Behind the Arras

The Tempest is the first play in the Folio (collected dramatic works) of 1623, but perhaps the last that Shakespeare wrote entirely on his own (Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen are probably later, but also probably written in collaboration with John Fletcher). It has thus been very often treated as Shakespeare’s farewell performance—a valediction that its central character, Prospero, will signal by breaking the staff and drowning the book that are the instruments of his magical power. The play does look backward in some important ways. It draws its structural principles from classical drama: five acts, a relatively small cast of characters, a strongly integrated action completed in a single place on a single day, centered on the actions of a noble protagonist and involving supernatural forces. Its central figure is near the end of his life, not the beginning; much of his own speech and that of his one-time antagonist, now his prisoner, Alonso, is retrospective, and includes celebrated musings about the nature of image-making in general and dramatic writing in particular, from the perspective of an experienced practitioner.

Much about the play looks ahead, however. It incorporates features of the two hottest trends in Jacobean theater: tragi-comedy (grief and separation at the actual or apparent death of an important character giving way to comic reunions and reconciliations and joy) and the masque (a hybrid form, extensively and expensively patronized by the royal family, in which rudimentary stories conveying clear-cut political and moral messages are filled out by singing, dancing, and slapstick comedy, with elaborate costumes and props). The mechanism that turns it from death toward life is the love-story of two youngsters who are as fresh and lively as Romeo and Juliet, if less fully developed. It incorporates utopian images of a political order in which the firmly established social hierarchy that had characterized European life for centuries, and which was indeed in the process of breaking down, would be replaced by something much more egalitarian. Over against this, the play refracts extensions of English power that would entail major changes in the country’s political makeup—the early steps, following the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England, toward unification of the two countries under one crown and parliament, consolidation of the recently reaffirmed control of England over Ireland, the first British experiments with overseas colonies in North America and elsewhere. Increased contact between Britons and the indigenous peoples of East Asia, Africa, and the New World, light skins and dark, seems to explain elements in the treatment of Caliban, a theme that has dominated scholarly and critical approaches to the play in recent years. Shakespeare had worked with these forms and issues in three earlier works also termed romances by modern critics—Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale—but The Tempest takes them up with a concentration and economy that is both brilliant and highly demanding; it has an apparent clarity and simplicity that turn out to be full of ambiguity and complexity, and that pose severe challenges to actors, directors, designers, and audiences.

David Evett
Scholar in Residence
The Actors' Shakespeare Project