In his mid-forties Shakespeare did a remarkable thing. Between 1600 and 1606 he had written, as well as other plays, the four greatest Tragedies in the English language. These plays are full of violence, blackness and cries of despair. To my mind they are not only pagan and existentialist, but at times come close to utter nihilism.

Then, only a few years later, he writes what are essentially his last plays—four ‘Romances’; plays that begin with some great crime or act of evil, but halfway through they turn around, thanks to some act of mercy, forgiveness or reconciliation, and become about hope, optimism and regeneration.

Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest are full of music, magic and theatricality, yet they remain among Shakespeare’s least appreciated works . . . Why?

For a start, their form and context are unfamiliar to us. They freely mix drama, comedy, philosophy, morality, song, dance and outrageous coincidence. How seriously are we meant to take them? How do we, as an audience, reconcile farce and spirituality?

We have to realise that they represent something of a vogue or shift in popular taste in the early seventeenth century and that this in turn was influenced by theatre moving indoors—away from the rough and tumble of the Globe to the more refined atmosphere of the Blackfriars, where the price of admission could be twelve times as much. The plays could be performed by candlelight and the theatre was able to accommodate quite elaborate stage effects, such as ‘Jove descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle. He throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees’, in Act V, Scene 5 of Cymbeline. Dumb shows accompanied by music were popular and much employed in Pericles, while in The Tempest an elaborate banquet is brought on by magical spirits but disappears in a crash of thunder when Ariel, dressed as a harpy, claps his wings. The use of spectacle, masque and music seems to have appealed to King James and his courtiers, who often played roles in the elaborate court masques concocted by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones.

The Romances range freely over so many of the themes that occupy Shakespeare throughout his career: shipwrecks, pirates, families torn apart and reunited. We find these in one of his earliest plays, The Comedy of Errors, and again in Twelfth Night. They are given a proper workout in the four Romances along with the father/daughter conflicts and reconciliations we find throughout his work, culminating in King Lear. Either all these themes have a personal significance for him or he simply found them fertile ground for creating drama.

But given the above elements (adventure, music, song, dance, magic, comedy and the supernatural), you’d expect these plays to have a very wide appeal today, especially for younger audiences besotted with Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Harry Potter, sci-fi and teenage love sagas. Why aren’t they on the school syllabus? They might provide an easier entry point to Shakespeare than Othello, Antony and Cleopatra or King Lear.

The answer may be that the Romances are not seen often enough in the theatre. But when they are staged, they usually prove very popular with audiences. Both times I staged Pericles the audience response was tremendous. Academics and teachers need to see the plays afresh; and maybe they need to be shown the way by theatre practitioners reimagining the plays in productions that reveal their beauty and entertainment value.

Perhaps some theatre companies neglect the Romances because they don’t seem ‘relevant’. I get fed up when people start arguing about Shakespeare’s ‘relevance’, with the implied suggestion that things are of interest only if they are about us. Is Mozart ‘relevant’? Is a sunrise? Maybe instead of continually trying to claw everything back to our own tiny circle we should take a look outside it and reach out to the unfamiliar, the unknown, the exotic; try to experience the universe through the eyes of people in other times, in other places.

Directors have worked overtime on the Histories and Tragedies to show how ‘relevant’ they are—dressing everybody as Nazis, the KGB, the Taliban or whatever. This is not relevance, it’s just topicality and it can prove very reductive. True and lasting relevance runs deeper. Looking at the Romances, what could be more relevant than mercy, love, forgiveness and reconciliation of family conflicts? The Romances offer positive messages to audiences of all ages: messages of hope, of optimism, of wisdom gained through experience and strength of character in the face of suffering. A white magic is at work in these plays that makes them uplifting in quite a profound way.

As for their theatricality, they are a gift for directors, designers, musicians and choreographers. But not many actors have made their names playing Pericles, Giacomo, Imogen or even Prospero. They are all good roles but are subservient to the overall story. They are not roles as seductive as Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Falstaff, Cleopatra or Rosalind—all recognised as vehicles for the star performer.

But vogues are just that—they come and go according to the zeitgeist. Sometimes the age craves to experience the Tragedies, sometimes the Histories seem to talk to us more urgently and sometimes the Comedies creep under our skin with their bittersweet concept of life. Shakespeare was well aware of the vagaries of fashion and wrote accordingly. No doubt the great Romances will have their day again.

Pericles

I have a great affection for Pericles and have directed it twice for the Bell Shakespeare Company (1994 and 2009). In most cases, directing a play, living with it for the best part of a year, does breed an affection—it becomes like an adopted child and, like a proud parent, you are determined to bring out the best in it and show it off to an admiring audience.

The thing that clinches Pericles for me is the penultimate scene, the recognition by Pericles of his long-lost daughter Marina, whom he had presumed dead. To me this is one of the finest scenes Shakespeare ever wrote. It is masterful in its tension and excruciating delay of the eventual recognition. It can be absolutely heartbreaking when well played. But in directing it, I discovered something rare for me in Shakespeare. Usually the tempo and pitch of playing is firmly determined by the structure of the verse (the closet scene in Hamlet, say, or the banquet scene in Macbeth), but in the final two scenes of Pericles, maximum effect is gained by unspoken subtext à la Chekhov or long pregnant pauses worthy of Pinter. If you simply play the text through glibly you will earn unwanted laughs because the coincidences, discoveries and accidents border on the outrageous. We discovered early on in the season of Pericles (as in the statue scene of The Winter’s Tale) that the final scenes demand complete emotional commitment and hair-trigger timing on the part of the entire cast. I don’t see this as a weakness in the writing, just an affirmation of Shakespeare’s skill as a dramatist. He knew the power of the unspoken word, the long silence, the facial and physical reactions to circumstances that are the proper domain of the theatre. Shostakovich said that to understand movement you have to understand stillness; to understand music you have to understand silence. And that is the key to playing much of Shakespeare.

When Heminges and Condell published the First Folio in 1623 they didn’t include Pericles. This was perhaps because it was not entirely Shakespeare’s work; or, more likely, because another company had procured the rights to it. It is generally accepted that Pericles was written in 1608 and it is usually lumped in with the other three Romances because of stylistic and thematic similarities. But it could have been a much earlier play which Shakespeare reworked, or maybe someone else wrote part of it. The most widely accepted contender is a minor scribbler named George Wilkins who wrote to supplement his earnings as a brothel-keeper. He was a neighbour in Cripplegate when Shakespeare lodged in Silver Street in the large house owned by the Mountjoys, so it’s entirely possible that over breakfast, or over a pint, Wilkins and Shakespeare discussed the idea of Pericles. Wilkins may even have written the first two acts, then given up, either because he ran out of puff or else went to prison—he was frequently in trouble for beating up the young prostitutes in his employ.

Shakespeare was no stranger to collaboration. We tend to forget what a play-factory the Elizabethan theatre was. Audiences demanded at least one new play a week, and just as today most TV ‘soaps’ and sitcoms are written by a committee, so in seventeenth-century London bits of plays were farmed out to different writers. Some excelled in comic scenes, some in high-flown rhetoric, and some in lyrics for songs. Such collaborations are the stuff of modern Broadway.

Shakespeare began his career as an apprentice actor and patcher-up of old plays, but once he had established a reputation he jealously guarded the bulk of his plays that were all his own work, as did all his fellow playwrights and competitors. (In his last years, when he had made his pile and lived in semi-retirement, he was not averse to pitching in and collaborating with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen and the play of Sir Thomas More, which contains the only extant page of his handwriting.)

So why would he bother collaborating on Pericles, especially with such a desperado as George Wilkins? Probably because he saw a quid in it (it went on to be one of the most popular plays of its day). And there’s no denying the presence of themes that seemed to preoccupy him: families divided by disaster, by shipwreck, but in the end reunited; the maiden daughter redeeming her father, forgiving his tyranny or neglect and thus rescuing him from despair; the jealous father relinquishing his daughter to a young lover, thus ensuring happiness and regeneration. These themes recur throughout the four Romances but they have echoes in one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, The Comedy of Errors. In that play we have the tragi-farcical situation of parents with two sets of identical twins being split apart in a shipwreck. Each parent with one of each set of twins is washed in a different direction. The twins with the mother, Emilia, are seized by pirates, so she takes refuge in a convent in Ephesus. The twins who are saved with their father, Aegeon, eventually travel to seek out their kin. In the last scene the whole family meets up in Ephesus—father, mother and both sets of twins. Emilia had become the Abbess of the convent, but now rejoins her husband.

Compare this plot with the story of Pericles, who loses his wife Thaisa at sea just after she has given birth to a daughter, Marina. When she grows to adolescence, Marina is kidnapped by pirates who sell her into a brothel. After months of mourning, Pericles is reunited with both wife and daughter in Ephesus, where Thaisa has become a priestess of Diana.

The choice of Ephesus as the location for both denouements is an interesting one. Ephesus was one of the great cult centres of the ancient world and the temple of Diana one of its holiest places. When Saint Paul arrived there he was determined to root out all memories of this great pagan cult and substitute a Christian icon, namely Mary, the other virgin goddess. Angels picked up Mary’s house in Nazareth and carried it through the skies to Ephesus, where it stands today. (An order of nuns looks after it and will happily show you around and sell you a set of rosary beads.) So in The Comedy of Errors, Ephesus is regarded with fear and suspicion by the new arrivals, in an echo of Saint Paul’s paranoia. In Pericles, on the other hand, Shakespeare pays homage to the pagan status of Ephesus. Diana is a benign protectress and the city’s leading citizen is Cerimon, a wise healer, a white magician. Pagan Ephesus is a holy place.

Even if Shakespeare did take over Pericles only for the last three acts, he must surely have done some revision of the first two. The language and character of Gower, the chorus, is consistent from the beginning and the play does hang together coherently despite its picaresque nature. The dramatic shift is in the quality of the verse. When Pericles steps onto the deck of the storm-tossed ship at the top of Act III and declaims:

Thou God of this great vast, rebuke these surges,

Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast

Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,

Having called them from the deep! O, still

Thy deaf’ning dreadful thunders; gently quench

Thy nimble sulph’rous flashes!

you know Shakespeare has arrived.

Although my two productions of Pericles were fifteen years apart, they were not fundamentally different. Both times I attempted an epic, poetic presentation eschewing any attempt at naturalism, except in the brothel scenes which are very different in style to the rest of the play. In my first version, the costume designer, Edie Kurzer, and I drew our inspiration from the Arabian Nights. This is, after all, a fairytale, a romance, and it takes in epic voyages like those of Sinbad. Andrew Raymond’s set consisted of ropes and cloths which could be manipulated to suggest sails, pavilions or the interior of the brothel. The basic concept was that of a ship at sea and the sailors’ costumes were adapted to suggest each different port of call. This effect was enhanced by devising a different body language and gestural repertoire for each location. The music, performed live by David King and Jonathon Maher, further contrasted the different cultures: Tyre, Antioch, Pentapolis, Tarsus, Ephesus and Mytelene. Physicality expressed in mime, dance and martial arts underpinned the production.

The same principles held true for my 2009 production, but this time the design aesthetic was governed by our association with the percussion group TaikOz. I had been looking for some time to collaborate with another performing company such as a dance or music group in order to revitalise our company and widen our potential audience. TaikOz and Pericles looked like a very good fit: this group was young, vigorous and attractive. Their Japanese drumming was thrilling and they could sing, dance and display martial arts skills as well. Their aesthetic was firmly Japanese and not just cosmetic. They study in Japan, tour there and have developed their appreciation of Japanese music and culture over a long period. I reckoned it would be no use referencing a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean visual imagery given TaikOz’s involvement—we had to go along with their established image and disciplines—and I thought it would be a great chance for our actors to make an acquaintance with a whole new physical repertoire in dance, combat and mime.

Julie Lynch’s set and costume designs were both exquisite and exotic, befitting the largest-scale show Bell Shakespeare had yet attempted. Her brief, as well as mine to the company, was to reference Japanese costume, dance, movement, etc., without in any way trying to play Japanese: we were not doing The Mikado. We had to evolve our own performance language and physical world which was specific to Pericles and take the audience, along with the hero, on a voyage of spiritual trial and fulfilment. The experiment was a very satisfying one and the collaboration with TaikOz both joyous and instructive. It paid off by attracting record audience numbers, especially in Melbourne, which has sometimes proved a difficult market for us to crack.

The role of Pericles is a challenging one as he is essentially reactive rather than proactive. Things happen to Pericles, but he does little to initiate action. He also has to age considerably, progressing from a naive and heroic young prince to a shrunken middle-aged man rendered comatose by grief.

It is essential that the production retains the simplicity of a biblical parable or folktale. There is psychological truth in the characters but they don’t need to be probed too deeply: most of them are types rather than complex individuals. Played honestly and without pretension, Pericles can be a deeply satisfying piece of theatre:

To glad your ears and please your eyes . . .

And lords and ladies in their lives

Have read it for restoratives.

Cymbeline

Of the four Romances, the one with which I am least familiar is Cymbeline. I have seen one student production and one as part of a BBC TV series. Cymbeline was one of their better efforts. The play has some tricky things to bring off: Imogen’s lament over the headless body of her supposed husband is a challenge to any actress. On the other hand, there are scenes and speeches any actor would regard as a gift. Consider the following—Posthumus’s rage at his wife’s supposed adultery. Try spitting it out and note how it erupts like white-hot lava, the thoughts almost tumbling over each other. To feel its full effect, hit the nouns and verbs hard and submit to the hammer blows of the rhythm:

. . . could I find out

The woman’s part in me! For there’s no motion

That tends to vice in man but I affirm

It is the woman’s part. Be it lying, note it,

The woman’s; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;

Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers: revenges, hers;

Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,

Nice longing, slanders, mutability,

All faults that man may name, nay, that hell knows

Why, hers, in part or all, but rather all—

For even to vice

They are not constant, but are changing still

One vice of but a minute old for one

Not half so old as that. I’ll write against them,

Detest them, curse them. Yet ’tis greater skill

In a true hate to pray they have their will:

The very devils cannot plague them better.

Cymbeline also contains one of Shakespeare’s loveliest songs, ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’, and the sinister scene in which the wily Giacomo betrays the fair Imogen. He has wagered with her husband Posthumus that he can bed her. (When will these husbands learn to stop betting on their wives?)

Concealed in a trunk he is smuggled into her bedroom and when she is asleep he sidles out and takes note of all the salient details of the room (including the mole on her breast). Like some ghastly incubus he pollutes the chamber and, after stealing the bracelet from her arm as proof of his ‘conquest’, he creeps back into the trunk with the comment, ‘Though this is a heavenly angel, hell is here.’

Even in the broad daylight of a rehearsal room the scene is unutterably creepy.

The Winter’s Tale

It is required you do awake your faith.

To my mind The Winter’s Tale is the most beautiful of the Romances—the most moving, uplifting and enlightened. Maybe The Tempest packs a bigger punch with an audience; it has the great Prospero arias, it’s got Caliban, Ariel and a magical desert isle. And maybe audiences find the first half of The Winter’s Tale too gruelling, what with Leontes’ insane jealous rants, the torment of Hermione and the death of little Mamillius. It’s pretty heavy going and then suddenly, bingo! We’re into the song and dance of happy Bohemia with its lovers and clowns. The contrast could not be more stark. Some audiences might find this confusing or even unsatisfying: just what sort of play are they supposed to be watching?

Well, actually, they are watching a ‘tale’, a winter’s story told around the fire, full of drama, excitement, pathos, fun, jokes and a miraculously happy ending. The audience is invited to shuffle off the cares and world-weariness of adulthood and slip back into childhood, to surrender to the magic of make-believe, to commit to that marvellous act of suspending disbelief and let the story take them where it will.

One of the great joys of parenthood is reading or telling stories to infants, to watch their eyes grow round with the wonder of it and let their understandings expand to admit the unknown. There is a similar thrill in directing and performing a play like The Winter’s Tale. You as the director or actor submit to it totally, you believe it, and through that act you hope to transport the audience through the sheer power of storytelling. The four most powerful words in the English language are ‘Once upon a time . . .’

As Pericles says to Marina:

. . . I will believe thee

And make my senses credit thy relation

To points that seem impossible.

I have seen a couple of fine performances of The Winter’s Tale and a few not so fine where the first half tipped into melodrama and the bucolic second half was overworked and coarsened by ribaldry. I directed the play with NIDA students in the mid 1970s and played Leontes when Adam Cook directed the play for Bell Shakespeare in 1997. Leontes is a monster of a role. In the very first scene of the play he launches into a crazy monologue, convincing himself that his wife, Hermione, is having an affair with his best friend, Polixenes. They are as innocent as Leontes is obviously psychotic. He works himself into a state of murderous paranoia, snatching his son Mamillius from his mother’s grasp and throwing her (pregnant as she is) into prison. He sends an assassin to kill Polixenes, but the plot fails. When Hermione gives birth to a daughter, Leontes condemns it to be abandoned in the wilderness. Leontes is devastated when Apollo’s oracle reveals that his wife and Polixenes are innocent. He is told that his wife is dead, his daughter lost and his son dead of grief. Thus begins Leontes’ long penance and healing process.

I gave a copy of The Winter’s Tale to Dr Tom Stanley, a Macquarie Street psychiatrist, who found it very intriguing. ‘Leontes is certainly paranoid,’ he told me. ‘Shakespeare got it just right, especially when he speaks of tremor cordis, an attack of acute anxiety that heralds paranoid delusion. He’s probably schizophrenic as well. He has an unshakeable delusion. He sighs, he is brooding, obsessed, always pacing. He’s always watching, vigilant, listening. Always questioning. He is always cross-examining people.’ And all this is in the text. You don’t have to invent it. Amazing that through sheer observation, Shakespeare conveyed it so well.

Armed with this information I sought out back-up from other sources. Dr Francis Macnab of the Cairnmillar Institute concluded that Leontes is a classic paranoid schizophrenic. He suffers irrational rage and subsides within seconds to a subdued submission. He speaks gibberish and is offended or aghast when not understood. A TV documentary called Spinning Out defined paranoia as thinking everything is bugged, that food is poisoned and that people are talking about you. And in the tragic story of her son Jonathan, Tell Me I’m Here, Anne Deveson describes his physical activities, like rocking back and forth, hugging himself and keening, sudden violent mood changes, physical violence and loss of a sense of distance, shouting in people’s faces, talking and giggling to himself, dropping the head to the left as if unbalanced. Many of these observations I was able to incorporate into my performance as Leontes, confident that I was not simply winging it or generalising, and that Shakespeare’s text is very much in accordance with scientific evidence.

First performed at the Globe in 1610, The Winter’s Tale was probably performed indoors at the Blackfriars as well, although much of its humour is tailored for the Bankside audience. A prime example is the famous stage direction ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’. Since the Bear Garden was within a stone’s throw of the Globe, the appearance of a bear on stage would have caused much hilarity; maybe people even thought for a moment that a bear had escaped. It is hard for us nowadays to stomach the intolerable cruelty of bear-baiting. The screams of tortured animals were clearly audible to the Globe audience. It’s that mix of ugliness and beauty, cruelty and refinement that makes the Elizabethans simultaneously fascinating and repellent. It underscores a lot of Shakespeare’s writing and we do ourselves a disservice to play it down. The sight of ancient Antignous chased off stage by a bear is simultaneously horrible and comic. It provides a neat tipping point for the play from grim tragedy to pastoral comedy.

The Winter’s Tale has a lot of crowd-pleasing elements. It is closer to a musical comedy than any other Shakespeare play: Autolycus has six songs (one of them a trio); there is a dance and spectacle as well as much buffoonery involving Autolycus and the two shepherds. The songs are an obvious showcase for the talent of Robert Armin, who became Shakespeare’s chief clown after the departure of Will Kemp. The role of Autolycus tells us a lot about Armin’s clowning skills. As well as the catchy musical routines he demonstrates his cunning in pickpocketing and cony-catching, routines much appreciated by a Bankside audience. Then he gets to impersonate an outrageously foppish courtier who runs rings around the two simple shepherds. Finally, he gets his comeuppance in an hilarious denouement. It’s a great vehicle for a comedian; but that’s just what it is—a vehicle, not a character.

We have a lot of trouble today with Shakespeare clowns; too often they’re just not funny. This is partly because humour dates faster than other kinds of writing: topical references are lost, language, puns and witticisms change their meaning. But the problem goes deeper. Shakespeare wrote his Comedy for particular comedians, playing to their strengths and idiosyncrasies. Take a comedy script today from one comedian and give it to another and watch it fall flat on its face. So much of the comedy comes not from the material but what the comic does with it, through tone of voice, innuendo, facial expression, the lift of an eyebrow. Every good comedian is unique. So my advice to a Shakespeare clown of today is ‘make it your own . . .’ If something’s not working, feel free to cut, translate or put in your own material and topical gags. Don’t take it so far as to dominate the scene or pervert the overall meaning, but always ‘better a wise fool than a foolish wit’.

Armin’s versatility is demonstrated by the fact that he played that wonderfully acidic and melancholic clown Feste in Twelfth Night, Iago in Othello, the gravedigger in Hamlet, Caliban in The Tempest, the foul-mouthed Thersites in Troilus and Cressida and the greatest clown of them all—Lear’s Fool. He combined wit and proverb, satire and philosophy, and studied each role with care. Small and wiry, he was also quite a successful playwright.

The longest role Shakespeare wrote for him was Touchstone in As You Like It, a notoriously difficult role for modern comedians. The ‘Seven Degrees of the Lie’ routine in Act V was written very much with Armin’s talents in mind and has confounded many a clown since.

Critics have tied themselves into knots to elucidate the significance of the name ‘Touchstone’. There is a simple explanation: before becoming an actor, Armin had been apprenticed to a goldsmith. The touchstone was their logo. Most actors and writers had served a trade apprenticeship. Shakespeare may have briefly served an apprenticeship as a glover, following his father’s footsteps (there are a number of very specialised references to gloves and glove-making tools in his plays); Ben Jonson was apprenticed to a bricklayer and John Heminges to a grocer. No doubt parents back then weren’t that different to our own: ‘Alright, you can go off and be an actor, but only after you’ve got a trade first.’

The Tempest

There is a great deal of popular mythology clinging to The Tempest, the two most persistent assertions being that this was Shakespeare’s last play and that it is heavily autobiographical: Prospero, the great magician, is Shakespeare himself, retiring from his magic island (the theatre), breaking his magic staff (his pen), drowning his book (his plays), and bidding farewell to his creative spirit, Ariel. Such a notion is imbued with an attractive sentimentality—but it ain’t necessarily so.

For a start, Shakespeare didn’t entirely give up on theatre after writing The Tempest in 1611. In the following few years he collaborated with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII (or All Is True). He contributed some scenes to Sir Thomas More and worked (again with Fletcher) on the recently rediscovered play Cardenio, based on an episode in Don Quixote. Although he stopped performing and writing for the Globe, he kept up his business interest in the enterprise and kept collecting royalties.

As for the self-portraiture, that’s always a dubious claim to make with Shakespeare. It’s true that great masterpieces, and even lesser works, reveal something about their authors even when they try to bury the evidence. But no one was more successful at concealing himself than Shakespeare. At grammar school he had been well trained in the art of rhetoric and arguing both sides of any question. For every assertion or sentiment voiced by one character, another will provide the antithesis. Which one did Shakespeare believe? One? Both? Neither? It doesn’t matter: he was a playwright, not a pamphleteer, and the ideas expressed had to spring from the characters, not the author. (If only Shaw and Brecht had followed his example!)

It is tempting to draw analogies between Shakespeare and Prospero. For a start there is the father/daughter relationship which so haunts his later plays, nowhere more forcibly than in King Lear, where the spurned virtuous daughter forgives and redeems her father but then is cruelly taken from him. Leontes casts out his baby daughter to die in the wilderness, but as an adolescent maiden she returns to effect the reconciliation of the parents. Pericles, driven to despair by his ill-fortune, is brought back to life by the ministering angel Marina. And Prospero comes to realise that his only salvation will come by forgiving his enemies and giving his beloved Miranda away in marriage. Regeneration is the common theme enacted by these wonderful girls, all of whom are about sixteen years old. Mothers are curiously absent in most of Shakespeare’s plays but feisty daughters (Juliet, Cordelia, Desdemona, Katharina, Hermia) are often in conflict with their fathers, who come to regret their tyranny. How much this reflects Shakespeare’s own relationship with his daughters Susanna and Judith must remain a matter of conjecture, but whether he was drawing on personal experience or simply mining the dramatic potential of father–daughter relationships, they certainly feature heavily in his plays. The challenge he set himself is all the more remarkable in that all these crucial roles were to be played by boy actors. How much easier it would have been to focus on father–son conflicts (these occur too, but not as extensively).

Whether or not he saw himself as a great magician is also open to question. Prospero’s lines can be interpreted as Shakespeare’s claim to theatrical mastery:

. . . I have bedimm’d

The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds

And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault

Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder

Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak

With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory

Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up

The pine and cedar; graves at my command

Have waked their sleepers, oped and let ’em forth

By my so potent art.

He had indeed created tempests, forests, oceans and deserts on an empty stage, and caused the dead to walk and talk again: Julius Caesar, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra . . . And when Prospero decides to lay aside his art, he seems to be making direct references to the theatre:

. . . These our 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-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.

The references are more explicit if ‘globe’ has a capital G, and if by ‘rack’ he meant the scenery racks that stored the painted panels used in pageants.

But elsewhere a self-portrait is not very plausible. Prospero is a scholar, a dreamer who becomes engrossed in his books to the detriment of his efficiency as ruler. Shakespeare shows no such abstraction. He was essentially pragmatic, a man of business and eminently practical. His picture of Prospero is that of the humanist scholar gone wrong: one who is steeped in love of learning but only for its own sake. As a ruler he should apply that knowledge to good governance for the sake of his subjects. But instead, he to his state ‘grew stranger, being transported and rapt in secret studies’. This phrase has a sinister ring, suggesting Prospero may have crossed the line of legitimate study and, like Faustus, begun dabbling in black magic. This obsession leads him into serious errors of judgment—not just neglecting his duties but appointing his easily corrupted younger brother, Antonio, as his deputy. Given such status and responsibility, it’s little wonder that Antonio begins to imagine himself the rightful ruler who has to somehow get rid of his useless older brother. Prospero is full of rage and resentment at his brother’s perfidy, but it’s not hard to see Antonio’s point of view.

The good humanist should also abhor slavery, but that is the only way Prospero knows to control people. He starts out with good intentions but botches it every time. He finds Caliban who, because he is ‘different’, a so-called monster, must be made to conform to Prospero’s image of civilisation. Like a grammar-school pedant, he teaches Caliban his language and ideas of astronomy and natural law. This despite the fact that Caliban already has his own language, a finely tuned sense of natural beauty and musical sounds, the craft of subsistence in a wilderness and an initial trust and obedience. But the colonialist insists that the native be recast in his own image. When Caliban’s natural impulses assert themselves he is cruelly punished, tortured, enslaved and abused. Similarly, Ariel is released from imprisonment by Prospero only to be immediately indentured to a new tyrannical master whose promises of freedom are somewhat rubbery. When Ferdinand refuses to surrender he is immediately disempowered and, like Caliban, enslaved as a beast of burden. Instead of proper nurture Prospero reverts to force, to punishment and magisterial control of his subjects on the island.

This humanist scholar has to learn about forgiveness, tolerance, letting go of jealousy, revenge, resentment and even art when it stands in the way of genuine human intercourse. But it’s a mighty struggle for him, he is so locked in the role of the magus. Almost to the end he is intent on torturing and punishing all his enemies. Ariel, the airy spirit, is employed as his minister of justice; but even Ariel begins to feel compassion for his victims, and this wonderful transforming exchange takes place:

Ariel: . . . Your charm so strongly works ’em

That if you now beheld them your affections

Would become tender.

Prospero: Dost thou think so, Spirit?

Ariel: Mine would sir, were I human.

Prospero: And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling

Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,

One of their kind, that relish all as sharply

Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick

Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury

Do I take part. The rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent

The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel.

I have played Prospero three times (so far). The first time was in Neil Armfield’s production at Belvoir in 1990. I played it for Bell Shakespeare in Jim Sharman’s production of 1997 and again in 2006 in a production by Peter Evans. I do love the role but admit that the first three acts don’t yield much return for the actor. Right at the top of the play you have the longest exposition scene ever written, telling both Caliban and Ariel heaps of stuff they already know and then you tell Miranda your and her life story. Gielgud never liked this scene (Act I, Scene 2) and found it a terrible bore. But you have to remember that it’s all new for the audience and this exposition is meant for them more than Ariel or Caliban. With Miranda it’s a different story, because it’s all new to her too. Because Prospero keeps peppering his exposition with remarks like ‘Dost thou attend me?’, ‘Thou attend’st not!’ and ‘Dost thou hear?’ some Mirandas take this as a clue that she must be drifting off and is bored witless. Nothing could be further from the truth: this is all absolutely riveting stuff—discovering that her father is a duke, that she’s a princess, that they were betrayed, nearly drowned at sea, saved by divine intervention and that their enemies have just now arrived on the island! How could she be bored? She speaks the simple truth when she asserts, ‘Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.’ Prospero’s interjections are markers as to the importance he places on the tale and how essential it is that she follows every twist and turn.

The scene can be as dry as dust unless it is fuelled by passion—and that is all written into the text. Prospero can barely contain his rage, grief and vengefulness as he addresses all three of his auditors. Besides, he is racing the clock. The ship has just been beached, his deadly enemies have disembarked and are on their way. This is no time for Prospero to sit down and indulge in reminiscence. He must not sit down at all. The scene should be played white hot with agitation and urgency—at the same time making sure that the other characters (and the audience) absorb all the information. As well as Prospero’s fury, what drives the scene is the resistance offered by Ariel and Caliban—where there is conflict there is drama.

Nevertheless, that scene is something of a challenge for the actor playing Prospero, and then for the next three acts he just hovers in the background tossing in the odd sage observation. His pay-off doesn’t come till Act IV, but what a pay-off it is! From that turn-around moment when Ariel prompts Prospero to forgive his enemies, a wonderful feeling of blissful release settles over the performance, at least for Prospero. All the rage and tension is gone, he is able to deliver those two magnificent arias and, one by one, bestow love and forgiveness on all. He is able to let go, at last, of his creative ambitions in the figure of Ariel and, perhaps most importantly, admit to himself the dark and destructive side of his nature. Confronting Caliban he says, ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.’ Caliban is the brutish, incestuous part of himself that Prospero hates, fears and tries to suppress. Once admitted, the danger is gone and Caliban can reply, ‘I’ll be wise hereafter and seek for grace.’ I finished every performance of Prospero in a state of euphoria, feeling cleansed and unburdened. It’s a great feeling to let go of jealousy, possessiveness, resentment, vengefulness, ambition, hatred, paranoia, status, control . . . even by proxy!

The Tempest is a fascinating play—so many ways into it, so many levels of understanding and interpretation, such a mix of clowning, magic, satire and social commentary. Shakespeare was, like most of his contemporaries, excited by the discovery of a New World, of uncharted seas, islands and possible civilisations. He devoured Montaigne’s essays about governance and responsibility, especially the one dealing with cannibals—hence ‘Caliban’. Through the homely character of Gonzalo he gently mocks the idea of a utopian existence; he was too much of a realist to believe in utopia. And his survey of English history finds a satirical end point in The Tempest. He’d begun his career with a successful blockbuster about the Wars of the Roses—brothers, fathers, sons all killing each other to obtain possession of the isle of Albion. Now the isle is shrunk to a desert island but people are still plotting to kill for possession of it. What greater parody of the history cycle than the sight of a clown, a drunken butler and a monster swaggering about in robes of state, plotting to kill Prospero and bestowing regal and vice-regal titles on themselves! It’s delicious satire.

Of the three productions I felt most at home in Armfield’s, even though that was my first go at the role. The staging was reassuringly simple—a sandy beach backed by a huge pile of driftwood, the detritus of many wrecks. Alan John’s music was whimsical and ethereal.

I have been fortunate with my Ariels—all three played by women. Gillian Jones was the first—febrile, quirky and tormented. In Jim’s production Paula Arundell played Ariel like a cheeky cherub. The Peter Evans version featured Saskia Smith as a Nordic beauty with a gorgeous voice.

The moment of parting between Prospero and Ariel calls for a directorial decision. Some directors overplay the pathos—others go too far the other way: in an RSC production Simon Russell Beale’s Ariel spat in the face of Alec McCowen’s Prospero. I found the most satisfying interpretation the last time I played it: Prospero bade farewell with great regret. Ariel looked frightened for a moment, unsure of what to do with her newfound liberty, but then seized it ecstatically.