So today's lecture is on Tempest. And as you know, I've been in the habit of beginning lectures by placing the play chronologically as a prelude to discussing it. One of the things I want to show in this lecture is that the presumed chronological position of The Tempest is absolutely inseparable from critical discussion about the play. So it's it's it is itself an interpretive act.
What we say about where the tempest fits in Shakespeare's career, the idea that The Tempest is Shakespeare's last play. That's an assumption I want to challenge a little bit during the course of this lecture. But let's start with it as an assumption. The idea that The Tempest is Shakespeare's last play has been entirely intertwined with it, with views of the play as a poetic summation of Shakespeare's career and more particularly as a self-portrait.
The portrait of the artist as an old man, the old man saying farewell to the stage. So the question I want this lecture to focus on and the way I want to try and approach some of the themes and the critical reception of this play is the question, is Prospero. Shakespeare is Prospero. Shakespeare. So let's start by reviewing the play together. A storm causes a shipwreck and noblemen are washed up on an island. We discover that the storm has been magicked up by Prospero.
The former Duke of Milan and a magician who had been exiled to the island 12 years previously by his brother Antonio, who was deposed him. Prospero is accompanied on the island by his daughter Miranda and two unwilling servants. Ariel, a moody spirit, and Caliban, a reviled, embittered creature. The shipwrecked King Alonzo believes his son Ferdinand is drowned. But in fact, he's on another part of the island and is brought by Prospero into contact with Miranda. The couple duley fall in love.
Two servants from the ship Tranquilo and Stefano fall into a drunken conspiracy with Caliban and plot to overthrow Prospero. Two nobles from the ship. Sebastian and Antonio Prospero's brother plot to kill Alonzo Aeriel is watching over these plots and prevents them coming to fruition. Prospero conjures a marriage mask for Ferdinand Miranda. He punishes the conspirators with various magic tricks and eventually prompted by Ariel.
He decides to forgive rather than take revenge on his brother Antonio Prospero varas to give up his magic and to return to his dupe them in Milan, freeing Ariel as his final act on the island and asking for freedom by the audience. For the audience to give him his freedom. In conclusion, on the face of it then it might be slightly difficult to see why Prospero would be Shakespeare, or to imagine an allegory in which this reading would work.
What's the island? Who would Caliban be? Who is Antonio? It's like all the dark lady, rival, poet, beautiful boy stuff in the sonnets. The idea that the sonnets somehow have reference outside themselves Real-Life people who can be identified and give us the key to open the poetry. I think that's a mad idea because it's based on a premise that must be unsustainable. It's the mistaken assumption that what Shakespeare is writing is autobiography. That's the same premise.
The premise that the plays and poems are autobiographical that lies behind the fantasies of those who think Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. If you've seen Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous, you'll know that the main argumentative procedure for the case for Oxfords authorship of the plays in that film is biographical. He, like Hamlet, stabbed somebody mistakenly behind the Arris.
He knows and dislike somebody with a hunchback cops off with Queen Elizabeth and so writes a kind of romantic tragedy. So there's an obvious kind of biographical links are made between the person who writes and the writing they do, and that those biographical links may be there. But to suggest that that's a clue about authorship is a mistake. The kind of writing Shakespeare or Marlowe or Johnson or Middleton or Sidney or Spencer or even the Earl of Oxford is doing during this period.
People do not write autobiography. We are not in a period where the mind of the author, the inner workings of the author is seemed to be the most interesting thing that they can write about. That comes in a much, much later literary fashion through romanticism into the confessional poetry. And so one of the 20th century. I don't think it's a generic is recognisable as a genre in this period.
But nevertheless, the idea that The Tempest serves as an allegory for Shakespeare as a playwright does have a long, critical history. When John Dryden and William Davenant restoration playwrights who were ransacking Shakespeare's plays for productions for the newly opened playhouses in the mid 17th century, when they rewrote The Tempest as the Enchanted Island, they identified a substantial parallel between the playwright and the protagonist.
In one phrase from the play's prologue and the phrase is Shakespeare's magic. They talk about Shakespeare's magic and how that sort of combines both Prospero and Shakespeare. So let's see how this connexion between the magic in the play and the magic of the theatre or in the theatre might fit together were thrown immediately at the start of The Tempest into the scene of The Tempest tossed ship. It's the only scene in the play which doesn't take place on the island.
And it's a scene which is complete with Mariners', a good deal of technical jargon and most importantly, the aristocratic passengers who are completely bewildered. Their usual status has been completely levelled by these elemental force. What can these roars for the name of King Cross the boats and what can these roar? As for the name of King, the roar as being the waves? We think or at least we think we're supposed to think that we're in the presence of a real storm.
There's nothing in the play at the beginning to suggest that this is not real by the conventions of the theatre. I think that's quite an important element of the opening scenes, are that for me, productions of the play which show this scene taking place in a ship, in a bottle or under the direction of Prospero right from the start. I think they missed the point because I think what we're supposed to think at the beginning is this is a real storm.
Then we pan back and we see that that's not what we thought, isn't it? Isn't what we thought. The next scene proves that the apparent realism was not so. We've been deceived by a theatrical illusion. The storm was magic done by Prospero. It was under his control all along. The passengers were never in any danger. All was being managed. Stage managed. We might think from the island as part of a plan not yet revealed to us.
It's a very clear metaphor for the play itself. This play any play events happen controlled by the playwright in order to further a yet unknown plot. We in the theatre believe events that are actually illusory. They're just a matter of a few props and a believable script, but they have no real substance. The sailors, Prospero reassures Maranda, won't even have their clothes whetted by the storm. They are actors pretending to sway and tumble on the deck of an imaginary stage ship.
Throughout The Tempest, Prospero describes his magic as my art. Further than developing the analogy between magic and the act of writing or creation. So Prospero uses Magic to make things happen. Just as an author does. Just as an author uses writing. He moves the shipwrecked Italians around his island stage in order to create pleasing dialogues and meaningful encounters. Just as an author handles his or her characters like an author, Prospero controls the present and the past of the characters.
It's he, for example, who tells the story of his brother's usurpation. He who tells the story of their exile. He who tells of Ariel's imprisonment in a tree. Many other details of previous events. And none of these have independent corroboration. So he's telling us about the past.
It says if Prospero is inventing all the other characters and fleshing out their past lives to develop the force of his creation, I think again about a kind of writer or even a method actor thinking about how did we get to this point in. Peter Greenaway is weirdly creative film based on this play, a film called Prospero's Books. Greenaway Literals is this power by Prospero, by having him speak literally every character's lines.
They're all like ventriloquist dummies without any words of their own. It's an extreme but revealing depiction of the extent of Prospero's authorial control. And when Prospero acknowledges the theatricality of his own magic as presented in the wading mask in Act four, he does so in terms which are famously redolent of the theatre. You'll recognise this quotation. Our revels now are ended. These are actors. As I foretold, you were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.
And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud cap towers, the globe, gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself yé all which it inherit shall dissolve. And like this insubstantial pageant faded leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep. When in 1740, in an important step in Shakespeare's canonisation as national poet, a Life-Size statue of him was erected in Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.
It's still there if you want to go and look at it. These associations of Shakespeare and Prospero received concrete or perhaps rather marble form. The statue depicts the dramatist leaning his elbow on a pile of books and pointing to a scroll on which are written a variant of those valedictory lines in The Tempest.
The cloud cap towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself yé all which it inherit shall dissolve and like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave, not a rack behind. The text here on this statue in Westminster Abbey serves as an epitaph for the poet and their original speaker in the play, Prospero becomes merely a transparent mask for Shakespeare himself. Firmly attached them to this prominent myth of Shakespeare and Prospero.
It's the question of the play's chronology, although it does come at the end of Shakespeare's active theatrical work in London. There is no definitive external evidence to confirm that The Tempest written unperformed in 16 ten eleven is Shakespeare's final play. No definitive external evidence to confirm that. We can't guarantee its place. That's to say amid other late plays from this period, The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline, either of these could be after The Tempest.
It is precisely because we want the play's closing movement to read as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage that we place The Tempest at the end of Shakespeare's career. Then we use that position to affirm that the play must dramatise Shakespeare's own feelings. So we say it's at the end of his career because it fits the narrative we want and then we say because it's at the end of his career. This is what it must be about. It's a circularity of argument we're going to see again this morning.
What we do know is that Shakespeare works on two noble kinsmen and all is true, or Henry the Eighth and the Lost Cardini go play based on Don Quixote with John Fletcher after The Tempest. So we know Shakespeare keeps working after The Tempest. The Tempest is certainly therefore not his last. Writing for the stage, even if it were his last solo play. And we don't even know that.
But it has been felt to be particularly appropriate that Prospero's epilogue figures his own freedom from the play in terms of leaving the theatre. Although, as you'll know from reading the other plays which have epilogues by Shakespeare or by other people in this period, it's fairly conventional for epilogues to be spoken from a subject position, which is not really that of the character, but more that of the actor.
What the epilogue does is to dissolve the illusion and remind us that we are in a theatre and that what we have to do now is clap. Let's hear that play epilogue, though, from The Tempest to see why these associations have been activated. So this is an interesting, short, slightly incantatory lines. The Rhythm of POCs epilogue in Midsummer Night's Dream. We might think this is still a kind of magic key sort of syntax and a much sort of magic kind of rhetoric.
It's not. It's not. It's not iambic pentameter. Now my charms are all thrown on what strength? I have my own, which is most faint now. Tis crew. I must be here confined by you or sent to Naples. Let me not since I have my Duplin God and pardon the deceiver dwell in this bear island by your spell. But release me from your bands with the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours. My sails must fail, or else my project fails. Which was to please. Now I want spirits to enforce art to enchant.
My ending is despair unless I be relieved by prayer which pierces so that it assault's mercy itself and frees all faults as you from crimes would pass and be. Let your indulgence set me free. So the Lexus here released despair, prayers, faults, indulgence, connects farewell with liberation, but also perhaps implicitly, with death. Ruth Nivo in a stimulating book on the late plays called Shakespeare's Other Language.
Ruth Nivo, Shakespeare's other language, acknowledges that the play has two generic movements which are exemplified in this final speech. Niveau asks, What is the nature of this momentum in the play towards death? Every third thought shall be my grave. One of Prospero's lines. Every third thought shall be my grave. What is the nature of this movement? Sorry.
What is the nature of this momentum in the play towards death? Synchronic with its movement towards and fulfilment of a rejoicing beyond common joy. So she says, it's moving the pace. Moving both towards death. The death of Prospero. And towards the end of my marriage, conclusion's comic conclusions in the marriage of Ferdinando Miranda. We can see a clearer version, perhaps, of this interpretation in W.H. Auden as poetic meditation on The Tempest.
A series of poems called The Sea and the Mirror, which are all done in the voice of different characters in in Shakespeare's play. The poem Prospero to Ariel sees the protagonist at the end of the play. Addressing his newly freed spirit to this is prosperous. Ariel, stay with me, Ariel, while I pack with your first free act.
Delight my leaving share my resigning thoughts of you as you have served my revelling wishes, then brave spirit ages to you of song and daring and to me briefly Milan then earth in all things have turned out better than I once expected or ever deserved. I am glad that I did not recover my kingdom till I do not want it. I am glad that Miranda no longer pays me any attention. I am glad I have freed you. So at last I can really believe I shall die for under your influence.
Death is inconceivable. So in these readings and others like them, Prospero's farewell is not only Shakespeare's farewell to the theatre, but in some sense his dying breath will bracket that he doesn't die for another five years against this fruitfully poetic cluster of associations. It may seem a little prosaic to counter the Shakespeare's last performed words were almost certainly not Prospero's epilogue,
but rather Theseus is somewhat un sonorous. Let's go off and bare as like the time which comes at the end of two noble kinsmen. Most scholars think Fletcher wrote the epilogue to that play. So we can say, I hope that chronology and interpretation start to become mutually enforcing a mutually constitutive, the Templars must be Shakespeare's last play because it depicts his own renunciation of the art of theatre in the guise of Prospero.
Because Prospero is Shakespeare, The Tempest must be Shakespeare's last play. We can extend this, perhaps, to notice that all authorial chronologies are, in some sense biographical readings. The Tempest is not the only play to have its meaning determined by an assumed place in Shakespeare's writing career. So I want to talk about how the implications of having The Tempest as a as a late play.
Now, readings of The Tempest as Shakespeare's last play activates various culturally charged associations of lateness, unusually for Shakespeare. There is no major source for this play. We might rather see that his source here, as in the contemporaneous Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and two Noble Kinsman, is his own earlier plays. He has his own source. Certainly The Tempest recaps earlier motifs.
It's a retelling of Hamlet in the context of Midsummer Night's Dream, a revenge quest between brothers in which forgiveness ultimately trumps violence through an encounter with the magical its young lovers recall Shakespeare's comedies. Its makers figure recalls the Patriarchs, Lear and parallelise. Its structure conforming to the unities of time, place and action. Recall's comedy of errors. For some reason, we don't understand. The Tempest is the first play in the collected edition.
We know is the First Folio of sixteen twenty three, and that's its first printed edition. The fact that it's the first play led earlier commentators, not unreasonably, to imagine that it was Shakespeare's first play rather than his last. And it's interesting to look back at that commentary just because it's so revealing. They judged it. Having thought that because it was at the beginning of the book, it must be an early play. They found the play entirely to reinforce that view.
There's a sense that whatever our preconception is, whatever our assumption is, we can make the play work out. So The Tempest is shortlist became a sign of immaturity, someone who can't quite write a full length play rather than as other kinds of arguments would have it, somebody who's able to distil in this very compressed way. At the end of a career. So thinking about how what we expect to find in a play gives us maybe governs what we actually find.
I think it's worth it is worth being aware of. In fact, we could see the whole of the tempest structured as a response and renovation of another play of the early 15 nineties, not one by Shakespeare. And that's Marlowe's play. Dr. Fasters. Francis presents the dark side of Prospero's magical learning, promising desperately to burn his books at the end of that play, just as Prospero. At the end of Shakespeare's anticipate drowning his.
So as in as in a lot of the plays at the end of Shakespeare's career, there is a very definite recourse. Back to the 50 nineties daily, 50 90. OK, so they go back to the beginning of Shakespeare's career in their sources and their and their style and their interests. And one way of reading all these echoes of the 15 nineties of comedy of errors or of early romances or of not fasters when we're reading all those echoes,
is to say that this is a play which is derivative. Shakespeare has run out of steam. One association of cultural or aesthetic lateness is as a decline from earlier achievement or prowess, we might think. Thomas Hardy, Ben Johnson, Alfred Hitchcock, Lady Gaga, Kenneth Branagh, artists who go off rather than on Litten straight. She proposed that in The Tempest chase me with getting bored with his art and he couldn't really be bothered with either the characters or the situation.
And that's a view echoed by Gary Taylor in a newspaper article headlined Shakespeare's Midlife Crisis. Taylor argues that after a period of high commercial popularity in the 15 nineties, Shakespeare's career in the 17th century was in the doldrums. Like many other has Beane's, Taylor continues provocatively. Shakespeare, in his 40s tried to rescue his sinking reputation by recycling his 20s and 30s, according to Taylor.
Then Shakespeare's collaboration's with John Fletcher at the end of his career, become in a revisionist argument, a desperate attempt by a worn out writer to piggyback on a younger one. Rather than as we've tended to see them, the idea of The Apprentice working under the old master's supervision. Taylor's argument is challenging precisely because it's so unexpected, far more prevalent as a response to the idea of a play being late. Is the idea that it's a summation? A high point?
A culmination of wisdom and of humanity? So this is an argument that I write is just get better and better, that their last thing should be their best in this reading. Prospero's own wisdom, which leads him to forgive Antonio rather than punish him and to renounce his magic rather than continue it occupies an ethical high ground that we can associate with Shakespeare himself. Edward Dowden writing in a hugely influential intellectual biography of Shakespeare.
At the end of the 19th century exemplifies this association. This is Dowden. It is not cheap, chiefly because Prospero is a great enchanter now about to break his magic staff to drown his book deeper than ever, Plummet sounded to dismiss his air spirits and to return to the practical service of his dukedom. It is not because of those that we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself.
And this is this is what I think is interesting about doubt, and it is rather because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self mastery, his calm validity of will, his sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, and with these a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world. These are characteristic of Shakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays.
Dowd's argument is beautiful, I think, and beautifully circular, Prospero reminds us of Shakespeare because his character constructs our idea of what Shakespeare must have been like. It's a complete syllogism. One, Prospero is a good guy, too. Shakespeare is a good guy. Three. Therefore, Prospero is Shakespeare. Or we could put those propositions in any order. Really. One, three, two, three, two, one. Any kind of order because the association is is an assertion.
It's not it's not causal. I'm going to come back to the issue in a moment, which is crucial to that syllogism of whether Prospero is a good guy. We'll just park that for a moment. And I want to stick for now with the point about the players supposed position in Shakespeare's career. If The Tempest largely has benefited from assumptions about the aesthetic values of lateness, we think it's late. Therefore, we think it must be good. Therefore, we try hard to make it so.
Other players have been pigeonholed through differently, pigeonholed, I think, through chronological evaluation. As Anthony Dawson pointed out in a nice, provocative essay in a nice collection called Bad Shakespeare, which is also a good title. How many unexpected virtues would suddenly appear if two gentlemen of Verona were proven to date from 15, 97 or 60?
No. Three. He goes on to talk about a play which a play has a critical position and critical estimation is inseparably tied up with the fact that it's thought to be early. So because it's early, you can't expect it to be very good and therefore not really much point in spending much time on it, and therefore it never looks any better. But if it turned out to be later, perhaps we would go back to it and think this is someone who's writing this play after Twelfth Night.
And probably then it would turn out to be much more interesting, even though the play itself would not have changed at all. I think the counterfactual scenario in Dawson's case, about two gentlemen of Verona sardonically reveals that apparently chronological words like early, late or mature carry with them implicit value judgements, and they predetermine our critical response.
If you look, for example, at the Oxford Shakespeare, the Collected Oxford and Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Welles and Taylor or the Norton Shakespeare, which follows that text, that's a collected edition which orders the plays by presumed chronology. When I talk about Richard, the second I was talking about how the First Folio organises the plays, you might remember, and that of Nazism by genre comedies, histories and tragedies.
And we saw in that lecture how in particular the history play section has been ordered in its historical sequence rather than anything to do with the order in which Shakespeare wrote them. So that's one kind of organising principle. The Oxford joke, but has another one, which is really rather like Dowden, to try and make a sort of intellectual biography of Shakespeare by putting the plays in order of composition.
This has does have the advantage of challenging readers used to the generic divisions of the First Folio, and it does give some unexpected and fruitful juxtapositions. If you look at the complete Oxford edition table of Content Contents and look at just look at two plays which are next to each other, that can often be quite an unexpected but productive way of trying to cut Shakespeare up and think about how his work develops.
But these are all interpretations which ultimately privilege and implicitly biographical reading, because the chronology that we're interested in, the connexion that the plays have is only really the connexion of the author's life. They're written at the same time or next to each other, and therefore their connexion is is primarily biographical.
So so far I've been trying to unpack the ways that critics have wanted to connect The Tempest with Shakespeare and how in doing so they have ossified a network of often unexamined assumptions about the play's chronological position and what that chronology might mean in terms of critical interpretation.
I want in the second part of the lecture to think about the character of Prospero to try and interrogate this question from another angle to see how which might try and meet the popular assertion that Prospero is Shakespeare. I've already said that Shakespeare doesn't write autobiography. The primary impulse behind early modern dramaturge, the primary impulse behind the development of drama as the dominant mode of this period seems to be the influence of rhetorical training.
The technique of arguing we've had this before in the tranquil part term, in a tranquil parlour term, both sides of the question. This is really crucial to humanist education, where both at school and at university. The idea of inhabiting the voices of people on different sides of an argument is. And making that real. Making that convincing, whatever your own views. That's a really important piece of training in Elizabethan schools.
No literature of this period, I think, has the revelation of the artist's own inner feelings that it's legible core. And as I've said before, perhaps a drama, even less so because drama depends on making different voices and different people equally estimable and equally interesting. That might differentiate that from this, a single narrative consciousness like this or traditional realist novel. For example. We might, though, want to modify this.
We might want to acknowledge that in this play, perhaps uniquely, or you might think of some. You must think of some other examples. Hamlet, maybe Shakespeare's interest is only really in the main character. The only character in The Tempest that has any real effort bestowed on it. I think probably is Prospero. There are a gallery of two dimensional functional figures flanking him. We've talked about different kinds of characterisation earlier on in these lectures.
Tempest is quite a good example of how lots of flat in any and Faustus tub's or two dimensional characters people this stage for Virgin under Miranda, for example, have little of the energy or youthful verve we see in earlier romantic couples. Antonio has nothing like books of antagonistic energy that we've seen in villains or antagonists in in earlier plays. Perhaps we should understand it then.
Like its prototype, Dr. Fasters as another version of that late mediaeval morality play technique Psycho McKeough, the psycho Makhija. That technique of showing the interior of the character through exterior arising elements into different actors on the stage. Certainly it's been a fruitful theory to see Caliban and Ariel as parts of Prospero that he attempts to keep in cheque.
Caliban, repeatedly associated with the Earth, with carrying fuel, with uncontrolled appetites for food and particularly for sex. And Ariel associated with the air, dashing about like Tinkerbell to enact his master's commands and prompting him to the higher spiritual and ethical values of forgiveness. These seem to be psychic functions which map so clearly onto Freudian ideas about the ID, ego and superego as the locations of instinct, the reality, principle and conscience, respectively.
So the ID, ego and superego as a kind of version of Caliban, Prospero and Ariel that the map so clearly that it's tempting to think that Shakespeare must have read Freud's beyond the pleasure principle. Of course, the reality is the other way around. But together, this composite Prospero, Ariel Caliban speak almost half the play's lines. If, though there are certainly analogies between Prospero and the dramatist, these need not be autobiographical analogies between Prospero and Shakespeare.
So I think there are roles. There are ways in which Prospero has sort of theatrical associations or mathematical associations. But they needn't be solely with Shakespeare. Prospero's role in writing the script of his revenge against his enemies picks up a long association in the revenge tragedy genre. The Tempest is a late version. Interesting. I think it really interesting the a late version of revenge tragedy hit because of a long association in that genre between the Avenger and the Artist.
That association has its clearest iteration right at the beginning of Elizabethan revenge, tragedy in kids, Spanish tragedy, where you might remember that Hiran M.O. enact his revenge through a play he has written and that's presented before the Spanish court. So it's a structural and thematic topics of revenge, tragedy, the genre The Tempest works to read, right, that there is something there is an association of that theatricality and artistry in the character of the revenge.
So saying that Prospero's role in the play is akin to that of a dramatist does not mean he is a self portrayed. But it does allow us perhaps to link him with other directive figures elsewhere in the canon. It's striking that these figures, these people who direct action in the plays, tend to be negative ones.
He Argo, the arch plotter of Othello, of whom Haslet Haslet described him as an amateur of tragedy in real life and quite an extended the actual image about the Argo, an amateur of tragedy in real life. We might add the Duke who manipulates events in the guise of a frier in measure for Measure Pauliina, the keeper of Secrets in the Winter's Tale. Helena, who writes her own romantic comedy script with some decidedly unconvinced actors in all's well that ends well.
These all tend to be ambivalent figures. I think within their plays, we might also want to see the self reflexivity of the tempest alongside that of, say, Hamlet or A Midsummer Night's Dream. These are all plays which perform inset plays, which occasion commentary on the nature of theatre and the difficulties of drawing the lines clearly between theatre and reality.
Outside of Shakespeare's plays, and perhaps it's in these these kinds of comparisons that we can best break the hold of implicitly biographical readings, we might want to compare the theatricality of Prospero's magic with that of the Trickster's in Johnsen's The Alchemist. So to associate the magic in the temblors with theatre need not inevitably plays Prospero and Shakespeare together.
So we've seen that the Association of Prospero with Shakespeare requires a reading of Prospero's character that is ultimately positive, Downton's syllogistic logic rests on an interpretation of Prospero's grave harmony, self mastery, Carme validity of will, sensitivity to Tarong, unfaltering justice, as Poppy tells us a good deal about late 19th century ideas of patriarchal authority.
But more modern critics and their directors have seen a rather different Prospero irascible, tyrannical, subjecting Caliban to slavery and Ferdinand Caliburn double to unnecessary physical hardship as part of a thoroughgoing ambivalence towards Miranda's marriage. Prospero is entirely preoccupied with Miranda's chastity, in part for plot reasons, because her main function is to be a token to secure his own successful return to Milan.
Her marriage buys off her new father in law, who was formerly a supporter of Antonio. Prospero's antagonism towards Ferdinand is in part a ruse to bring the couple together. Prospero is trying to play the part of the traditional comic blocking figure, the father like Jesus in Merchant of Venice. Sorry, McMinns Midsummer Night's Dream for Shylock in Merchant of Venice or my darkly broadband tale in Othello. Those father figures who oppose the marriage and thereby perversely sort of cement it.
They make the couple and the audience invest more in their relationship. And in the end, the blocking figures have to they have to step back. So Prospero needs Miranda to be chased because he he needs her to be a token in his political rehabilitate meditation. And he needs to oppose her marriage because he's being a sort of comic blocking figure. But for both of those, I think his behaviour is in excess of that generic point.
This is what he says to Ferdinand. If now does break her virgin, not before all sanctimonious ceremonies may with full and holy right ministered. No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall to make this contract grow. But Baron hate sour. I disdain and discord shall be strew the union of your bed. We talked last week about Latin at unusual Latin words at times of strain and kind of emotional stress in Antony's speech, remember.
And I think sanctimonious. Their sanctimonious is just about got its two meanings, one meaning holy and reverent, and one meaning pretending to be wholly and reverent at this time. But it's an unusual word for Shakespeare to use and quite a quite a new word. The marriage of daughters, though, is a source of sorrow and loss more widely in the play.
The ill fated sea voyage, which brought the nobleman close enough to Prospero's island for him to capture them in the storm, was undertaken for the marriage of Alonzo's daughter, Clarabelle, married to a Tunisian prince, part then of the play's undercurrent of anxious interest in international and particularly colonial politics, which are going to move on to talk about. So one way of seeing Prospero is actually as a distinctly unlikeable, manipulative, manipulative control freak out.
One scene two in which he's introduced gives us a good example of this behaviour, because Shakespeare has set himself the task of writing a play where real time and story time are equivalent. So the action of the play takes the two and a half or three hours that the play itself takes.
It's an extreme version of Aristotle's prescribed unity of time. So because of this decision, he has the structural problem of how to convey the previous part of the story mount to look at the Winter's Tale for a completely different way of how you deal with a story which spans two generations. What Shakespeare does in The Tempest is true is to tell it. Tell us what happened in the past through an extended series of narrations about that history. And that's what formed the long seen act.
One scene to these narrations are punctuated by Miranda's apparent disregard and eventually her falling asleep, albeit by magical intervention. But these seem like nervous tics in the narrative, which seemed to me to betray the fear that this scene is actually quite boring, heavy with diagnosis. The narrative term for telling not showing my misses are showing says dialectically.
Very heavy, huge amount of material has got to be got through. And there's there's an unease about how the play is actually managing that. But part of the purpose of the scene, I think, is to establish Prospero as a tyrant physically and psychologically. And also to collapse the distinction between his own supposedly benign scholarly magic and the maligned feminised magic of Caliban mother, Taliban's mother is the Witch Seeker Act. And we never see her in the play.
But she's an important recollection and kind of compass point in this early scene. Prospero charges Ariel with forgetting how she treated him. You can see one of the ways the plot is clunky at this point. Prospero says to have you forgot the file, which secour? And Ariel says no. But Prospero has as a yes, you have because he has to tell us, because we've never heard of her.
He charges area with remembering cigarettes is cruelties to him, Ariel imprisoning him in a pine tree and reminds Ariel that he Prospero released him. He acknowledges that he released him into another kind of servitude or servitude that Ariel is grumbling about all the way through the play. And he keeps him he keeps Ariel obedient to him against the threat of being rehme, prisoned.
This time in a stronger tree, an oak. The ostensible purpose of this exchange, which is to establish the difference between Prospero and or acts collapses because actually they become the same thing. Prospero uses the same threats multiplied that cigarettes has done.
He becomes the same kind of figure. It's part of it's a small part of a different and more compromised presentation of Prospero, which cannot participate in Darden's positive construction of his presumed presumed associations with Shakespeare. Or to put it another way. If this Prospero is Shakespeare, we wouldn't like Shakespeare. We might not like Shakespeare. Isn't too awful a prospect, really.
No. Elizabethans Katherine Duncan Jones reminds us a nice revisionist biography of Shakespeare called Ungentle Shakespeare. No, Elizabethans were likeable in the sense of being modern, tolerant, hygienic, liberal people. Edward Bond's 1970s Play Bingo dramatises a negative version of the ageing playwright retired to Stratford, a useful corrective to more idealising biographical speculations.
But the point is, I think that the Association of Prospero with Shakespeare has tended actually to obscure or misrepresent the ways Prospero's characterised in the play. And it's in this aspect that autobiographical readings of The Tempest have been eclipsed by colonial ones. More recent readings of The Tempest have been less interested in Prospero as playwright, specific or not, and more interested in him as colonial overlord. This is a Prospero who is less Shakespeare than slave master.
Since at least the 19th century, the late 19th century, when the scholar Sidney Lee discussed how far knowledge of the new world had travelled to early modern England, The Tempest has been connected with stories of exploration and more distantly with the early colonisation of the Americas. I said before that there's no major source for the play. But two minor sources we have discovered both connect the play with exploration.
Montaigne's essay on cannibals is one of the ways that a new kind of intellectual scepticism uses the discovery of the new world and the tales that come back to reflect on or a kind of relativist view of human human nature. I guess the Montaigne's essay on cannibals, as translated by Florio being in the 17th century, provides almost verbatim Gonzalo's account of the ideal Commonwealth. At the beginning of Act two, the name Caliban may actually have been intended as an anagram of cannibal,
then a generic term for a rich Aboriginal peoples. The second source is a letter about a shipwreck in the Bermudas written by William Strait. Gee, this seems to provided some of the details of the early scenes. This reading of The Tempest, as in some sense a parable of early colonial expansion, has gained ground in the 20th century, particularly because of some significant post-colonial rewriting.
And something about the tempest, which has made it more, I think, than any other play of Shakespeare's, the one that has been rewritten and reworked and responded to. It's it's sort of presented itself almost as one part of a dialogue, which needs to be which to which I reply needs to be given. So the colonial reading of the play has gained ground politically because of some significant post-colonial rewriting.
Amongst them, the Martinique poet MSH Rs and Tempest from 1969, which retells the play really flagging up the interest in language, domination and defeat. When the French Madagascan psychoanalyst Octave Manin his book, which was actually called In French Psychology, the LA Colony's ASIL. You can see what that means. When that was translated into English in nineteen fifty six, it had a new title, Prospero and Caliban.
We might sum up the shift in criticism by pointing to the difference between the second edition of the play in 1954 and the third in nineteen ninety nine. Frank Kermode introduces The Tempest in the second in the Ardern two edition briskly. It is as well to be clear that there is nothing in the tempest fundamental to its structure of ideas which could not have existed had America remained undiscovered.
So I retargeted have come out as well, to be clear that there is nothing in The Tempest is fundamental to its structure of ideas which could not have existed had America remained undiscovered. So for commode, this is a really rather romantic 54. That is not important at all. If we look at Virginia Mason Vaughn and Alden Tyvon, who are editing the 3rd edition of the series in 1999, just come out in a new updated edition. This is what they say.
The extensive and varied discourses of colonialism are deeply embedded in the languages in sorry, in the drama's language and events. I read again this I messed up. The extensive and varied discourses of colonialism are deeply embedded in the drama's language and events such that they say the play is a theatrical microcosm of the imperial paradigm. A theatrical microcosm of the imperial paradigm. So over 40 years, 45 years, the view of the play and what's important to it is completely changed.
It's one good example of why you should try and read the most up to date editions you can find. A similar shift in interpretive priorities has taken place in the theatre after the director, Jonathan Miller's production of the play in 1970. It has been hard to recover a sympathetic Prospero unmarked by colonial guilt.
Reviewers described that landmark production, Jonathan Miller's production in 1970 as giving us a Prospero who was a solemn, touchy, neurotic, the victim of a power complex who was arrogated to himself the godlike power of the instinctive colonist. By the end, wrote Michael Billington, the cycle of colonialism is complete. Ariel, the sophisticated African picks up Prospero's discarded wond clearly prepared himself to take on the role of bullying overlord.
Recent Prospero's, that's to say, have tended to be so extremely unpleasant that any association with Shakespeare would reflect extremely badly on the playwright himself. So I've been trying to unpick why the association between Prospero and Shakespeare has been such a feature of critical and particularly biographical discourse on the plan, to use that to think about how we use biography more generally and perhaps a rather hidden in the way we think about Shakespeare's plays in their chronology.
And then I've tried to think about some different methodologies to try and test the interpretive validity in. Some of those have rested on different views of Prospero's characterisation and how they have changed over the 20th century. Next week is my final lecture in this series, remember all ten previous lectures, so finally last year are available as podcasts. But next week for the last lecture, I'm gonna be talking about the first part of Henry the set.
Henry the fourth. No, not Henry the sixth. First part of Henry the fourth. John Henry the sixth. Have to wait till next year. So the first part of Henry the Fourth and the focus of the lecture, I think is going to be why is Falstaff fat? Why is Falstaff that? So I hope I'll see some of you then.