The Tempest

Revision Sheet

The Tempest is the only of Shakespeare’s plays whose action takes the same amount of time to unfold as the play does to watch (unlike Antony and Cleopatra, for example, whose action takes place over many months).

Genre

Romance permits the admixture of the mythical and the quotidian, and tend to be temporally and spatially non-specific, like fairy-tales. There are only four plays by Shakespeare in this generic category: The Tempest; The Winter’s Tale; Pericles,Prince of Tyre; and Cymbeline. Romance is a mixed-mode genre, and can include elements of comedy and tragedy. There is no death in Romance, however, but there is always some kind of reconciliation, often reconciliations within the family.

Absolute Monarchy

Absolute, or absolutist, monarchy was a political ideology favored by King James I. Absolutism states that the King is God’s lieutenant on earth and as such is infallible, just, and morally unimpeachable. To complement his proximity to God, the absolutist monarch was held to possess quasi-divine qualities, such as the ability to ‘see’ his subjects and watch over them, the ability to control his kingdom through surveillance, the power of life and death over those subjects and the magnificence and power necessary to orchestrate the most awe-inspiring displays of majesty.

Prospero is undoubtedly a fictionalized and symbolic representation of absolute monarchy. On his island he sees all and commands all. Just as King James would have had a network of spies, informers, diplomats and magistrates informing him of affairs in and outside his kingdom, so Prospero employs Ariel, a spirit of the air, as his eyes and ears. Prospero enjoys total control of his island, and, unlike any other character in a Shakespeare play, knows as much of the plot and other character’s actions as the audience do. However, he is prone to oversight, forgetting the fermentation and execution of Caliban’s plot against him.

Magic

Prospero’s ‘art’ is an extension of his monarchical power. Magic here is understood differently to the malevolent witchcraft of Macbeth. Prospero’s magic is the result of an education and understanding so comprehensive and complete that goes beyond a mere knowledge of meteorology, natural science, physics etc., to become the ability to affect those forces. This type of magic is traditionally male.

The New World and Utopia

Gonzalo’s utopian fantasy (2.1), in which labor, monarchy, marriage, and hierarchy are abolished, is typical of the relationship many Europeans had with the New World. Utopianism, imagining perfect societies or perfect communities, is as old as literature. Plato’s Republic is an early, and extremely influential, example of the genre. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516, meaning ‘no place’) was a popular work that described an island visited by a traveler in which the inhabitants lived in perfect equity and many of the hardships and inequalities of English society had been dispatched. As the English began to exploit the North American coast, the territory took on an imaginative life of its own. It was strange and unknown, full of possibilities and dangers, a geography of potential.

In 1609, the Virginia Company, founded in London with the sole purpose of exploiting the Virginia colony, sent a fleet across the Atlantic bearing four hundred new colonists. During a hurricane, a tempest, the vessel bearing the Governor was lost, and driven to the island of Bermuda. The passengers all arrived safely ashore and began to reorganize themselves socially, questioning whether the governor had any jurisdiction over this unrecognized island.

Caliban: Caliban is a near anagram of ‘cannibal’. Cannibals, the ‘anthropophagi’ of renaissance traveler’s tales, as well as other semi-mythical and monstrous beings, were believed to inhabit the territories beyond the world known to Europeans. Caliban, the son of the witch Sycorax, initial inhabitant of the island, represents a seventeenth-century view of indigenous people: monstrous, resentful, subservient yet unable to submit to authority, worshipping strange pagan gods, a sinister and destructive sexual presence. Caliban is also a depiction of the corruption of indigenous cultures through European contact. That Caliban has ‘learnt to curse’ from Prospero suggests the negative and distorting effect Prospero’s dominance has had.

An ‘Anthropophagus’ (left ) and ‘Sciapod’, creatures believed to inhabit the new world.

Court Masque

Prospero celebrates the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda with ‘some vanity of mine art’. The vanity is a court masque, a royal performance on a grand scale, performed at great expense and with all the innovation and ingenuity court architects, choreographers and musicians could bring to the spectacle. Court masques were performed once only and usually staged on special occasions such as holidays, Christmas, or the celebration of a wedding. Court masque was a panegyric spectacle, intended to praise the king and his court and reaffirm his centrality to the state. As the image of an absolutist monarch, Prospero is naturally using the court masque form as further evidence of his supremacy and as another prop in his repertoire of power.