The Tempest first appeared in a performance for King James at Hallowmass, November 1, 1611.1 As played at Whitehall, it was very much an indoor show: a court piece for an audience of royals and invitees by the troupe dubbed, since James’s ascension, the King’s Men. Two years later, they staged the play again, this time to celebrate the wedding of James’s daughter, Elizabeth, to the Elector Palatinate. A court play, and yet not a play of court, for while it was played at Whitehall and, perhaps, composed originally for the Blackfriars Theater, there is no reason it could not have been a Globe play, too (Prospero’s famous mention of the “great Globe” provoking years of speculation).2 And while it offers up all of the spectacles so increasingly beloved of King James’s circle—magic, masque, and majesty—it hovers insecurely as a truly Jacobean play. Ben Jonson, famously, dug deep into its reputation in the Induction to his Bartholomew Fair of 1614, mocking its “rare discourse” and its display. The 1616 text of Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor offers snide asides to storms and monsters and those plays where the “Chorus wafts you o’er the seas.”3
By the time the Tempest would open the First Folio, it had already been a product of such critique and allusion. Thomas Tomkis’s Albumazar of 1615 offers clear echoes, and The Sea Voyage of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger (acted by the King’s Men in 1622) explicitly indebts itself to Shakespeare’s play right from its opening.4 Readers would have come to the play through the scrim of such reception, and they would have come to it, as well, with an elaborate set of stage directions (by far, the most elaborate of any in the Folio). Such directions, now attributed to the scribe Ralph Crane, may recall the specifics of a performance practice but, within the Folio itself, they evoke visions in the reader’s mind.5 For all of our desire to see it as the most transparently autobiographical of Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest comes into print already mediated. For all of our admiration of its formal control, linguistic adventurism, and poignant characterization, it remains an insecure thing, caught between the memories of kingly audience and the fifteen shillings of the Folio’s first buyers.
Those buyers would have opened to a carefully prepared, well-edited, and closely proofread text. They would have come to it after pages of praise of Shakespeare and his actors, injunctions to read him and read again. Some may have recalled Jonson’s criticisms. Some may have seen, by 1623, a story that had spawned many storms onstage. They, and we, may have sought to excavate its earliest appearance. But it remains clear that there remains a gap of time and taste and tension in the years between its first performance and its printing.
There is a gap, too, I will argue, between the idioms of its inhabitants and the tastes of its audience and readers, a gap of years but also sensibilities. It is precisely in that gap that I see its displacement of the lyric, its reliance on old tunes and tropes, its mythic power and its musical allure. Left on his island for nearly two decades, Prospero maintains the old habits of the court. His artistry commands his servant-actors, Ariel and Caliban—the former evoking an idealized boy of the Elizabethan stage, the latter reminiscent of an antic and uncontrolled clown. For all of its allusions to a new world, and for all of its Jacobean literary feel, The Tempest is a play out of joint with its time.6 Nothing is real, nothing is straightforward. Prospero’s masque is not a true, courtly masque. Rather, it is a simulacrum of a masque, one step removed from what Ben Jonson, Robert Campion, and Inigo Jones were staging for James’s court.7 It is as if its audience had landed on an island out of phase with everyday reality, a place trapped in time, run by its own rules. Yes, Miranda grows and Prospero ages. But Ariel and Caliban seem trapped in the amber of its landscape—the one an eternal adolescent, the other an enduring monster. In such a world, the songs are echoes.
I read the Tempest as a play of such displacements. I see its storms as far less meteorological than mythical. I hear its music less as something of its own but of another time. I feel its focus less in the old man who would retire to his dukedom than in the boy who, freed of service, anticipates a life among the bees.
For what catches my eye and ear in Shakespeare’s play is less the instructing Prospero than his attendants, less the magician than the manservant. Here lies the problem of what I call its mythic lyricism: the sense that every voice has been commanded, that artists and their audiences place both their imaginations and their bodies on the line, and that what we see not only in our dreams but in our days may well be only feigned appearances. Throughout the play, characters are moved by forms of artistry, and The Tempest exploits the tension between the creative artist and the patron, between the musician’s ability to move the listener and that listener’s own resistance to that power.
Few courtly poets and musicians had the opportunity to voice their motives as much as John Dowland, and I want to place his narratives of service, travel, skill, and sadness against those embedded in The Tempest. His writings, as I have already suggested, invest in old familiar fears and fables: the need for applause, the storm and shipwreck, and the idea that, at our best, we are like the bees. “As in a hiue of bees al labour alike to lay vp honny opposing them selves against none but fruitless drones; so in the house of learning and fame, all good indeuourers should striue to add somewhat that is good.” These words from his Third Book of Songes and Ayers (1602/1603) ring in the ear to any listener of Dowland’s songs. The bees are everywhere—in love, in service, and in shapely creation—much as they were everywhere in early modern myth and science. They stand for ingenuity and civic achievement. But in Dowland in Ariel, they stand as figures for aesthetic freedom.
Throughout his lyrics, songs, and prefatory prose, Dowland shares with The Tempest a language of artistic service, musical effect, and mythological allusion. He was the lutenist of sleep and sorrow, and for many of his listeners, he could transport them almost out of their earthly bodies. Dreaming, ravished, even (figuratively) liquefied with his lyric prowess, Dowland’s listeners share much with the audiences in The Tempest. Ferdinand and Caliban, Gonzalo and Alonzo, Miranda and the clowns all witness lyric spectacles that release or rescue them. They move between the worlds of sleep and water, dreams and drowning, tiredness and tears.
The Tempest is a play possessed by tensions between power and aesthetics, and while I will find those tensions in the courts of Dowland’s ache, I find it too in Ovid’s dreams. It is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s most Ovidian play, not simply in its borrowing of tropes and speeches but in its overarching metamorphoses.8 As in the other late plays, book 11 of the Metamorphoses haunts its texture, though here it is Ceyx and Alcyone (that great tale of sleep and water) rather than Orpheus or Midas who shadow its motifs.9 With its story of the king and queen separated by sea travel, its naturalistic depiction of the tempest that drowns Ceyx and his shipmates, and its account of Juno sending her messenger, Iris, to the Cave of Sleep, the episode chimes with the plots and ploys of The Tempest. One way of reading Shakespeare’s play is as a comically restorative retelling of this tale. Drowned royalty remain alive, shapes shift in dream and vision, and a messenger of air does bidding to let everybody know that in this island world all has been rounded by a sleep. Iris herself appears in the play, not to wake a sleeping god or pass on news of sorrow, but to lead a celebration of a marriage. The masque-like feel to Ariel’s great show takes on not just a courtly but a truly Ovidian quality, as mythic goddesses and nymphs conjure a new, domestic metamorphosis.
The tale of Ceyx and Alcyone works with the lyricism of John Dowland to create a poetic language of both ravishment and change. Music and poetry, maritime travail and unsettled dream, the lassitude of men and the business of bees, all enable us to place Shakespeare’s contemporary and his creation side by side: two poet-singers, asking if it had been well done, challenging us to find our own souls transformed by the work of divine hands.
Mine is an elegy for Ariel, and I begin with one of the most sensitive of critical encounters with his singing, David Lindley’s opening to Shakespeare and Music. Lindley begins his book by exploring the dramatic possibilities of Ariel’s first song to Ferdinand in act 1, scene 2.10 Ariel (according to the stage directions, “invisible, playing and singing”) performs the exquisite lyric “Come unto these yellow sands,” and Ferdinand wonders from where it came. “I’th air, or th’earth?” Lindley teases out the impact of this scene: its basic, dramatic purpose of moving the narrative along and getting Ferdinand where Prospero wants him to be; its enigmatic textual condition in the First Folio, with the unclear directions and line assignations; and its place in the larger arc of song and performance in the play as a whole, with its temptations to imagine particular “instrumentation or vocal style,” and the challenges to our understanding of “what ideological freight” its verbal codes had carried.
Lindley makes clear that, at this moment in The Tempest, Ariel’s position is as a commissioned servant. “We are accustomed,” he writes,
to the notion that a theatrical character who sings is, in some way or another, giving voice to their own emotions: yet in Shakespearean drama, almost all performed songs are rendered by professionals and servants who do not articulate their own feelings so much as sing to, or on behalf of others. Those who sing directly “for themselves” are generally drunk, mad, in their dotage, or socially subversive.11
We can see Ariel clearly among the first kind here, those whose job it is to perform for an embedded audience within their plays. Feste in Twelfth Night comes to mind, as do Touchstone in As You Like It, the Fool in Lear, and the courtly singers in Henry VIII and Cymbeline. For the latter group, there are, most famously, the Gravedigger in Hamlet, Ophelia, the clownish drunkards of The Tempest, the love-besotted Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, and the fairies and rustics in Midsummer Night’s Dream.
But by the end of The Tempest, things have changed. Ariel stands at the cusp of freedom, Prospero has abjured his magic, and the onetime servant now sings as much for himself as any theatrical character who would give voice to emotion:
Where the bee sucks, there suck I,
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry;
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. (5.1.88–94)
Lindley calls it “an utterly solipsistic song,” a celebration of the spirit’s impending freedom, a song that has an impact on the audience outside the play’s fiction as much as within it. “Why, that’s my dainty Ariel!” Prospero commends him when he finishes. “I shall miss thee.”12
Ariel may well be one of the very few, if any, characters in Shakespeare’s plays that moves from patronized to self-generated performance. He may have been cast for his distinctive skills in voice and instrument. But by the play’s end, he has said farewell to boyish roles and looks forward to living “merrily.” Ariel’s is an actor’s life, and his final words in the play are those of an actor asking for approval: “Was’t well done?” (5.1.240). This is a play that closes with requests for affirmation and approval: for Prospero’s blessing on Ariel’s show, for the audience’s comparable praise and release of Prospero himself, and with the range of characters within the play assembled to forgive, or judge each other. Alonso ends by longing “to hear the story of your life,” making himself a willing audience for what we imagine to be Prospero’s post-island recitation—and, in the process, affirming that he will be a far more attentive and approving one than impatient Miranda had been at the play’s beginning. The meta-theatrics of The Tempest have been bruited for centuries, and in these final moments readers have wished to find Shakespeare himself retiring from the stage.13
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands. (5.1.327–28)
Prospero’s asking for applause recalls, of course, Puck’s epilogue in Midsummer Night’s Dream, “give me your hands, if we be friends,” and at such a moment it is as if this late play has taken us back to the comedy of a decade and a half before—that the presiding aegis of this daydream has called for closure, and the final words are left not to the playful servant but the master, as if we had been bid farewell, in the earlier play, by Oberon.14
This powerful tension between master and servant, played across the arts of lyric, music, and the theater, runs throughout both the plays. But nowhere, I believe, do we see the release of literary servitude as explicitly as in The Tempest. Many still like or want to believe that the play is Prospero’s and that his story, somehow, helps explain Shakespeare’s own enigmatic retreat from the theater in the early 1610s.15 But what if we were to see this play as Ariel’s: to see it not as a fable of retirement but as a fantasy of manumission? Ariel represents poetry patronized. He speaks, almost until his very last, only when spoken to, commanded, or provided with a script. “What shall I do? Say what: what shall I do” (1.2.300). He is the poet striving to emerge from actor’s prompts, the lyricist and singer who has spent a lifetime under courtly care and can now, at the play’s end, intuit an afterlife of freedom.
Throughout The Tempest, that work goes on in a drowsy wetness. People fall asleep and wake. Those drowned appear to live again. From its opening, the storm feels more like a bad dream than a real disaster, and Prospero’s magic moves along the axes of sleeping and drowning, waking up and rescuing. His arts put Miranda to sleep and rouse her when he wants; he wrecks the ship, but lets the nobles find themselves awake with clothes as dry as when they left; fathers and sons are feared drowned, only to be resurrected. There is a sense, throughout the play, that both sleep and water are more than conditions of the body but are realms of art.
I have already limned the contours of this reading. Ovid’s story of Ceyx and Alcyone, especially in Golding’s implicitly theatrical retelling, sets the stage for any tale of shipwreck and return. The terrors of those mythic sailors—“Strike the toppesaile,” “harts and stomachks fayle,” “One weeps: another stands amazed”—come back in The Tempest’s opening words: “A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightening heard.” This stage direction takes the reader to the world of the Ovidian storm. For what Ovid gives us, by way of Golding, is noise: no man could hear the cries of another; there are “ratling ropes,” “crying men and boyes,” “flushing waves and thundering ayre.” One need not have been in the theater to imagine such sounds: “swelling surges,” “Hideous flusshing.” “The Gallye being striken gave as great a sownd,” in Golding’s English, like a battle ram of steel or the roar of a lion. And there is lightning too.
Howbee’t the flasshing lyghtnings oft doo put the same to flyght,
And with theyr glauncing now and then do give a soodeine lyght.
The lightnings setts the waves on fyre. (11.603–5)
“To prayers, to prayers!” cry Shakespeare’s mariners, much as they do in Golding’s Ovid: “To God another makes his vow . . . Doth pray in vayne for help” (11.623–25). “Farewell, my wife and children! Farewell brother.” And again, in Golding: “The thought of this man is uppon / His brother and his parents whom he cleerely hath forgone. / Another calles his house and wyfe and children unto mynd” (11.625–27).
The Tempest seems, at first glance, to begin where the story of Ceyx and Alcyone leaves off. There may have been much at the Blackfriars or Whitehall to evoke such sounds and shocks. But we need not have been there to see all this vividly. This is, first and foremost, a literary storm, a tempest out of poetry and myth.16 Golding had found the English words to make that storm seem vivid to a local audience, and there is a sense throughout The Tempest as we have it in the Folio that we are not so much remembering a play as reading such a tale.
We read this, too, not just in Ovid’s voice, or Golding’s English, but through a woman’s eyes. Queen Alcyone saw Ceyx off, a “chillness” striking to “her very bones,” her face pale, crying, imagining his fate:
To think uppon the sea dooth cause my flesh for feare to quake.
I sawe the broken ribbes of shippes alate uppon the shore.
And oft on Tumbes I reade theyr names whose bodyes long before
The sea had swallowed. Let not fond vayne hope seduce thy mynd,
That Aeolus is thy fathrinlaw who holdes the boystous wynd
In prison, and can calme the seas at pleasure. When the wynds
Are once let looce uppon the sea, no order then them bynds.
Then neyther land hathe priviledge, nor sea exemption fynds
Yea even the clowdes of heaven they vex, and with theyr meeting stout
Enforce the fyre with hideous noyse to brust in flashes out. (11.492–501)
Her husband leaves, and Alcyone lies down in her bed. And to that bed comes Morpheus, now called by Juno, in the shape of the dead Ceyx, “Pale, wan, stark naakt.” She sobs, wakes from her dream, and cries, “By shipwrecke he is perrisht: I have seene him.” She cries until her heart is sore, and “Her sorrow would not suffer her to utter more.”
Alcyone sees Ceyx in her mind and in her dreams, and so, too, does Miranda see the shipwreck:
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel—
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her—
Dashed all to pieces! O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart—poor souls, they perished. (1.2.3–9)
It is as if Shakespeare displaced the vision of the wife on to the girl; as if Miranda saw in her mind’s eye what Alcyone saw and suffered. In Golding’s lines:
. . . the raging sea did rowle about so fast:
And all the heaven with clowds as black as pitch was over cast,
That never nyght was halfe so dark. (11.635–37)
The pieces of the story, like the bits of a shattered boat, wash up on Prospero’s island, a fragment of old Ovid, a story of sea storm and a noble creature lost, now transformed into theater by an old man. “There’s no harm done.”
Or is there? Prospero’s island is a place of constant harm, of brusque injunctions to his spirit servant, of cruel torment to his monster, of insensitive tests of strength and will and patience set upon his child and the visitors. Each character, in his or her own way, suffers under Prospero’s stagy yoke, and one might well ask whether there is always harm done in the making of a play. Golding’s Ovid acutely brings out both the theater and the anguish of these episodes: the drama of the storm and shipwreck, the rhetoric of dying men, and the impersonations of Morpheus himself, stage creature, feigning voice and face.
None other could so conningly expresse mans verrye face,
His gesture and his sound of voyce, and manner of his pace,
Togither with his woonted weede, and woonted phrase of talk. (11.737–39)
Morpheus performs, and the theme of performance runs through Ovid’s tale much as it runs through Shakespeare’s. But so does the terror. For these moments in the Metamorphoses are not just about performing but commanding performance: Juno compels Iris, Iris pleads with Sleep, and Sleep sends Morpheus. The sleeping god is none too happy with his task, and when he shows up in the Queen’s dream, he announces himself:
Most wretched woman, knowest thou thy loving Ceyx now
Or is my face by death disformd? behold mee well, and thow
Shalt know mee. (11.760–62)
Colin Burrow has perceptively seen this speech as “the opening lines of an uneasy actor who is not quite sure that he lives up to the part he is playing.”17 We can equally well see these lines as central to The Tempest, a play brimming with uneasy actors not sure of their master’s, or their audience’s, approval. “Was’t well done?” Ariel’s last words in the play take us back to this image of the artist as an actor, to Morpheus as commanded performer, and to the range of harms done on and off the stage. Prospero’s boy has spent his time anxious about living up to parts in which he has been cast.
But those words take us back to the beginning. After the storm and shipwreck, after the daughter’s nightmare and father’s lesson, Ariel is called, and he appears, not just to praise his master but to tell, again, his myth. When Prospero asks if he has “Performed to the point the tempest that I bade thee,” Ariel responds with his own version of the storm.
I boarded the King’s ship; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement. Sometime I’d divide
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join. Jove’s lightning, the precursors
O’th’ dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary
And sight-outrunning were not; the fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege and make his bold waves tremble,
Yea, his dread trident shake. (1.2.196–206)
This is, by this point, the third version of the play’s beginning: the first enacted, the second dreamt, and now this one remembered and retold. There is as much of Golding’s Ovid in this tale as in the others.
One weeps; another stands amazde . . .
The lightnings setts the waves on fyre. Above the netting skippe
The waves, and with a violent force doo lyght within the ship. (11.622; 625–26)
Ariel retells this scene as a scene of artistic performance. We had already been plunged deep into the sound-world of the story: “A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightening heard.” Everyone is yelling. So is the storm. “A plague upon this howling!” cries the Boatswain. “They are louder than the weather of our office.” Miranda’s dream is one of sight and sound. But it is an internalized response to sense; what matters here is how things “seem” to Miranda, how she herself felt them, how it knocked against her heart. Ariel’s story, however, is one completely visualized. His job is to amaze the eyes. His literary task is to create a language of evocative imagery. His job, in short, is to make something we have barely seen completely visible.
That is the job of art. He shapes his speech not simply to impress his master but also us. For this is clearly a performance, a description of actions to amaze one audience—those on board the ship—and that, in their retelling, must amaze us. “Not a soul,” he says, “but felt a fever of the mad.” That is what theater, poetry, and music must do—to make us feel the fever, to bring us to the brink of drowning and, at the last moment, wash us up all dry on someone else’s shores.
John Dowland and his circle knew this well. Remember Thomas Campion, whose Latin poem on his Orphic skills recalled Lygia walking from the waves and avowed that, when Dowland played, the listener’s limbs fell, minds were stolen, and the soul was liquefied. Liquescit anima. Remember, too, Richard Barnfield’s sonnet in The Passionate Pilgrim, where Dowland’s “heavenly touch . . . doth ravish human sense.” Much like Campion, liquefied in rapture, Barnfield finds his watery response to music:
And I in deep delight am chiefly drowned
When as himself to singing he betakes.
Dowland’s had been a world of liquid metamorphoses. His lyrics conjure up a world of tears. The verb “dissolve” holds special power for him. Things change, and that constellation of what he would sing as “teares and sighes and groanes” had powerfully informed the late Elizabethan mood.
These three words shape, too, Shakespeare’s early forays into anguish. Throughout his first poems and first plays, they mark their laments. Queen Margaret, in Henry VI, Part 2, could well be quoting Dowland when she eulogizes the Duke of Gloucester: “And for myself, foe as he was to me, / Might liquid tears or heart-offending groans / Or blood-consuming sighs recall his life” (3.2.59–61, emphases mine). The three words concatenate in The Rape of Lucrece: “If ever man were moved with woman moans, / Be moved with my tears, my sighs, my groans”; and again, “When sighs and groans and tears may grace the fashion / Of her disgrace . . .” (638–39; 1371–72). The words show up, in sequence, in Richard II, in Twelfth Night, and in Two Gentlemen of Verona. They are the currency of love’s abandonment: the markers, for a late Elizabethan audience, of that Dowlandian melancholy that had become the emotive fashion of the age.
What happens when these idioms show up in later plays? What happens when the fashion for the black bile has passed and tears and groans and sighs no longer signal love or loss? These words have become old idioms. They are displaced on to reporting rather than to feeling. And The Tempest marks them clearly. There, the word “groans” shows up not to distinguish the loss of love or pangs of desire, but, instead, to note the cries of Ariel himself, pent in the pine tree before his release (“thou didst vent thy groans,” 1.2.280). As Prospero reminds him, “Thy groans / Did make wolves howl” (1.2.287–88). So, too, the “sighs” in the play reserve themselves for Ariel, who in response to Prospero affirms that everyone has safely survived the tempest and the King’s son was left “cooling the air with sighs” (1.2.222). And the word “tears” appears but once in the play, when at the end, Ariel describes old Gonzalo crying. Here, however, the tears are not the marker of emotion but, instead, the occasion for Ariel’s own poetic skill, a prompt for simile rather than sense:
Here, it is Ariel who is the voice and vehicle for tears and sighs and groans. But they are things reported or remembered, now. The Tempest takes these old tropes of lyric dolor and distances them, displaces them from action or emotive life and places them securely in the past of narrative or memory. An older language resurfaces to mark generational distance. The allusive wording of the lyric distances the play’s fiction from its feeling. Ariel is the servant but he is, as well, the messenger, and in his mouth the language of the old songs becomes strangely distant, displaced, different.
For Dowland, that was the language of sleep and water, and The Tempest transforms the allusions, images, and metaphors of his world into narrative. What is a set of tropes in the songs is a set of actions in the play. Look at act 2, when Ariel puts all but Sebastian and Antonio asleep. The waking courtiers debate whether they are indeed awake and dry. “What? Art thou waking?” Sebastian asks, thinking the language of his compeer “sleepy.”
This is a strange repose, to be asleep
With eyes wide open. (2.1.211–12)
And when Antonio avows that he is “more serious than my custom,” Sebastian seems to dare him to say something moving or convincing:
Seb: Well? I am standing water.
Ant: I’ll teach you how to flow.
Seb: Do so—to ebb
Hereditary sloth instructs me. (2.1.218–21)
This strange and allusive interchange makes human action into liquid, turning metaphor into matter. “Ebbing men,” Antonio replies, “indeed, / Most often do so near the bottom run” (2.1.224–25). The conversation then soon turns to a man who may well be at the bottom, Ferdinand, the King’s son: “’Tis as impossible that he’s undrowned / As he that sleeps here swims” (2.1.235–36).
Sleep and water are the venues for the lyrical imagination, but here they are the sites of politics. Only with their companions asleep and with Ferdinand thought drowned can Antonio and Sebastian conspire to unseat the King, and only then must Ariel return to wake Gonzalo and the others and prevent the plot.
He sings in Gonzalo’s ear
While you here do snoring lie,
Open-eyed conspiracy
His time doth take.
If of life you keep a care,
Shake off slumber, and beware.
Awake, Awake! (2.1.298–303)
To wake the sleeping was the charge of Juno’s messenger, sent to the Cave of Sleep so that Alcyone could learn her husband’s end. In Ovid, it is an episode of ease and suggestion: Iris appeals to the god of Sleep quietly and directly. For Chaucer, whose Book of the Duchess rewrote this scene into burlesque, Juno’s messenger (now a man) screams at the god and blows a trumpet in his ear:
This messager com fleynge faste
And cried, “O how! Awake anoon!”
Hit was for noght; there herde hym non.
“Awake!” quod he, “whoo ys lyth there?”
And blew his horn right in here eere,
And cried, “Awaketh!” wonder hye. (178–83)
Much has been made of Chaucer’s transformation of this episode into domestic comedy, and much, too, has been made of the repeated calls to “Awake” in this poem: from these shouts, to the ghostly image of Ceyx telling Alcyone to “Awake” and realize that he is dead, to the Chaucerian narrator’s own awakening at the poem’s close.18 It may be a rube’s Ovid, but it may, too, be Shakespeare’s, as the tone of Chaucer’s episode inflects the tone of this scene in The Tempest. Its messenger of air calls upon an authority to awake, but now it is for purposes of restoring political, rather than domestic or amorous, alignment. Impersonators seek their vengeance, and if Antonio and Sebastian would be false kings in their dreams, it is left to Gonzalo to bring them back to earth. But still they lie. Gonzalo wakens with a start, and then the others, and Alonzo turns to his would-be usurpers and asks:
Why, how now, ho! Awake? Why are you drawn?
Wherefore this ghastly looking? (2.1.306–7)
Here, it is not the dead who come back, “ghastly” in their guise, but the all-too-living, and Alonzo’s vision of his courtiers echoes that of Alcyone, woken by the image of her husband’s speaking corpse (in Golding’s English):
Both with her crying so,
And flayghted with the image of her husbands gastly spryght,
She started up;
The co-conspirators make up a story: there was a noise, something terrible, did you hear it? Alonzo heard nothing, Gonzalo but a humming. The point of this interchange is that it takes the imagistic building blocks of Ovid’s tale, filtered through Chaucer, and rebuilds them into political threat. The tale of Ceyx and Alcyone bubbles beneath the surface of The Tempest, from its opening storm through its anxieties about the drowned ruler, to its reflections on the metamorphic power of desire. Here, at this moment of usurper’s threat, shards of the story return to make what once was love into suspicion.
Dowland, as well, had called upon his love to rise and come:
Awake, sweet love, thou art return’d;
My heart, which long in absence mourn’d,
Lives now in perfect joy . . . (First Booke, 19)
Think of this lyric as a tale of Ovidian restoration, of love sleeping once but now returned whole, where the mourning heart now lives again. Sleep and waking, morning and life. Such are the axes of this aching lyric, a lyric made richer by awareness of its mythic resonances.
Raised from the depths, love will return. All of these images surround the language of The Tempest: the lyricality of love, the mythic sense of loss, the language of the lover/king impersonated in a dream.
But Ariel and his beached noblemen are not alone. Caliban, too, can feel the ravishment of sound. His is a poetry of earlier, Elizabethan lyric beauty now transmuted into memories—as if he had awoken from a dream of benign queenship to find himself entrapped under an unforgiving monarch. He is a monster stuck remembering a world of how things used to be:
And then I loved thee
And showed thee all the qualities o’th’isle,
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile— (1.2.336–38)
Like an untutored Orpheus, Caliban guards the memory of his aesthetic shore. The wood he bears, however, is not the enchanted and enchanting lyre of a hero but the firewood of a servant. Unlike Orpheus or Dowland, Caliban cannot still the animals or move the rocks. Nature besets him, and he offers up a catalogue of bad creation out to get him. Prospero’s spirits
set upon me,
Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me,
And after bite me; then like hedgehogs, which
Lie tumbling in my barefoot way . . .
sometime am I
All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness. (2.2.8–14)
It was such an adder that had bitten unsuspecting Eurydice, and such a snake that, long after Orpheus was dead and dismembered, finally ate his head that had washed up on its shore. Nothing is liquid, evanescent, rapturous for Caliban. Read against Orpheus and Dowland, he is resolutely anti-metamorphic, as if nothing could transform him into air or liquid beauty.
Except when he remembers. There was a time before Prospero and, he asserts to his visiting clowns, there will be a time “when Prospero is destroyed.” Then they may have, in Stephano’s words, “my music for nothing.” And so, to tutor his new audience, Caliban gives them a tour of the island’s sounds:
Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again. (3.2.133–41)
How like an old Elizabethan he appears. His words—sounds, sweet airs, delight—draw on the lexicon of affect from the 1590s, a lexicon exemplified in Richard Barnfield’s verse:
Thou lov’st to hear the sweet melodious sound
That Phoebus’ lute (the queen of music) makes.
Sweet was a word that took off in that lyric era; it shows up countless times in lyrics, panegyrics, introductions, plays. Sweet airs were everywhere. Henry Peacham would recall the musician Luca Marenzino (admired by Dowland, dead in 1599) as excelling in “delicious Aire and Sweet Inuention.” Dowland’s own lyrics would hearken back to lines of Philip Sidney, “O sweet woods the delight of soliarinesse,” while the poet Patrick Hannay, writing in the early 1620s, would look back to Marlowe to inflect his lines, “Or nimbly on a Lute light notes out finde, / Which with sweet airs my charming voice did grace.”19 Even in these Jacobean writings, sweet airs are a memory of something gone before.
Caliban’s is the ravishment of old sounds. Even the instruments have an archaic feel to them. His “twangling instruments” recall the English of Thomas Phaer’s 1558 translation of the Aeneid, when Aeneas comes upon the long-dead Orpheus in the underworld, still playing his lyre.20
And Orpheus among them stands, as priest in trayling gowne
And twancling makes them tune, with notes of musike seuerall seuen,
And now with Yuery quill, now strings he strikes with fingers euen.
This is the background music of the dead, a moment out of an old-fashioned Virgil brought back to the ears of these strange, mock-Virgilian travelers. And, if we had any doubt that Phaer’s diction was, by Shakespeare’s time, old-fashioned, if not arch, we should recall that moment in the early Taming of the Shrew, when Hortensio stands dazed after he has been banged on the head with a lute:
And there I stood amazed for a while
As on a pillory, looking through the lute,
While she did call me “rascal fiddler”
And “twangling Jack.” (2.1.148–51)
Hortensio becomes a fool’s Orpheus, and Caliban, struck by the music by his ears, hears “twangling” instruments as one might well see stars. Caliban’s poetry is poetry; but it is old verse, reminiscent of a time before Prospero, of a time of sweet airs that give delight—words of a gone court and a lost lute. Much as Campion would give himself to Dowland’s slumber, so Caliban would succumb to sleep anew and dream again.
So many of us, now, want Caliban to be the unimpeded artist of this colony, want him to be the earliest anticipation of an imperial future, that we miss his echoes of the past. Douglas Brewster has suggested that the monster’s antics would recall the jumps and starts of Will Kempe, that star clown who had left Shakespeare’s Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 and who was still, two decades later, remembered for his “hey” and “hey de gay” in his songs. Caliban’s own exultant “heigh day” may well smell of the clown, but he gives off the aura of the lyricist as well.21
But he cannot sustain that aura for long. Instead of liquefying soul through flowing tears of love, he nearly drowns in the imported liquor of his shipwrecked drunkards. Instead of fingers making music out of strings, his fingers grub the earth: “And with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts.” And when the drunkards come upon that gift of splendid clothing, and Caliban begs them to leave off, he imagines a strange and anti-metamorphic consequence. They will, he fears, “all be turned to barnacles, or to apes / With foreheads villainous low” (4.1.249–50). But Stephano is unmoved: “Monster, lay to your fingers” (4.1.251). Lay to your fingers. An old command for music now bids the monster steal. A phrase that could have conjured beauty from a string now presses itself into parody. Caliban—earthbound, fingers in the dirt—emerges as a kind of anti-Ariel, a servant always on the verge of rebellion, a listener to music that moves him, but that he cannot reproduce.
And yet, like Ariel, like Prospero, Miranda, and practically every character in the play, he remembers things and tells their story. For, as we read on, we see the story repeating itself. The storm is witnessed and retold; Prospero’s exile and his daughter’s rearing are rehearsed; Ariel’s imprisonment, Caliban’s freedom, and the aristocrat’s experiences all become subjects for review and reminiscence. As we read, The Tempest more and more becomes a play attempting to retell its pasts.
I think that this is what the stage directions do. Increasingly, as the play progresses, they elaborate on what one may have seen before. Increasingly, they resonate with the words of the characters themselves. Ariel’s own account of his storm-show, Prospero’s commands, Caliban’s tour of the island’s soundscape—the characters speak more and more like stage directions, and it seems clear that, in the Folio text of the Tempest, a kind of dialogue emerges between the actor’s lines and those of the directions. Ralph Crane’s elaborate directives may have the feel of description or evocation. But what they increasingly have the feel of is that of a character within the play. They pick up, sensitively and with clear awareness, its Ovidianism of the play, its resonances to contemporary musical performance, and its sense of character at work.
Without them, we would not know that Ariel sings in Gonzalo’s ear. Without them, we would not know that Ariel enters, on two occasions, “playing”—bearing what must be an instrument of song, a lute, and with that instrument emerging as the icon of a lyric self.22 These are vital stage directions, as they signal Ariel’s association with the courtly and the mythic: Orpheus, of course, but also all those boys who played the singers in the early plays. Those boys were playing girls, and girls and their lutes show up over and over again: from The Taming of the Shrew, through Henry IV, through Titus Andronicus. Henry VIII will have Katherine call for her servant-girl to play, and in that wonderfully challenging and unique stage direction from the First Quarto of Hamlet, Ophelia will enter, “playing on a Lute.”23 I stress this sense of Ariel the player, brought out in the stage directions—a boy actor well versed in the arts of song, an image of the courtly and controlled on this rare island.24
The play’s stage directions offer not just information; they present interpretation, judgment, and affect. They fill with adjectives and adverbs. At the banquet in act 3, scene 3, there is “solemn and strange music,” “strange shapes,” and “gentle actions.” Ariel makes them disappear with a “quaint device.” After he vanishes “in thunder,” there is “soft music.” These are not just directions for performance. They are distillations of the key words of the play. The word “strange” appears nineteen times in The Tempest, more than in any other play (“strangely” appears four times, and “strangeness” twice).25 Everybody seems to use it, describing everything from fate and fortune, to the sounds and sights of the island, to Caliban’s shape, to inner feelings and outer appearances. Prospero, broken off in concentration from his masque in act 4, starts and speaks, and his conjured creatures vanish “to a strange hollow.” And at the play’s end, Alonzo—a spectator to all this magic, much like us—repeats over and over: things move “From strange to stranger,” “This as strange a maze as e’er men trod,” “This is a strange thing as e’er I looked on,” and, in his last words of the play, “I long / To hear the story of your life, which must / Take the ear strangely.”
Everything in The Tempest takes the ear strangely. We see and hear displacements of old songs and sorrows. The language of Orphic lutenists hovers around the play like a sea mist. We have a storm, but it is far more an Ovidian than an Atlantic one. Thunder is everywhere, but it is mostly in the stage directions and the mind. And, as Alonzo stares at all this strangeness, he and Shakespeare’s audience would well have been reminded of Dowland’s own strangeness, played in court and published in his songbooks.
Now cease my wand’ring eyes,
Strange beauties to admire,
In change least comfort lies,
Long joys yield long desire. (Second Booke, 13)
These opening lines from a lyric in The Second Book of Songs or Ayres may well stand as an epigraph for the whole play—a play of wandering eyes, strange beauties, changes, and characters who, as much as Miranda, constantly admire.
But so too would Dowland’s later feeling of estrangement resonate with courtly life. In the Epistle to his Pilgrimes Solace of 1612, reflecting on his return to an England he had left over a decade earlier, he recalls how he came back from a “forraine climate,” where his music had been published and praised, even though there he had “beene a stranger.” Now, back in England, things are different: “so haue I againe found strange entertainment since my returne.” Dowland goes on to complain about changes in musical styles at the Jacobean court, vocal singers who are mere technicians, lutenists who have no deep appreciation for their music, artists who have come from abroad without a sense of old traditions. “Moreouer that here are and daily doth come into our most famous kingdome diuers strangers from beyond the seas, which auerre before our own faces that we have no true methode of application or fingering of the Lute.”
Dowland captures evocatively this sense of estrangement from the present. Things are different in this kingdom now: different because time has passed, but different also because strangers have come in. Part of what he is responding to is a changing set of musical tastes and techniques in the 1610s. But part of what he is responding to, as well, is the condition of a new global sensibility: a world in which everyone, ultimately, is a stranger, new to court and arrived from beyond the seas. This language captures, I think, the pervasive sense of strangeness on Prospero’s island, a strangeness that is as much aesthetic as it is political or social. What Dowland and Antonio capture is this new world where things appear to move from strange to stranger. In change least comfort lies, and Dowland’s lyric, much like Ariel’s, chimes in the ear to show us that with every change is something strange.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
And in the end, the fantasy for the performer lies not on a distant shore but in familiar leas. Imagine a world without change. Ariel, stage-dresser to his master at the play’s close, returns once again to sing. “Where the bee sucks, there suck I . . .” Music for this song, and for Ariel’s earlier “Full fathom five,” survives, attributed to Robert Johnson, lutenist to King James and, by the 1610s, one of the most successful court musicians of the era. He and Dowland moved in the same circles. They most likely lived near each other in the Blackfriars district. His songs show up in plays by Fletcher and Webster. His star rose as Dowland’s fell. In 1613, both men contributed to the “Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn,” performed at Whitehall in 1613. Records show that Johnson was paid forty-five pounds for “songs and music.” Dowland was paid two pounds ten shillings as one of the lutenists. Ariel’s tune may have been up-to-date. But his lyrics hearken back to older times. For, in the image of the bee, he returns to a central motif of both Dowland and the classicists—an image that helps us review the longing of his character for both political and artistic autonomy.26
Since antiquity, the bee has stood as the central figure for both civic industry and learning. Bee similes define the collaborative work of city building from Virgil on, and by the early modern period the study of bees had become the purview of the natural as well as the political scientist.27 Bees, in their social organization, came to be understood as part of a royalty. While scientists did not confirm the queenship of the bees until the middle of the seventeenth century, the idea of a “bee king” was a commonplace, and the production of both honey and wax came to be appreciated as a fact of nature and a figure for society. Bees were political as well as artistic creatures, and Ariel’s last poem brings both worlds together to imagine a life unbounded.
So too for Dowland, the bee stands as a fulcrum on which social and aesthetic balance. Recall his comment in the Epistle to his Third Book of Songs and Airs: “As in a hiue of bees al labour alike to lay vp honny opposing them selves against none but fruitless drones.” But Ariel does not imagine a life of the hive. What he imagines, instead, is something more akin to Dowland’s lyric from his Third Book:
It was a time when silly Bees could speak,
And in that time I was a sillie Bee,
Who fed on Time until my heart gan break,
Yet neuer found the time would fauour me.
Of all the swarme I onely did not thriue,
Yet brought I waxe and honey to the hiue.
Then thus I buzd, when time no sap would giue,
Why should this blessed time to me be drie,
Sith by this Time the lazie drone doth live,
The waspe, the worme, the gnat, the butterflie,
Mated with griefe, I kneeled on my knees,
And thus complaind unto the King of Bees.
My liege, Gods graunt thy time may never end,
And yet vouchsafe to heare my plaint of Time,
Which fruitlesse Flies have found to have a friend,
And I cast downe when Atomies do clime,
The king replied but thus, Peace peevish Bee,
Th’art bound to serve the time, the time not thee. (Third Booke, 18)
This poem had been well known long before Dowland set it to music. Some twenty versions of it have survived, most of which attribute it to the Earl of Essex. Historians have sought an allegory of Essex’s own exile and his fraught relationship with Queen Elizabeth.28 By the time Dowland published his setting, Essex was dead and the Queen nearly so, and some have therefore sought a more personal resonance to its lines. Diana Poulton speculates that “the poem also reflects precisely the image—fortune’s victim—that Dowland was coming to associate with himself, and in setting the lines . . . he must have experienced the bitterness of his own exiled condition.”29
We need not speculate on politics or personality here. The poem speaks for itself. It imagines a beast-fable past in which bees had the power of language, where the narrator presents himself as an impoverished and unrequited lover—a bee who, no matter how hard he works, cannot receive the favor of the age. The poem plays on a sustained pun between “time” and “thyme”: the former representing the past age and life of service, the latter representing the herb on which the bees fed and made honey. To bring out this wordplay, I have quoted the poem not from a modernized edition but from its original printing, where both words are spelled “time.” It is a poem of service and complaint, desire and power. Imagining a king of the bees, the poet becomes a supplicant, complaining to his monarch. I am cast down, the speaker complains, “when Atomies do clime”—that is, while even the smallest of creatures advance. And the King responds:
Peace peevish Bee,
Th’art bound to serve the time, the time not thee.
At the purely botanical level, the King’s words counsel: you are the servant of the thyme plant; do your service; the plant does not serve you. More broadly, it is a statement about the rightness of hierarchy: serve nature, nature does not serve you. But, at the level of the poem’s overarching wordplay, the King’s comment is a claim for bondage. You are bound to serve the time.
The OED records the phrase “to serve time” as a phrase of prison life from the late nineteenth century. But “time” and “serve” are frequent in early modern English collocations, and they run through Shakespeare. A phrase such as “when time shall serve” means, in effect, when the time is right or when things come to fruition. “That time serves still,” says the first lord in Timon of Athens; “the time now serves not to expostulate,” says Proteus in Two Gentlemen. “When time shall serve, but let the herald cry,” says Edgar in Lear. To serve the time is to be subject to the passage of things, to be part of a larger hierarchy of nature and power. Ariel himself enters and exits the play with service. “Remember I have done thee worthy service,” he asserts early in his first appearance (12), and his penultimate lines return us to his time served: “Sir, all this service, / Have I done since I went” (5.1).
To have the well-known lines about the “silly bees” in mind is to have a lens through which to read Ariel’s pleas to Prospero. For, when the spirit brings up the matter of his release, in act 1, the magician can only remind him:
Prospero: How now? Moody?
What is’t thou canst demand?
Ariel: My liberty.
Prospero: Before the time be out? No more. (1.2.245–48)
Prospero comes off like the bee-king, chiding his peevish subject and reminding him of time’s bondage.
At stake in both Ariel’s and Dowland’s lyrics is the idea of servitude and bondage. We should not see Ariel’s poem as a paean to Nature or as imbued solely with fantasies of woodland spirits. He is no Puck. His master is no fairy king, but an all-too-human duke, displaced, exiled, and gifted with new powers, but a human nonetheless. There is no magical transformation in The Tempest in the way that there are transformations in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Nobody gets an ass’s ears here. Instead, we have the magic of lyric language itself, and the ways in which poetry and music can create in the mind of the listener the sense of being changed. Liquescat anima.
No souls are truly turned to liquid. It is a metaphor, a figure, and it is precisely in this sense of being a figure that it has power. Campion’s praise of Dowland, like Dowland’s own poetry and like Ariel’s place in The Tempest, lives in the world of “as if.” These are impersonations, actings-as, performances. It is, Campion would say, as if my soul were liquefied. It is as if Ariel is a harpy; it is as if strange phantoms come in masque and music; it is as if all of this had been a dream; it is as if there were a time when bees could speak.
These plays of mythic lyricism create worlds of like and as, and if Ariel’s freedom is a fantasy, or Dowland’s recognition unrequited desire, then so too is our own. For in the world of court, as in the world of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, all acts of artifice are mediated. Creatures perform because they are commanded to. Ceyx and Alcyone is as much a fable of artistic commission as it is a story of love, loss, and transformation. Ariel’s poem creates a discourse of artistic independence. The image of the bee becomes an image of self-generating artistry—a move from sleep and water to new flight and nectar. Where the bee sucks, there suck I. Now, we are far from salt seas that crust the lips or from the deluding inspirations of the bottle. Take not a drunkard for a god. But then again, what does it mean to have drunk up, or spilled the liquid of one’s life in playing? What would it mean, to go back to Dowland’s Epistle, to imagine a world in which “incouragement” needs no “applause”?
Release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands. (5.1.327–28)
Prospero’s claim upon the audience returns us, too, to Dowland, as if now he is the supplicant before the King of Bees, seeking release from service to the bonds of time. Prospero seems to call for applause, but he calls, too, for a power of the hand. Siste divinas manus, stay your divine hands, Campion had pleaded. Do not tap my now-liquid soul, not just yet. These are concluding fables of, quite literally, manumission: a release through hands.
But as we look back through the play, we see the hand as both release and bondage. Caliban is a creature of his hands: those long fingers that would pluck the berries, fish, and point out secrets for the clowns. His fingers are not magical, but they do reveal. They do not pluck the strings, but they do, in their own way, open up an Orphic scope of all creation. Springs and berries, crabs and nuts, birds, marmosets—all fall as food beneath his fingertips. His fantasy of freedom is a fantasy of what his fingers will not do: no more making dams for fish, no more fetching things, no more scraping of trenchers. These earthy hands seek their release not just from tasks but from poetry itself. Caliban’s celebration at the end of act 2 has all the feel of verse unmoored. His “Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom!” may recall, as Douglas Bruster has suggested, Will Kempe’s shouts and jigs, as well as the ill-mannered exclamations of the rioters and holidaymakers who had threatened London’s civic stasis in the late Elizabethan years. It may be, in Bruster’s words, less a shout of enslaved native than a “rite expression of a folk id.”30
By contrast, Ariel is carefully controlled. His song is high art for the Jacobean listener, and Prospero commends its courtliness: “Why, that’s my dainty Ariel.” Ariel, now, remains refined, carefully poised, even a bit girlish. The play’s last movements take us out of phantasms and airy flights and place us squarely in the world that Prospero must enter once again: a world not of seeming but of being. “I drink the air before me,” Ariel announces on his way—one final gesture to this world of water before the Italians enter, one last time, fully awake, dry, clear-eyed, and forgiving. “Was’t well done?” Ariel’s last words in the play take us back to the artist as an actor, and to Morpheus himself, impersonating the dead Ceyx in a dream. Recall Colin Burrow’s interpretation of this Ovidian moment: “these are the . . . lines of an uneasy actor who is not quite sure that he lives up to the part he is playing.”31 Dowland and Ariel have spent their time anxious about living up to parts they played. Both live in a paradox of early modern artistry: a need for institutionalized patronage, and yet a longing for artistic independence.
Lyric transforms the listener as it shapes the self. If Ariel is to be thought of as the mythic hero of this play, what of his metamorphosis? Shakespeare denies his lovers transformation into birds, and Ariel himself is left only to act the avian aggressor when commanded to appear “like a harpy, clap[ping] his wings upon the table,” and disrupting Alonso’s banquet. But he was always Prospero’s bird. “This was well done, my bird,” he commends Ariel after he leaves the drunkards with Caliban (4.1.184), and when Prospero at last releases him, he verbally transforms him into flight:
My Ariel, chick,
That is thy charge. Then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well. (5.1.316–18)32
Prospero must return to mundane things, but Ariel is now released to air, and what makes this play not just so comically but so mythically restorative at its conclusion is this final, Ovidian metamorphosis. For when Prospero casts himself upon the mercy of his audience, he too pleads now not for water but for air: a “gentle breath” to fill his sails, as elevating as the air that lifts Alcyone and Ceyx’s new-grown wings.