‘Miranda, where’s your mother?’: Female Prosperos and What They Tell Us
Clark University
Two decades ago, in a widely-circulated essay, Ann Thompson wondered whether it is possible ‘for a staging of The Tempest to convey anything approaching a feminist reading of the text’ without substantial rewriting. She observed that, aside from Miranda, women are noticeably absent: Claribel and Sycorax are mentioned but do not appear; Ceres, Juno, and Iris perform briefly but are not human; and Ariel, who is often portrayed by an actress, is an androgynous spirit. While the text seems to deny the ‘importance – and even in some cases the presence – of female characters’, it also ‘attributes enormous power to female chastity and fertility’, along with an insistence on male control.1 Thompson’s expressed desire for a feminist interpretation of Shakespeare’s Tempest may have been answered, at least in part, during the last decade when directors and actors in the United States re-framed Shakespeare’s romance – not so much by re-writing (although in two cases new lines have been inserted) but by introducing a female Prospero.
Inspiration may have come from Shakespeare’s Globe’s 2000 production that featured Vanessa Redgrave. Her cross-dressed, male Prospero was a British landowner, who wore boots and patched shepherd’s garb and spoke with a North Country accent. As reviewers noted at the time, Redgrave’s Prospero failed to convey the magician’s vengeful ferocity, succeeding only in softer moments with Miranda when an underlying maternal tenderness shone through. Still, a noted actress had performed Prospero on a major stage, and in regional theatres of the United States, female Prosperos would soon follow, reinforcing in new ways the role’s ‘maternal’ dynamics.
The following year Director Penny Metropulos’s Tempest, produced for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, presented Demetra Pittman as an overtly female Prospero. Metropulos’s programme notes claim that ‘Gender is not the issue of the production’, but reviewer Michael W. Shurgot begged to differ. Pittman’s Prospero, he argued, ‘was not an angry, avenging monarch’; instead, ‘she was mostly weary of human perfidy’. Indeed, it mattered profoundly that Pittman’s Prospero was a mother, not a father. Her scenes with Miranda ‘resonated a mother’s care for her daughter’s inevitable entry into the tragic-comic human community that no father could have imagined’. Her rejoicing at Miranda’s betrothal, for example, ‘captured the anguish of a woman who had given birth and had been betrayed by [in this production] a sister, and who knew that daughters were often political pawns in the hands of European nobility’.2 Pittman’s female Prospero, in other words, highlighted the parental affection between Prospero and Miranda that is often buried in performance; more important, it conveyed a mother’s sympathy for a daughter who, like herself, is circumscribed by patriarchy.
Another Tempest, directed by Emily Mann at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, New Jersey, cast women actors as Prospera, Ariel, and Alonsa, Queen of Naples. Blair Brown’s Prospera was exceptionally feminine, wearing flowing tresses and elegant gowns, while Julyana Soelistyo’s Ariel was a pixie spirit. The gender switch, noted one reviewer, allowed ‘for a gentler, more feminine aspect to Ariel’s pleas for freedom from servitude’. In addition, ‘Prospera’s maternal warmth temper[ed] her fearful power and magical prowess’ (Daily Princetonian, 27 February 2003). Another reviewer reported that Blair created a Prospera ‘who is a formidable island empress, magisterial and graceful. If her Prospera appears to be short on thunder, she glows with comforting maternal wisdom’ (Variety, 4 March 2003). Both reviewers approved of the gender switch, but wished that Mann had exploited it more fully.
In a 2011 Tempest, directed by Sharon Ott for the Georgia Shakespeare at Oglethorpe University, Prospera’s maternal concern stretched from Miranda to include Ariel and Caliban. Reviewer N. R. Helms observed that ‘as a mother rather than a magician, Prospera’s tenderness revealed her human capacity for pity’. Carolyn Cook’s ‘Prospera interacted with Ariel and Caliban both as master and as mother’; she acted as ‘a gentle master’ when offering Ariel ‘his freedom along with her love’, and as a teacher, when she held Caliban’s hand in the final scene. Helms’s review implies that Cook’s Prospera conveyed the magus’s vengeful passions more effectively than Blair Brown had, but tenderness dominated the play’s final scenes.3
These three productions, all directed by women and featuring a female Prospero, suggest that the obvious parental affection Prospero shows for Miranda in Shakespeare’s text resonates more fully when the parent becomes a mother figure. One underlying source of urgency in getting Miranda safely betrothed and off the island – the danger of an incestuous relationship between father and daughter – is erased, allowing for the parental figure to touch Miranda more fondly and demonstrate affection more freely. But the reviewers’ criticism of Blair Brown’s ‘lack of thunder’ suggests a downside to the softening of Prospero/a’s role, for if there isn’t some thunderous rage in the play’s first half, the shift to forgiveness in the final scenes falls flat.
By stereotyping the female Prospero in a maternal role, these productions failed to answer Ann Thompson’s objections to Shakespeare’s text. They did not make The Tempest into a critique of patriarchal control or question in any way the play’s emphasis on female chastity and fecundity. For that, it would seem, Thompson was right – it takes some re-writing. This is certainly the case with Julie Taymor’s filmic Tempest, which, after a very short run in 2010, went to DVD in 2011. To be sure, Helen Mirren also captured the female Prospera’s maternal dimension, adding a not uncommon touch of testiness between exasperated mother and determined teenage daughter in 1.2. In 3.1’s betrothal scene, she holds Miranda by the arms and gently strokes her cheek. The maternal dynamic is extended in sporadic moments to Ben Whishaw’s translucent Ariel, but for Caliban, Mirren’s Prospera displays nothing but fury until his final exit, when she looks at him with grudging respect.
At the same time, Taymor’s Tempest offers a feminist critique of patriarchal power by providing Mirren’s Prospera a backstory to explain her status as Duchess of Milan in the 1.2 exposition. In lines written by contemporary playwright Glen Berger, Prospera explains to Miranda that her husband, the Duke of Milan, had allowed her to dabble in scientific experimentation, but when he died and left the Milanese throne to her, her brother Antonio had conspired with the King of Naples and his brother Sebastian to stage a coup by accusing her of witchcraft. This narrative is spoken as the screen shows flashbacks of Prospera at her experiments and of Sebastian and Antonio lurking in the palace’s dark corners as they wait to entrap her.
These brief shots of Milan’s claustrophobic built space establish a contrast between European power politics, dominated by the masculine figures of Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio, and the sunlit vistas of Prospera’s island. Although her underground cave features the ‘brave utensils’ she needs for scientific experimentation, as the characters wander around the island from one landscape to another, shots of lava beds, ironwood forests, standing pools, and ocean-washed cliffs create a sense of openness and possibility. This is Prospera’s world, which, like the half-moon pool of water near her cell, is gendered female.
The flashbacks to Milan that show Prospera as an early modern Duchess, dressed in the tight corset of Renaissance costume, also indicate the gender constraints she endured as Duchess. The Europeans’ black costumes, reminiscent of Velásquez’s portraits of conquistadors, are confining, especially in contrast to the loose-fitting trousers and tunic that Prospera wears on the island. And it is the corset that she must resume at the film’s end when her royal power is restored. As Ariel tightens the stays on her bodice, Prospera murmurs, ‘So, so, so’ in a tone of resignation. Taymor told me that she intended the corset to signify the confinement of patriarchy. Indeed, returning to Milan and resuming her political power is not a restoration for Prospera but a sacrifice. She is giving up the freedom of her island retreat, the scientific inquiries she has conducted in her cell, the lure of the surf and the breeze, not to mention the freedom of loose-fitting clothing. The shot of her being tightly laced signals the sacrifice Prospera is making for her daughter.4
Taymor’s film does not deal with the issue of Miranda’s chastity overtly, but the visual imagery she substitutes for Shakespeare’s masque does convey an alternative view of human sexuality. As Miranda and Ferdinand gaze at the heavens, Prospera prepares a spectacular dance of stars and planets that culminates in the figure of Vitruvian man etched in stars, only in this image it’s Vitruvian man-woman because separate male and female figures converge into one. This androgynous vision replaces the masque’s mythical vision of Iris, Ceres, and Juno, who promise the young couple ‘honour, riches, marriage blessing / … Earth’s increase, foison plenty’ (4.1.106–10).
These details suggest that it is not simply the casting of Helen Mirren in the lead role that lends Taymor’s Tempest a feminist perspective. The directorial choices Taymor made in both location and costume subtly critique the patriarchal system underlying Shakespeare’s text. A more systematic feminist critique emerged in 2012 when the Oscar-winning actress Olympia Dukakis portrayed Prospera for Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, in a stage production directed by her former student, Tony Simotes. Dukakis had pondered the text for many years, directed it in Whitefish, Minnesota, and made it her own. In a lengthy interview, she explained to me why she undertook such a demanding role at the age of 81. Dukakis confided that she had grown up learning about Greek civilization from her father, who taught classics and spent his life studying the ancient myths. But in the wake of first wave feminism and through books by Merlin Stone and Monica Sjöö,5 she discovered archaeological proof that before the Greeks conquered Asia Minor, worship of the Great Mother, a female goddess of sexuality and power, flourished in the ancient world. Dukakis spoke passionately about the ways Perseus and other Greek invaders silenced and systematically destroyed ancient female religions. To Dukakis, the destruction of women-centred religion constituted a great betrayal, one from which all women who have been silenced by patriarchy need to recover by looking into themselves, recovering and expressing their anger. ‘Being denied your “place” is an ongoing reality for women in a patriarchal culture’.6 Dukakis referred as well to the Sumerian myth of Inanna, a goddess who is separated from her sister, Ereshkigal. Inanna lives and thrives above ground, while her sister is confined to the underworld. Inanna spends her life knowing something is missing. She has to reclaim her anger. She has to discover a mode of being that has been repressed.7
This sense of betrayal informs Dukakis’s appropriation of Prospero’s role. Her conception of Prospera’s life in Milan, she told me, was pre-patriarchal, but when her brother steals her crown, a fragmentation of the spirit tears her apart. Ariel and Caliban are, in a sense, archetypal parts of her psyche. Ariel is like Artemis, the side of woman that refuses to be touched and insists on remaining intact and independent. Caliban is the vengeful, lustful side of her nature, a side that takes over for much of the performance.
According to Dukakis, Prospera finds a new kind of power on the island. She connects with the natural world, with the materiality of plants and stones, and with the ‘old consciousness, and I think, the ancient mothers who are guiding and empowering her’.8 Moreover, ‘it’s the male world she takes on. Prospera intends to use this boy Ferdinand, because she knows if the connection happens, her daughter can get power back. She [Prospera] can’t have it for herself, but she can get it for her daughter’. Prospera’s obsession with Miranda’s chastity is defensive, because she knows if Miranda yields sexually, Ferdinand will reject her: ‘She has to learn some restraint’. After the masque of 4.1, Dukakis added new lines to the script to make her point. As Prospera crowns the young lovers, she says, ‘For this I raised the tempest … My daughter will be the queen of Naples, ruler over Milan, vengeance for a crown taken.’ She’s finally got what she wanted. But suddenly she realizes her daughter’s love for Ferdinand and his love for Miranda and she can’t take vengeance on him or his father. Dukakis explained: ‘Then she is really confounded, and then Ariel comes in and tells her about Caliban and the connection happens, and Caliban – mine own, I have in me the same violence, the same desire – Caliban is going for revenge because he feels the island was taken from him and we have the same thing playing itself out. This is the change I made: I said, “we devils”, not “you devils, and I do it right to the audience’. Prospera’s anger surges again in Act 5, especially when she confronts her brother, but Ariel’s comment that ‘you would change your mind, I would were I human’, and her own self-recognition force her to forgive. The change doesn’t happen suddenly. But it does happen because ‘the person she needs to free the most is herself. She has to free herself from this manipulation, this conniving, this using, she has to free herself’.
Translating a conception that evolved out of Dukakis’s own research and life experience into a performance was no easy task, but several staging choices underlined the dynamics she discussed in our conversation. Dukakis’s Prospera, clad in a simple black dress with white jacket, provided a powerful rendition of Prospero’s fury in a performance worthy of Medea. While her concern for Miranda was evident, it was not softly maternal, for as she told me, ‘mothers can be as brutal with daughters as fathers’. Beside Dukakis, who dominated the small stage, Ariel and her fellow spirits, dressed in gossamer gowns, were all palpably female. The Europeans, whether of the court party or the comic subplot, were all male, and as Don Aucoin observed in his review, this opposition was conveyed most clearly in the confrontation between the ‘female forces of the enchanted island and the male forces of civilization’. All of the men who invade Prospera’s island – whether it’s the aristocrats Antonio and Sebastian or the servants Stephano and Trinculo – want to take power. But on the island, the female spirits reign supreme. The staging of Ariel’s appearance as a harpy in 3.3 was most telling: Prospera stood above on a catwalk, ‘observing and controlling, while Ariel (the excellent Kristin Wold) and several other female island spirits cow a group of men, forcing them to positions of submissive prostration’ (Boston Globe, 31 July 2012).
Another interpolation was substituted for the text’s epilogue. Prospera came downstage accompanied by Ariel and Caliban on either side; she freed Ariel to the air (as in the text), and then in an extra line or two, freed Caliban as well. Dukakis told me after the performance that she had to free them; she had to in order to free herself. Still, giving up power wasn’t easy for this Prospera. Even when Dukakis’s Prospera forgave her brother’s perfidy, her voice resonated with anger; the production made clear that it was the only choice. As Patti Hartigan concluded in her review, the point is ‘to create a sense of equilibrium where both genders can share power and celebrate all aspects of themselves, including ferocity’ (Boston Globe, 15 June 2012).
Perhaps Dukakis’s Greek heritage and background in Greek literature also informed her Prospera. Prospero’s lines in 5.1.33–57 which describe the powers he is about to relinquish are nearly identical to the words Medea speaks in William Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses, a text that Shakespeare had studied in school and knew well. Like the Great Mother, Medea had extraordinary powers. She, too, was betrayed by a man, Jason, who abandoned her for another woman after she had used magic to aid his quest for the Golden Fleece. Flooded with primordial wrath, Medea took a horrible revenge, killing her own children in the process. As a female Prospero, Dukakis could tap into the darkest passions, making her decision to forgive more difficult, yet more convincing.
None of the performances discussed here can fully satisfy the objections raised by Ann Thompson. Substituting Prospera for Prospero does change the play’s dynamics, especially the relationship between parent and child, but to introduce a clear feminist perspective, a little rewriting is required. Mirren’s and Dukakis’s Prosperas lead us to question patriarchal power, and, at the end, to wonder whether Prospera and Miranda’s journey to Milan and Naples will reinscribe them in patriarchal confinement. Perhaps their experiences on Prospera’s island will enable them to transform the world they find in Europe into a more equitable space where, in Dukakis’s words, ‘men and women are sacred and important to the planet and no one is diminished by the other’.9
Notes
1Ann Thompson, ‘“Miranda, Where’s your sister?”: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (eds), Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ (New York, 1998), pp. 234–43; quotes from 242 and 239, reprinted from Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Sellers (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), pp. 45–55.
2Michael W. Shurgot, ‘2001 Ashland Season’, Upstart Crow 21 (2001): 93–101; quotes from 99 and 100.
3N. R. Helms, ‘Georgia Shakespeare at Oglethorpe University’, Shakespeare Bulletin 30 (2012): 165–72; quotes from 171 and 169.
4Interview with Julie Taymor, 14 June 2010.
5Merlin Stone, When God was a Woman (New York, 1976); Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (New York, 1987).
6Quoted from Shakespeare and Company’s in–house magazine, Summer 2012.
7See also Patti Hartigan’s ‘Dukakis channels storm within’, Boston Globe (15 June 2012).
8This and all other quotations from Olympia Dukakis (unless noted otherwise) are taken from her interview with Virginia Mason Vaughan on 18 August 2012.
9Olympia Dukakis, quoted in Patti Hartigan, Boston Globe (15 June 2012).