form of a rhetorical question; the nautical imperatives have no answer but action, the imagery no answer at all. In the Boatswain’s speech, the survival of those on board is dependent on the absence of metaphor: the language of his commands is therefore direct and unambiguous. Figurative language, then, is portrayed in the scene as an extravagance. This has the result of making the storm as convincing as possible: by prioritising the technical terms and by isolating the imagery, the Boatswain’s language conceals the aesthetic framework of the drama as a whole, and its special effects.
In order to illustrate this further, it is helpful to compare the scene with its counterpart in John Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage (1622). Although Fletcher’s work alludes repeatedly to The Tempest, the difference in terms of the figurative language of the two plays is clear in the first speech. As in Shakespeare’s play, there are stage directions for a storm and the Master speaks first:
A Tempest, Thunder and Lightning.
Enter Master and two Saylors.
MASTER Lay her aloofe, the Sea grows dangerous,
How it spits against the clouds, how it capers,
And how the fiery Element frights it back!
There be devils dancing in the aire, I think
I saw a Dolphin hang ith’hornes of the moone
Shot from a wave: hey day, hey day,
How she kicks and yerks?
Down with’e main Mast, lay her at hull,
Farle up all her Linnens, and let her ride it out.28
Despite the concern that ‘Fletcher’s scene is designed to be an immediately recognisable echo and development of Shakespeare’s and therefore cannot be compared too closely with it’, this speech in fact embellishes the language of its predecessor.29 As in The Tempest, the nautical commands are evident, but here they merely bookend the speech rather than dominate it. For the majority of the speech, the imagery of the sea, the clouds, the dolphin and the fiery element give the lines an entirely alternative focus. The Sea-Voyage uses elaborate conceits to portray the storm whilst The Tempest, as Christopher Cobb has remarked, ‘withholds poetic descriptions of both the storm and the suffering of those caught in it’.30 This is not to dismiss Fletcher’s scene, merely to point out that it is inherently different from the scene on which it is based. The Tempest’s opening keeps the extravagant stage effects to a minimum, and this is reflected in its unadorned, practical language. The stylised language of Fletcher’s Master is precisely the sort avoided by Shakespeare’s Boatswain.
Implicit in all of the above arguments is the recognition that the aesthetic of the opening of The Tempest is dependent upon the language of the scene more than upon the stage effects of thunder and lightning. With any of Shakespeare’s storms the stage effects – however realistic drums, cannonballs and fireworks are – have a necessarily limited contribution to the overall effect of the scene. The reason for this is that Shakespeare’s storms are never simply storms. The representation of the weather is never the only priority of the storm scenes; rather, as I have argued throughout, the scenes are always concerned with human perception. Naturally, the title of the play is of key importance here also. Given that the first scene represents – and relies upon – a convincing presentation of a storm (even though afterwards the fiction will reveal the storm to have been derived from magic), The Tempest’s title is designed to misdirect the audience before the play begins: the tempest is not a ‘real’ one, except in the title and the opening scene. The audience are presented with the human apprehension of a storm; only later will they learn the extra-human force behind it.
Having explored the ways in which the scene in question relies on a faithful depiction of nautical procedures, I will now turn to the importance of Shakespeare’s earlier storms for the reading of this one. I have already noted that the sea-storms in Shakespeare’s plays, when considered in chronological order, become increasingly involved in spectatorship.31 It is also apparent that, when the storms that occur on stage are considered, the simplistic conclusion that thunder and lightning indicates supernatural activity is troubled. I propose that The Tempest’s engagement with storm relies on a career of complex approaches to that theatrical commonplace. Moreover, the ways in which the opening scene of the play builds on earlier storms once more point to what, following Morton, I want to call rendering. In order to show this, it is necessary to recall briefly each occurrence of thunder and lightning in Shakespeare’s plays and how each one engages with the supernatural.
In the Henry VI plays, staged thunder and lightning is dealt with in two different ways. In Henry VI Part 2, the effects straightforwardly accompany the rise of Asnath, and therefore follow the formula proposed by Leslie Thomson.32 In Part 1, however, the effects follow Talbot’s oaths and, whilst the possibility of divine intervention is thereby alluded to, it is not realised on stage until Joan Puzel summons the fiends (1.4.97; 5.3). From the very start of his playwriting career, then, Shakespeare destabilises the expected association of storm and the supernatural.
In Julius Caesar, the next play in which directions for thunder and lightning are found, no supernatural element is forthcoming (at least until the ghost of Caesar appears, long after the storm). Whilst the possibility of portent and ‘unnatural … things’ is raised during the storm, such lines are balanced within the characters’ dialogue, with Casca credulous and Cicero sceptical. The storm in Julius Caesar shows an awareness of its theatrical context in its allusion to the supernatural, but is at odds with that context in that it does not stage a supernatural figure.
If the sound of thunder was a part of the original performance of Othello, then subsequent editors, from the First Quarto of 1622 onwards, have not recognised it in stage directions. However, the beginning of Act 2, Scene 1 takes place during a storm, and the characters in it comment on the weather: ‘Methinks the wind hath spoke about at land. | A fuller blast ne’er shook our battlements’ (2.1.5–6). Perhaps because there are no storm effects, or perhaps in spite of them, there is scarcely any allusion to the work of the supernatural during the tempest. Cassio’s hopeful lines come closest: ‘Great Jove, Othello guard, | And swell his sail with thine own powerful breath’ (78–9). Once again then, if the audience have expectations of the meaning of a storm on stage, Shakespeare has refused to meet them.
The same applies to the next staged storm in Shakespeare’s plays, that in King Lear. At no point is there a supernatural figure or apparition on stage during the storm, but, as in Julius Caesar, the scenes nonetheless can be helpfully read as alluding to a wider supernatural theatrical context. In Macbeth, of course, the effects of thunder and lightning are unambiguously charged with the supernatural, occurring as they do at each appearance of the Witches. Rather than consolidate the idea that an audience witnessing a staged storm would expect a supernatural element, however, the storms in Macbeth illustrate the extent to which Shakespeare is able to manipulate and utilise expectations. This is especially obvious in the light of the play’s composition and first performance being so close to those of Lear. For the original Shakespearean audiences, that is, the playwright’s storms had meaning specific to each play. In the wider context of other plays, this meaning was inevitably complicated and not readily transferable.
With Shakespeare’s romances, the relationship of storm and the supernatural is perhaps even more complex than in the tragedies. As with Othello, the storms of The Winter’s Tale and Pericles are not introduced with stage directions for thunder and lightning in their respective editions. However, there is a persuasive case for concluding that those effects would have been used, particularly in the case of Pericles, the text of which ultimately derives only from a problematic Quarto edition and which, in Act 3, Scene 1, stages a shipboard scene which seems to cry out for storm effects. In terms of the present question viz. the supernatural, Pericles is persuaded to throw the body of Thaisa overboard in order to calm the elements, but there is no apparition of the supernatural in the scene. In the following scene, however, Thaisa is revived by Cerimon, who claims knowledge of ‘an Egyptian | That had nine hours lien dead, | Who was by good appliance recovered’ (3.2.86–7). Storm and magic are thus delineated in the two scenes. Only when the noise of thunder and lightning has faded does the work of the supernatural commence. Cymbeline, however, sees the familiar descent of the heavenly figure: ‘Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle. He throws a thunderbolt’ (5.4.93). Although, as we have seen, directions such as these are not unusual in early modern theatre, this is the first time in Shakespeare’s works in which thunder and lightning accompanies a descent.33 Storm and the supernatural, then, are once more conflated and simultaneous. As ever, this is not a position on which Shakespeare rests, for in The Winter’s Tale’s storm is as earthly as Cymbeline’s is heavenly. Moreover, this is a play in which the withholding of ‘magic’ is essential for the dénouement: the reappearance of Hermione. As in Pericles, the storm and the supernatural are delineated, but here several scenes separate them. The immediate appearance of the supernatural following the storm in Pericles is an explicit separation: each is informed by the absence of the other, and the harm done during the storm is rectified by the magic which follows it. In The Winter’s Tale, the effect is completely different. The deaths caused by the storm are not revisited, and the intimations of the supernatural are not related to the shipwreck. Any expectations of a theophany during the storm would introduce the idea of a deus ex machina too early for the play’s finale to be dramatically effective.
It is possible of course that the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays differs slightly from the order above. Perhaps The Tempest was written before, for example, The Winter’s Tale, or both of those plays appeared before Cymbeline. I have listed the various approaches of the plays, however, in order to make apparent the extent to which any implicit notion of the supernatural in staged storms is destabilised by Shakespeare. This is an important realisation in reading the storm qua supernatural in The Tempest; and, whether the play was Shakespeare’s last of sole authorship or whether others appeared afterwards, the playwright’s earlier storms have already established the pattern.
With this in mind, I want to examine the part of Leslie Thomson’s essay which deals with The Tempest. Until her reading of The Tempest, Thomson’s argument has been fairly unequivocal, asserting that, ‘[in] the case of thunder and lightning, the audience was almost invariably prompted to expect the supernatural – and got what it expected’.34 When approaching The Tempest, however, it becomes clear that the play already presents for Thomson a departure from the established theatrical practice which is the subject of her essay:
until Miranda begins the second scene by saying to Prospero, ‘If by your art, my dearest father, you have | Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them’, it is likely that the audience would not have questioned the tragic event, given the effects they heard and saw while listening to the desperate sailors.35
This statement points to a complexity of audience response which is not in keeping with the ‘invariable prompting’ of the former assertion. Effectively, Thomson concludes that with an appropriate degree of realism in effects, dialogue and acting, the ‘tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard’ need not suggest the supernatural. Moreover that same realism is enough to convince the audience that the storm is a portrayal of a natural phenomenon. It is my contention that an audience familiar with Shakespeare’s plays would be prepared for a storm which withholds its character according to a binary supernatural/natural categorisation. Again, this is not simply a case of how effectively the storm effects are staged, but relies on a career’s worth of the meaning of thunder and lightning being destabilised. Whilst Thomson’s point about the supernatural quality of the storm being realised only through the speech of Miranda is true, then, it complicates her earlier claims over what an audience would expect as the special effects begin the play. The storm is more readily rendered because Shakespeare has, in earlier plays, already troubled the aesthetic framework which rendering seeks to conceal.
So far, I have attempted to show how the opening scene of The Tempest is replete with strategies of rendering, and how these strategies work in the scene itself and in relation to earlier plays of Shakespeare’s. I will now examine the effect the rendering of the storm in Act 1, Scene 1 has on the rest of the play. In Act 1, Scene 2, Miranda’s lines, which open the scene, immediately raise the possibility that the storm itself was, anyway, an illusion. It is seldom acknowledged, however, that the lines simultaneously suggest that the storm is still taking place:
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch
But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek,
Dashes the fire out.
(1.2.1–6)
The second line of the speech, with its deictic ‘this roar’ and its imperative ‘allay them’ gives the impression, maintained throughout the passage, that the storm has not finished. This is the moment at which the provenance of the storm is revealed, but this revelation is not in retrospect: Miranda’s lines allow the audience to experience the storm in the context of the supernatural, then, rather prompting the audience to reimagine it retrospectively. The scene is the point in the play at which the aesthetic framework, hitherto concealed, starts to become acknowledged – a process that continues through to the metadrama of the masque in Act 4, Scene 1. There are no directions for stage effects in Act 1, Scene 2: the shift from the presentation of the storm as natural to magical is apparently dependent on the qualities of Miranda’s language. The audience can experience the storm both as natural and supernatural whilst it is occurring. Importantly, the present tense and extended imagery of the passage relates its content to accounts of storms from other plays. In this regard, the description is consciously theatrical in the very way that, I have argued, the opening scene is not. Thus Miranda’s speech is related to the Mariner’s in The Winter’s Tale, ‘The heavens that we have in hand are angry, | And frown upon’s’ (3.3.5–6) and Pericles’s in Pericles, ‘O, still | Thy deaf’ning, dreadful thunders; gently quench | Thy nimble sulphurous flashes! [...] the seaman’s whistle | is a whisper in the ears of death | Unheard’ (3.1.4–10).36 The extensive imagery of Miranda’s speech locates it in this stylistic tradition of characters narrating storms as they occur, a tradition which is resisted in the opening scene of The Tempest. One particular image will have been especially familiar to a contemporary audience: the literary conceit of the sea touching the sky. A similar idea is used by William Strachey, whose True Repertory is a probable source for The Tempest: ‘the Sea swelled above the Clouds, and gave battell unto Heaven. It could not be said to raine, the waters like whole Rivers did flood in the ayre’.37 The image, however, is widespread; taking translations of Ovid as an example, we may see some variations on the theme in the following extracts:
The surges mounting up aloft did seeme too mate the skye,
And with theyr sprinckling for too wet the clowdes that hang on hye.38
What boysterous billowes now (O wretch) amids the waves we spye,
As I forthwith should have bene hev’de to touch the Azure skye.39
Joves indignation and his wrath began to grow so hot.
That for to quench the rage thereof, his Heaven suffisde not.
His brother Neptune with his waves was faine to doe him ease.40
In including imagery in this vein, then, Miranda’s speech is identifiably engaging in a literary tradition. This is exactly the type of allusion that the first scene of the play sought to avoid. The structure of Miranda’s speech – the iambic pentameter, the florid description and the familiar, allusive metaphor – signals to the audience that they are watching an aesthetic construction. Just as Miranda intimates, then, that the storm is ‘art’, so art becomes acknowledged through its formal qualities. The opening scene withholds the poetic; the second scene revels in it.
After the detailed and careful rendering of the storm in the play’s opening, then, why have a speech which, in its diction, imagery and allusiveness, undoes the entire process? Surely, the fact that Miranda’s lines intimate that the storm is not real, whilst simultaneously employing language suggestive of a theatrical storm, is not a coincidence. In the speech, form is reflective of content, and vice versa. Miranda’s lines belong to the aesthetic framework which the first scene has been shown to hide.
If Miranda’s speech highlights the aesthetic framework fleetingly, then Ariel’s description of the storm consolidates the shift in emphasis:
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. 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.
(1.2.196–206)
As in Act 1, Scene 1, there is a certain amount of nautical knowledge on display here, which, though less obscure than that in the first scene, is nonetheless exact. Falconer comments that Ariel ‘makes his report, naming the different parts of a tall ship correctly’ and, moreover, ‘in order’ and, as with the manoeuvres in the storm, this is apparently a knowledge gained through experience or conversation rather than books.41 This, however, is where the similarity with the earlier scene ends, for Ariel’s speech, like Miranda’s, is thick with figurative language and allusion. Gabriel Egan has pointed out the similarities between these lines and Lear’s in the storm:
The compound adjectives ‘thought-executing’ and ‘sight-outrunning’ are not just grammatically alike … but also convey in different ways the sense of a human faculty (thinking, seeing) surpassed by the instantaneous brightness of lightning flashes that are advance warnings (‘vaunt-couriers’, ‘precursors’) of the boom of thunder that will follow.42
Again, then, the second scene of The Tempest is allusive in ways which the first scene circumvents. One word in particular which Egan notes is shared by Lear and Ariel is ‘sulphurous’. In fact, it is a relatively frequent word used by Shakespeare in describing storms, and in particular, in evoking Jove. As well as Pericles’s ‘nimble sulphurous flashes’ (3.1.6), we have Isabella’s comparison of Angelo and Jove: ‘Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt | Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak’ (Measure 2.2.116–17). In Cymbeline, Jupiter ‘came in thunder; his celestial breath | Was sulphurous to smell’ (5.4.114–15). In choosing this word, however, Shakespeare is not simply imbuing Ariel’s lines with a favourite description, but referring to the practical elements of staging lightning. Gurr contends that ‘Fireworks or rosin for lightning flashes were available at the amphitheatres but unpopular at the halls because of the stink’.43 That stink was, very often at least, attributable to the ingredients of the fireworks being based around sulphur, which is able to burn independently and is also a constituent of gunpowder.44 Ariel’s lines, then, can be read as referring to an effect absent in the first scene. If, as I have argued, the storm was staged through noise effects alone, then ‘sulphurous’ functions as a reminder of the inadequacy of such effects in rendering the visual phenomenon of lightning. If my conjecture is false, and fireworks were used, then Ariel’s ‘sulphurous’ is a reminder of their smell, which has probably only recently faded when Ariel is speaking. In this way, it points towards the artificiality of the lightning which the fireworks would have been intended to mimic. In either case, the word may be understood as being informed by the practicalities of staging, and thus, in Ariel’s speech, is engaged in the process of highlighting the storm’s theatricality. The same can be said for the examples from Pericles and Cymbeline, of course, but in The Tempest, the word amounts to a further suggestion that the second scene underscores what the first scene secretes.
Whatever the various permutations of ‘sulphurous’ in the speech may be, it seems extremely unlikely that the staging of the storm extended to the spectacular displays of flame which Ariel describes.45 Unlikely, that is, partly because an effect as distinctive as this would surely be mentioned in a detailed stage direction and partly because no flames are mentioned in the first scene. Perhaps the most pertinent point here, however, relates to the rendering of Act 1, Scene 1 being achieved, as we have seen, with carefully practical language. Ariel’s speech is not simply figurative for the sake of fulfilling an opportunity for heightened language, but in order to contrast with the earlier storm. In this way, in its hyperbolic style, it points to a system of theatrical representation which is spectacular, that is, one which draws attention to itself and to its aesthetic form. By reshaping the content of the storm, the form of the storm is brought to light: ‘As if we would stage something like that’, the speech seems to say, ‘when the whole point was to make you think the storm was real’. This reaches a climax in Ariel’s next speech, in which, in addition to even more elaborate effects, there is reported speech which is not in the first scene:
All but mariners
Plunged into the foaming brine and quit the vessel;
Then all afire with me, the King’s son Ferdinand,
[…]
Was the first man that leapt, cried ‘Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here’.
(210–15)
Ariel’s speeches here, moreover, are significant for another, rather different reason. Having been engaged in tempestuous imagery and staging throughout his writing, Shakespeare here indulges in the ultimate pathetic fallacy by giving the storm a voice. Ariel’s speech is a detailed, first person narration, that approaches the representation of weather by focussing on, as it were, the I of the storm. The closest I have found to an appraisal of this is concerned with the masque and not the storm, in an essay by Robert Egan: ‘the goddesses are being played by spirits who are, in fact, elemental creatures of nature – the real nature surrounding Prospero – and are compelled, possibly against their wills, to enact a natural order which is not their own, but Prospero’s “pathetic fallacy”’.46 Egan’s remark indicates the ways in which notions of pathetic fallacy are helpful in explicating the play’s approach to the representation of nature, and this applies equally to Ariel as to the spirits of the masque. I will return to this in the final section of the chapter, as it has important connotations for an ecocritical appraisal of the play and is, as I will show, best examined in that light.
The Tempest’s staging of thunder and lightning is not restricted to the opening scene, however. There are two more scenes with storm effects in the play and in each of them the illusion of the first scene affects the way the audience is encouraged to respond. Because of the introductory storm, and its subsequent re-imagining by Miranda and Ariel, the sound of thunder in the play is questionable: its origin and hence its qualities, supernatural or other, are unclear.47 Having witnessed a natural storm, which immediately becomes a supernatural storm, the audience is not in a position decisively to judge the next incidence of thunder:
Enter Caliban, with a burden of wood;
a noise of thunder heard.
All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him
By inchmeal a disease! His spirits hear me,
And yet I needs must curse.
(2.2.1–4)
Having established the possibility that thunder has a supernatural origin, the play consolidates the idea by directing the sound effects to be produced again. Thus the tension between natural and supernatural is created, and a hierarchical relationship between the two is brought about: the ‘natural’ in the play is subsumed by, and subject to the work of, the supernatural. Commenting on these lines, Gabriel Egan writes: ‘Caliban has developed the recognisable symptom of the mentally traumatised … This is why he responds to perfectly ordinary thunder as though it were the reaction of Prospero’s agents to his cursing’.48 As in Thomson’s argument above, Egan’s notion of ‘perfectly ordinary thunder’ is undermined by his earlier assumptions of the simplistic relationship of storm and the supernatural. Moreover, the impetus of Caliban’s lines relies on the fact that neither the natural nor supernatural assignment of the sound of thunder here is possible. However, Caliban’s curses, like Lear’s before him, are formed from ‘his’ – or, rather, Shakespeare’s – understanding of early modern meteorology.49 According to this set of theories, as we have seen, the sun caused ‘vapours’ to rise towards it, much as we now understand moisture to be formed into clouds.50 If those vapours were from a noxious source, like a bog, then when they fell to earth as rain, they would spread their disease. This curse of Caliban’s, then, requires a slight acquaintance with the Jacobean understanding of the weather.51
The significance of the meteorological source of the later curse is that Caliban speaks following the sound of thunder. The weather in the play has been exposed as magically derived rather than natural. Caliban’s curses rely on authentic natural processes: the sun drawing up vapours which eventually fall, a notion to which the Jacobean audience subscribed. Seen in this way, the curses evoke the futility of Caliban’s position regarding authority: they are optimistic fantasies that require a weather system outside the control of Prospero, but such a weather system is precisely what is being exposed as unavailable. Caliban acknowledges the ‘spirits’ making the thunder yet hopelessly invokes a natural weather event. Nature is represented by the play not only as subject to human control but also as generating the reference points for the language through which its enslavement is expressed. Even though they may still make sense without the concept of supernatural thunder, Caliban’s curses would thereby lose a wide nexus of allusive connotations. As with the opening scene, the use of sound effects provides a backdrop for the representation of the perception of a storm. The difference is that the audience now understands the play’s weather as supernatural and Caliban’s curse is all the more futile for it.
Continuing his argument on Caliban’s traumatic state, Gabriel Egan makes the following proposition:
It is in this light that we should consider the transformatory power of Prospero’s terrifying theatrical illusions. The first illusion is the tempest itself that made the ‘bold waves tremble’ … and was intended to ‘infect [the] reason’ to cause ‘a fever of the mad’ in Prospero’s enemies [who] thereafter take the natural for the supernatural.52
If we follow the hypothesis that the thunder in Act 2, Scene 2 is ‘natural’, then this is persuasive, although we might wonder what other ‘natural’ incidences Egan is referring to here. However, as I have shown, there is something more fundamental happening here in the play’s representation of representation. The opening scene’s determined rendering has given way to a clearly acknowledged aesthetic framework, one which makes it impossible to categorise the thunder in this scene as an ‘illusion of an illusion’ or as an ‘illusion of the real’. The way in which Caliban’s speech approaches the sound of thunder is indicative of the two separate strands of understanding. He recognises the possibility that the thunder is an indication that Prospero’s spirits are listening, but meets that supernatural apprehension of the storm with diction grounded in a natural understanding of the weather. In this way, the sound of thunder questions the representation of the natural in a dramatic context: it is not simply Caliban’s curses which are impotent, but the possibility of rendering a natural environment in the supernatural aesthetic which the play has established. This is, moreover, once again, a metadramatic quality: that supernatural aesthetic is the framework within which the play operates, and by highlighting it, the text necessarily foregrounds its theatricality. Much has already been written on the metadramatic in The Tempest, but in this way, as we shall see, such self-reflexivity has implications for an ecocritical reading of the play.
There is one more scene in The Tempest in which thunder is staged, and, unlike the first two scenes, there are two stage directions for it:
Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table, and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes. (3.3.52)
He vanishes in thunder. Then, to soft music, enter the shapes again and dance with mocks and mows, and carry out the table. (3.3.82)
Ariel’s appearance and disappearance are part of a series of theatrical miniatures which convince both the onstage and offstage audience that the scene is, as Sebastian puts it, ‘a living drollery’ (21). It is clear enough from these directions and from the above discussion that, in the course of the play, the sound of thunder has shifted in meaning from one extreme to another: in the first scene it signified a meticulously rendered natural storm, but here it represents a commonplace theophany which revels in its theatrical tricks. Even with the basic effects of a noise of thunder, Shakespeare can achieve a bewildering array of variations in what it signifies. But if we are to take the stage directions of the play literally, then the pyrotechnics absent in the first scene and in Act 2, Scene 2, here accompany Ariel’s entrance. It is surely no coincidence that such an act of theatricalising nature is simultaneous with the play’s own zenith of display: the ‘quaint device’ with which ‘the banquet vanishes’. The shifting signification of storm effects is in balance with the representation of magic. In the opening scene, the magic is kept hidden, as the representation of nature takes the stage. As Ariel descends, nature is marginalised as magic is not only foregrounded but, with a quaint device, performed. The storm in the play, therefore, signifies both nature and supernature; both realism and magic.
Addressing the staged thunder in The Tempest, Leslie Thomson writes that following the first scene, ‘occurrences of the effects in the play, although in the context of Prospero’s white magic, are nonetheless potent reminders of its darker uses, which would probably have helped to convey – more clearly to the original playgoers than to us – that Prospero is on the edge between one force and another’.53 ‘On the edge’, however, is the way in which The Tempest represents nature throughout. At its core, the play may be understood as an investigation of the drive to dominate nature, and the fantasies in which that desire is expressed. In order to see this quality more clearly, it should be read alongside more conservative readings of the play. As with all of Shakespeare’s storms, those in The Tempest are reliant upon – and probing of – the processes of theatrical meaning. They can thereby be read as metatheatrical. We have seen this in varying ways throughout the other plays I have explored. In The Tempest, however, we find a play with a critical legacy of metatheatrical readings. How should my reading of the play’s storms be handled in relationship with this tradition? Approaches to The Tempest’s concern with metatheatre have tended to concentrate on Prospero’s character as a dramatist, and in particular on the masque of Act 4, Scene 1. Kiernan Ryan, for example, contends that ‘[t]he play’s ideals are expansively celebrated in the masque’ by representing empathy and concession.54 As Stephen Orgel points out, the masque ‘is re-enacting central concerns of the play as a whole’.55 With these qualities in mind, the appropriateness of the masque for the focus of metatheatrical readings is evident, although the approaches are still open to various conclusions.56 However, if the metadramatic is to be properly addressed, then we must take account not only of the masque, but of the storm of the opening scene.
Like the masque, the storm of the first scene can be thought of as reflecting The Tempest’s concerns. As well as identifying immediately with the title of the play, the storm portrays social upheaval and confusion. As a work of magic, it establishes the idea – which the masque, of course, makes explicit – of Prospero as dramatist, simultaneously controlling the events of the play and commenting on their illusory nature.57 Although it is arguable that the storm in the first scene makes the metadramatic at once explicit and unstable from the start, such an argument would not fully take account of the detail with which that scene is rendered. It is possible for the scene to operate on both levels of meaning, that is, concerned both with naturalistic theatre and with metatheatre. Whilst the opening storm is retrospectively metatheatrical, we must also acknowledge that – at least in the initial reading or viewing – the concealment of the storm as a work of illusion serves to camouflage the metadramatic aspects. The rendering of storm, then, involves a representation of nature as wild and free, only subsequently to be claimed as under the domain of a supernaturally endowed human, or indeed under the domain of theatre. Part of the play’s concern with its own process of producing meaning inheres in its concealing that process for the time it takes for viable alternative processes to be consolidated. By rendering the storm as thoroughly as possible, the foundations are in place for the play to carry out a formal investigation of the meaning of thunder and lightning on the Jacobean stage. This investigation can only take place if the opening storm insists on its non-theatricality. In this way, the implications of the storm – both in terms of what it means and how it means – can be extended, as we have seen, through the speech of Miranda, and culminate in the language of Ariel.
As I have already suggested, the fact that the play gives a voice for the storm is of great significance to an ecocritical approach to the text. But it is crucial that it is Ariel who speaks with this voice, for the ecocritical approach is invested with similar interests as those that ground postcolonial readings. In the readings of the play which formed the bulk of late twentieth-century responses, postcolonial studies tended to focus on Caliban, as a native of the island ruled by the invading Prospero.58 The postcolonial and the ecocritical have already been shown to share concerns by Gabriel Egan. Egan’s chapter on The Tempest in Green Shakespeare explores Prospero’s apparent deforestation of the island, carried out through the enslaved Caliban who is constantly made to deliver wood, and relates this environmental question to the similar policies of Jacobean English forces in Ireland.59 Although Egan’s argument is persuasive (and can also be applied to Ferdinand – an imperial, rather than a native, challenge to Prospero’s domination in a postcolonial reading), its scope is limited by the focus on Caliban. Clearly an ecocritical approach finds more of interest in Ariel, a recognisable non-human, who is nonetheless enslaved and made supernaturally to carry out, indeed to supplant, the work of nature.
Ariel’s domination by Prospero is encapsulated both before and after his descriptions of the storm. His first lines display a willing subservience: ‘All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come | To answer thy best pleasure’ (1.2.189–90). The simplicity of this is troubled by the later exchange with Prospero, whose question ‘What is’t thou canst demand?’ is met with a forthright ‘My liberty’ (1.2.245). The extent to which Prospero has control over Ariel is evident in the language of intimidation. The threat with which he forces the slave to work is based on Ariel’s once being trapped in a pine tree by Sycorax: ‘If thou more murmer’st, I will rend an oak | And peg thee in his knotty entrails’ (1.2.294–5). The punishment which Prospero threatens is couched in both natural and mythological terms, the oak tree being suggestive both of the strength of nature and its associations with Jove.60 Ariel’s involvement in the natural world is simultaneously one of control and subservience. Moreover, the strength of Ariel’s lightning is apparently not the most powerful on the island, if Prospero’s later claims are to be taken at face value.61
As with the threat of the oak, Prospero’s encouragement to Ariel is figured in terms of the natural: ‘Thou shalt be as free | As mountain winds’ (1.2.499–500). Indeed, the same can be seen in much of the language used to describe Ariel and his actions. Prospero also speaks of the tasks ‘to tread the ooze | Of the salt deep,| To run upon the sharp wind of the north, | To do me business in the veins o’th’ earth | When it is baked with frost’ (1.2.252–6). Significantly, after Ariel’s speech in which he claims to have ‘flamed amazement’, Prospero here associates the spirit with the three remaining elements – the water of the sea, the air of the wind and the earth of the ground – in quick succession. Ariel thereby stands for a codified version of nature in its discrete parts. If we isolate one of Prospero’s phrases – ‘To do me business in the veins o’th’ earth’ – we can see several potential interpretations. For example, if the veins of the earth refer to metallic ore, as is clearly one possible meaning, then the phrase figures capitalism as ravaging nature – ‘To do me business in the veins o’th’ earth’. Simultaneously, though, veins is a word which figures the earth as mammalian, even human – there is a symbolic bridge between the earth and the human here: making the ravaging of nature more explicit, more cruel. Prospero’s lines are surely related to Ariel’s first phrases: ‘I come| to answer thy best pleasure, be’t to fly, | To swim, to dive into the fire, | To ride | On the curled clouds’ (1.2.189–92). Indeed, as Prospero defines Ariel, so Ariel often speaks of himself in imagery drawn from the natural world: ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I | In a cowslip’s bell I lie; | There I couch when owls do cry. | On the bat’s back I do fly’ (5.1.88–91). The imprisoning methods of Sycorax ensured that Ariel’s ‘groans | Did make wolves howl and penetrate the breasts of ever angry bears’ (1.2.287–9).62 Ariel’s entry in thunder is not simply the zenith of the play’s gradual conflation of storm and the supernatural, then, but also of Ariel’s identification with natural forces which become subject to the supernatural in theatrical representation.
In depicting Ariel both as a slave and as a personification of weather, The Tempest demands to be read in ecocritical terms: the fantasy of new-world domination is necessarily also a fantasy of domination over nature. Moreover, the way in which the ostensibly ‘real’ storm is thoroughly shown to be an illusion within the world of the play as well as within the world of the theatre, provokes the thought that all theatrical representations of nature share this same fantasy. In his chapter on As You Like It, Robert N. Watson remarks that the ‘difficulty of knowing nature objectively becomes part of the entire subject-object problem, as well as the problem of other minds’.63 Watson argues that As You Like It addresses such problems through a strategy of relentless simile, which foreground, rather than conceal the difficulty:
The irreducible distances between likeness and identity, and between the human and the natural, are (though the term has become anathema to Shakespeare scholars) themes of the play, recurring – often in parallel – with a remarkable frequency and intricacy quite apart from any necessities of plot or realistic characterisation.64
If we are to accept Watson’s argument as far as As You Like It is concerned, then we might be intrigued by the ways in which it may be applied to The Tempest. As You Like It supports such a reading largely because of its form: the ‘difficulty of knowing nature’ is a condition of the early modern human experience, and is a challenge which is, according to Watson, ironically reducible to a pastoral fantasy of a prelapsarian existence. In The Tempest, however, nature is not represented in the same nostalgic way: the environment is presented either as destructive or as supernatural. It is furthermore, as we have seen, figured as theatrical, neatly encapsulated in Prospero’s question to Ariel: ‘Hast thou, spirit, | Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?’ (1.2.193–4). Whereas As You Like It draws attention to the difference between the human and the natural through its imagery, then, The Tempest does so through its metatheatricality. The only form of nature which The Tempest is capable of representing is that which is controlled by the human. Paradoxically, it is the first scene – the most carefully ‘natural’ nature –which is the most rigorously exposed as an illusion: humankind can only represent nature as theatre, for to represent it through theatre is to mistakenly conclude that it is possible to know nature objectively. According to Watson, then, in As You Like It, ‘Shakespeare begins to explore some modern anxieties about our ability to know the world itself, to move beyond comparison into truth, to see the absolute face to face, as we feel we should and once did’.65 In The Tempest, however, such an approach is problematic not because language is a barrier, but because the play is ultimately concerned with approaching theatrical representation and not nature. Rather than ‘see the absolute’ of nature ‘face to face’, The Tempest seeks to expose the structures of illusion on which theatre depends as the only absolute available to us. For Watson, poetic representation functions as a screen between human experience and ‘real’ nature: nature is presented as knowable in As You Like It via the medium of figurative language. The artificiality of this language conceals the fantasy of knowing nature on its own terms. Similarly, The Tempest presents nature as subject to human control through the medium of theatricality.
For this reason, the personification of the storm as Ariel is the summit of the play’s approach to the problem of representing nature on the stage. In the speeches in which Ariel describes the storm, nature has a voice, a language, a narrative, the very qualities through which anthropocentric thought is expressed, and therefore through which the irreducible barrier between nature and the human is maintained. The fantasy of the supernatural agent, then, is one in which a dialogue with nature is possible. Crucially, such a dialogue is presented as hierarchical: the voice of nature in Ariel is subject to the voice of the human in Prospero. This hierarchy is maintained throughout the play after the first scene. Indeed, it may even be argued that the ferocity of the storm in the first scene is a way of retrospectively establishing the notion that even at its most extreme, The Tempest’s weather is the subject of human control. It is in the conversation between Ariel and Prospero that the relationship of human and nature is most explicitly played out, but there are incidents elsewhere which support the points I have made. The notable irony, for example, of Prospero’s characterisation of Antonio as ‘unnatural’ rests on Prospero’s entire character being founded on the subjugation of nature, or indeed the ‘unnaturalisation’ of nature (5.1.79).66 Watson’s account of the Renaissance maintains that ‘the elite intellectual culture appeared obsessed with getting back to nature, hoping there and thereby to regain unmediated contact with simple reality – which that culture could no longer comfortably identify’.67 In The Tempest, however, the obsession is not with getting back to nature, but with controlling it.68 Moreover, the notion of a ‘simple reality’ with which culture might gain ‘unmediated contact’ is made to seem ridiculous: in its place is a complex theatricality, which addresses the attempts to identify with anything simpler – more ‘natural’ – as futile. This complexity inheres in the drama’s capacity to recognise its own dramatic qualities after, of course, it has hidden them during the storm.
The last speech of the play has been read as superfluous. The recent Arden editors assert that the ‘Epilogue is not required for a coherent reading or production because the play’s action is complete. Shakespeare may have added it for special performances, perhaps at court’.69 By way of coming to a conclusion, I would like to turn to the Epilogue with these remarks in mind, and to argue that the speech is indeed vital for a coherent reading of the play and can be shown as completing the action rather than commenting upon it.
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.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
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.
Despite the content of the speech, its form betrays magic overtones: rhyming couplets in trochaic tetrameter is, as we have seen, the structure used for Macbeth’s Witches and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s fairies.70 As an epilogue, Puck’s is similarly arranged and is, like Prospero’s, concerned with the liminal boundary of theatre and audience imagination. The Tempest’s Epilogue, however, is unusual for maintaining the character of Prospero: as Stephen Orgel remarks, it ‘is unique in the Shakespeare canon in that its speaker declares himself not an actor in a play but a character in a fiction’.71 How does this idiosyncrasy reflect on the play as a whole? I have argued that the storm in the first scene is deliberately written to draw attention away from the aesthetic framework of the play. Surely, something similar is happening in the Epilogue if Prospero remains in character? Remarking on this quality, Robert Egan asserts that ‘The Epilogue of The Tempest … specifically does away with this perspective, purposefully eliminating any barrier between the play-world and the real’.72 The ‘charms’ and the ‘strength’ in the speech ostensibly refer to the supernatural powers which Prospero has surrendered, and yet are also evidently applicable to the power of the theatre and the play. By remaining in character, this anthropomorphic Epilogue readdresses the play’s concern that our contact with reality cannot be unmediated. This is made clearer as the speech continues, as further aspects of the play I have highlighted re-emerge. In the phrase ‘I must be here confined by you’, for example, the language of slavery is revisited. Orgel notes that here: ‘Prospero puts himself in the position of Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand and the other shipwreck victims throughout the play, threatened with confinement, pleading for release from bondage’.73 This much is clear. However, in addition to imagining Prospero as slave, what this phrase also does is figure the audience as enslaver. Audience become both master and dramatist: they are implicated in the same strategies of control which Prospero has espoused throughout the play.74 Moreover, this is not simply an identification of the audience that applies only in the Epilogue. Rather, the implication is of a hierarchy which has persisted for the length of the drama. In the final speech, then, the fantasy of theatrical control over nature is made explicit again, and the audience’s part in it is formalised: ‘Gentle breath of yours my sails | Must fill’ follows the importuning of ‘the help of your good hands’. The extent to which these phrases figure the audience not simply as controlling of nature but as complicit in the play’s magic – and therefore in the storm – is made clearer when they are compared to Prospero’s last lines before the Epilogue:
I’ll deliver all,
And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales
And sail so expeditious that shall catch
Your royal fleet far off. My Ariel, chick,
That is thy charge. Then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well!
(5.1.314–19)
What the Epilogue offers, then, is a formal alignment of the audience’s magical powers with those of Ariel: just as Ariel is charged with creating the ‘auspicious gales’, so the audience ‘must fill’ the sails with their ‘Gentle breath’ and applause. Just as Ariel is to return ‘to the elements’, so the audience is ultimately responsible for the means through which he is imprisoned: ‘this bare island by your spell’, a phrase which neatly implicates the audience as well as drawing attention to the bareness of the stage itself. I have argued that the play presents nature as only accessible through a distorted theatrical lens, one which reflects both subject and object through its self-awareness. The final component of that fantastical representation is the acknowledgement that any such lens necessarily requires the audience’s guilty subjugation of the elements, its wilful abandonment of the natural. If the longing to get ‘back to nature’ is fuelled by the characterisation of nature as ‘real’, The Tempest subverts the desire by highlighting the dramatic quality of its presentation of nature. In order to achieve this, the storm in the first scene must be as ‘real’ as possible, for only then is the theatricality of the human apprehension of nature exposed.