Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

On 29 June 1613 the thatched roof of the Globe Theatre caught fire during a performance of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play Henry VIII. The wooden building was burned to the ground. There were no fatalities but one man’s breeches were reported to have caught fire, only to be quenched by a bottle of beer. The fire is often taken to mark the symbolic end of Shakespeare’s theatrical career. However, within a year a new theatre had been erected, with a tiled roof, but less than three years later Shakespeare was dead. He was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on 25 April 1616, where, if you visit, you can see the place where he lies and read the doggerel versed inscription, which tradition has it was written by him:

Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,

And curst be he that moves my bones.

Scientific investigation has recently revealed that there may be some truth to the old story that Shakespeare’s skull was once stolen from his grave. It is still, nevertheless, his last resting place. On the wall to the left is a bust, which is the most contemporary likeness we have of him, although it is somewhat crude and stiff.

Henry VIII

It is perhaps ironic that the Globe fire broke out during a play about Henry VIII. Henry was the tyrannical, self-obsessed, ruthless, psychotic monarch who had been responsible for much of the religious and social turmoil in sixteenth-century England. It may be that some unpleasant personality traits were exacerbated following a severe blow to his head after a fall from his horse. The end, however, of what he began, it could be argued, came, ironically enough, with the execution in 1649 of the monarch himself, Charles I, but certainly Henry left a legacy of intolerance and bitterness that has continued for centuries. But, despite all that, Henry VIII, whom Erasmus referred to in the early years of his reign as ‘a universal genius’, promoted education and began the forging of a national identity which to a limited extent continues to the present day. Often, however, lionized by future generations, in Shakespeare’s play Henry is less vividly characterized than some of those about him: the Duke of Buckingham, Cardinal Wolsey and Queen Katherine. The structure of the play works, as Ralph Berry (1985: 128–41) has pointed out, like a masque and does not provide an opportunity for the wider historical perspective found in the other history plays by Shakespeare.

Spotlight

Holbein’s famous painting of Henry – standing erect with legs astride and large codpiece symbolizing the King’s masculine power and virility – helps establish the iconic image of this self-centred king. Shakespeare, however, chooses to provide a different focus. In the play he presents a series of vignettes or ‘staged pieces’ that concentrate on the characters surrounding the King rather than on the monarch himself. This is no more so than with Katherine of Aragon (spelled with a K in the text), who in Act 2, Scene 4 comes for judgement before the tribunal presided over by the two cardinals Wolsey and Campeius; they are charged with determining the legality of her marriage to the King.

The stage directions are more detailed generally throughout this play than is usual in Shakespeare’s Folio text, as, for example, in Act 2, Scene 4 with the entry of the King, the Cardinal, nobles and officials, which give an indication of the play’s great theatricality, which productions have continued to exploit over the centuries. Particularly in the nineteenth century, they allowed for great pageants and ornate stage designs to be created. Despite this theatrical emphasis, the play is a historical drama whose subtitle is All is True.

In Act 2, Scene 4 Queen Katherine is called formally into the Court, although she is already seated in the room. The Folio stage direction reads: ‘The Queen makes no answer, rises out of her chair, goes about the court, comes to the King, and kneels at his feet: then speaks’ (stage direction, 2.4.10). What she says is calm, measured and dignified – reminiscent, perhaps, of Hermione’s defence in The Winter’s Tale, as she seeks to counter the unjust cruelty of her husband’s attitude and action. This scene has, however, a historical accuracy that gives it even greater poignancy. Historian Michael Wood, for example, conjectures that if Henry VIII was performed in the indoor Blackfriars theatre – it was not unusual that the same play might be performed at both the Globe and the Blackfriars after Shakespeare’s company had succeeded in acquiring the latter for their own use in 1609 – the audience may have recalled that they were in the very hall where Queen Katherine’s tribunal took place. Her speech, one of the great set pieces in Shakespeare, begins, ‘Sir, I desire you do me right and justice’ (2.4.11 f.).

‘Is there a sense here [2.4.11f.] that history has moved on – the clock cannot be turned back? As in The Winter’s Tale, Pericles and The Tempest, the theme is recognition and forgiveness; here, however, it is not in fiction but in English history. The way is prepared after her trial by the boy singing a beautiful (Robert) Johnson song on Orpheus, and then fully expressed in the mystical scene of Katherine’s dying vision, when to “sad and solemn music” she falls asleep to see, in one of Shakespeare’s longest stage directions, six angels descend “clad in white robes, wearing on their heads garlands of bays, and…branches of bays of palm in their hands…” (4.2.82).’

Wood, M. (2003: 367–8), In Search of Shakespeare. London: BBC Books

Robert Johnson (c.1583–1633) was a royal lutenist and composer who worked with Shakespeare from c.1610 on songs for Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, and on the collaborative plays with Fletcher, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and perhaps the lost play Cardenio. His music reflects the masque tradition and the ambience created in the indoor Blackfriars theatre, which is indicative of the change of compositional style in Shakespeare’s last plays. (There is a recent CD release of a 1993 Parlophone recording, Shakespeare’s Lutenist, which brings together many of Johnson’s songs.)

The masque-like play, Henry VIII, maintains a sharp focus on Queen Katherine but concludes with the birth of Elizabeth and the prophecy of the greatness that will come with her accession to the throne. But the play also indicates a new direction in writing as Shakespeare moves towards retirement.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

The Two Noble Kinsmen, like Henry VIII, is by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare and draws on Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale telling the story of friends Arcite and Palamon and their love for Emilia, the sister of Hippolyta, who loves them both as much as each other. It harks back to earlier Shakespearean plays, for example the friendship of Valentine and Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the contest between Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in Antony and Cleopatra to the choice between Cleopatra’s Venus, the goddess of love, to whom, in this play, Palamon holds allegiance, and Antony’s Mars, the god of war, to whom, here, Arcite is dedicated. It also has a girl, the Jailer’s daughter, who, reminiscent perhaps of Ophelia, loses her sanity in this play because of her impossible love for Palamon.

Theseus rules that Arcite and Palamon should meet in a chivalric tournament and that the winner will gain Emilia, while the loser will forfeit his life. Palamon prays to Venus, Arcite to Mars and Emilia to Diana, goddess of chastity, that the one who loves her the most might be victorious or that they should both die, allowing her to remain a virgin. As in Chaucer’s tale, the gods’ answer is that Arcite wins but he is then accidentally killed in his victory parade, leaving Palamon to marry Emilia. As Theseus says:

Never Fortune

Did play a subtler game. The conquered triumphs;

The victor has the loss; yet in the passage

The gods have been most equal.

(5.4.112–15)

It is an engaging story, raising issues of heterosexual and same-sex love, and reminiscent not only of the plays mentioned but also of the Sonnets. W. H. Auden noted, for example, in reference particularly to Palamon’s prayer to Venus (5.1.77–136), an expression of ‘the intensity of the disgust expressed at masculine sexual vanity’, and asked, in relating the passage to the Sonnets, ‘Did Shakespeare later feel that the anguish at the end was not too great a price to pay for the glory of the initial vision?’ (Auden, W. H. [1964: xxxvii]).

Cardenio/Double Falsehood (?)

Collaboration on the writing of plays was common practice during this period. You may recall that Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), and possibly others, probably worked with Shakespeare on 1 Henry VI and that Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) may have contributed to Timon of Athens and to a minor extent even to Macbeth. Then, towards the end of his career, there are the plays we are discussing here, where it appears he worked with John Fletcher (1579–1625) in particular, who was to succeed him as the Company’s dramatist: Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and possibly the lost play Cardenio (1612–13), based on the story of Cardenio’s madness in love found in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which may or may not be a play called Double Falsehood, discovered and subsequently published in 1727/8 by Lewis Theobald. The editors of the Arden Shakespeare believe that a possible relationship with the lost play is sufficiently interesting to include it in their edition of The Complete Works, but the scholastic jury is still out. But both it and The Two Noble Kinsmen, another play not found in the First Folio, have had revivals particularly by the Royal Shakespeare Company over recent years, with another one of The Two Noble Kinsmen occurring in 2016–17.

We have seen earlier (in Chapter 21) how texts were pirated in one way or another. It is possible, also, that popular authors’ names or initials might have been assigned to texts in print, whether or not their contribution had been significant or slight, or perhaps even non-existent. Similarly, some collaborations or editing may have gone unrecorded. So the issue of collaboration with Shakespeare, or Shakespeare’s collaboration with others, including the musician Robert Johnson, is an area of interest and academic research. The fact that the masque, popular with King James, altered the nature and form of the last plays is something which theatre productions and audiences in modern times find challenging. Often the masque elements of the play sit uneasily with the acting styles that some modern companies promote. In the twenty-first century attempts have been made to realize the influence of music and masque on the style of an entire play as, for example, with Jonathan Holmes’s Jericho House production of The Tempest at St Giles, Cripplegate, Barbican BITE Festival in 2011, with music by Jessica Dannheiser.

The Shakespeare Apocrypha

In 1908 C. F. Tucker Brooke published a collection of 14 plays under the title The Shakespeare Apocrypha as part of a then ongoing debate ‘to provide an accurate and complete text…of all those plays which can, without entire absurdity, be included in the “doubtfully Shakespearian” class’ (Tucker Brooke, C. F. [1908: Preface], The Shakespeare Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford University Press). These plays and some additional ones have continued to interest scholars. One of them, The Two Noble Kinsmen, is now included in most Complete Works published in the latter part of the twentieth century and since then.

More than a century after Tucker Brooke, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, with others, published William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays which, newly edited, comprises eight of the 14 plays included in The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908), together with Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood or The Distressed Lovers (1728), the source story for Cardenio and also Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (with additions). Modern research using computer technology, we are told, detects the hand of Shakespeare in additions to The Spanish Tragedy and in Arden of Faversham, although some serious doubts still exist. The history play Edward III includes ‘a superb seduction scene by Shakespeare’ (publisher’s blurb). Sir Thomas More is included as the only play we have containing a scene in Shakespeare’s handwriting. Of the other plays included, The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy were ascribed to Shakespeare – probably to make money from his name – during his lifetime, while Locrine and Thomas Lord Cromwell contained, on the title page of their first publication, the initials ‘W.S.’ which Bate proposes ‘were intended to give the impression that [Shakespeare] was the author’ which ‘alone make the plays worth reading: even if they were not by Shakespeare, they are plays that were plausibly passed off as his’ [Introduction: 10–11]. Initials are a minefield for speculation and research, as the debates through the centuries over the identity of Mr W.H., ‘the only begetter’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, testifies.

The other play included in Bate and Rasmussen is Mucedorus (with additions), a comedy that Tucker Brooke also included, about which – linking it with Fair Em: The Miller’s Daughter (not in Bate) – he commented, ‘they bear the mark of vagabondage on every feature’ (1908: vi). It was possibly Tom Stoppard’s knowledge of this latter play, Fair Em, that inspired ‘Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter’, a clever bit of comedy in the film Shakespeare in Love (1999). Over the last century or so some plays have retained at least a claim of a possible association with Shakespeare, while others in Tucker Brooke, like Fair Em, have fallen by the wayside or been assigned elsewhere: Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan, The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Birth of Merlin. Nevertheless, every now and again someone will announce that one or other of these is a ‘lost play’ by Shakespeare or written in collaboration with Shakespeare. For the moment, Bate and Rasmussen et al., with their reservations and qualifications, are where the matter resides – as well as the challenges to them, of course.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Pericles is a significant play excluded from the First Folio, not appearing in a collected edition until the second printing of the Third Folio in 1664. It was published in a poor-quality quarto, bearing only Shakespeare’s name as author in 1609. It is now generally accepted by scholarship and theatre practitioners that this play was written in some form of collaboration with George Wilkins, a hack writer but more particularly a ‘brothel keeper’.

The structure of Pericles is one that must have led neoclassical scholars to near distraction. It darts across the seas from one country to another and lurches from one catastrophe to another with remarkable rapidity: Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, Mytilene. It is not often performed but I have seen a number of productions and none of them has ever left me disappointed. In one by the RSC in the Newcastle upon Tyne Studio Theatre, I was in the first row of the gallery looking down on to the stage. At the point in the play where a coffin/trunk containing the ‘corpse’ of Thaisa, Pericles’ wife who has ‘died’ in childbirth at sea, is washed ashore and opened by the doctor, Lord Cerimon, I found myself looking down immediately into it. As Cerimon worked on the body to restore it to life, the person next to me – whom I didn’t know – suddenly grabbed me and squealed ‘She’s alive!’ It was a moment of great theatre and great tension for audience and the play. (The woman concerned was much embarrassed!) In his experimentation with the play’s structure, Shakespeare uses the choric figure of John Gower, the medieval writer from whom he borrowed much of the story, as a frequent narrator, moving along with the shifts of location and thereby giving the narrative a discipline, and the audience a confidence, to be taken from one phase of the action to another.

‘…the narratorial interventions of Gower achieve the abbreviated convergence of desire and reality by enlisting the audience’s collaboration at every stage…The deliberately naive, archaic doggerel that distinguishes the choric couplets of “ancient Gower”…distances the brazenly concocted universe of Pericles…[sharpening]…the audience’s sense of the contrasting modernity, and hence the historicity, of the world in which they themselves, “born in these latter times”,…watch the play.’

Ryan, K. (2002, 3^rd edn: 110), Shakespeare. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave

It is the first of ‘the last plays’ in which Shakespeare upholds the dignity of women wronged by husbands or guardians.

‘In the romances (last plays), the feminine principle is reasserted, but…is being hounded by the masculine. The situation is one of outright war. The conclusion the playwright aims for, however, is that bitterly discussed and bitterly won in All’s Well: the supremacy of the feminine, rather than the masculine principle. Each play provides a different form, but all of them are experiments in achieving a vision in which “feminine” values are triumphant within the world of earthly power.’

French, M. (1983: 286), Shakespeare’s Division of Experience, London: Abacus, Sphere Books

During the play, Marina, Pericles and Thaisa’s daughter, is sold by pirates to a brothel keeper (thus the interest of George Wilkins?) but, much to his, his wife’s and their pimp’s displeasure, Marina is able to persuade each customer not to violate her. This includes the governor of Mytilene, Lysimachus, who at the end of the play is betrothed to her. Some critics believe this to be an inappropriate conclusion to the complex romance, but possibly they protest too much. In production it appears to work well enough. Even if he had met her first in the brothel, it was there that she managed to reform his erstwhile profligate behaviour.

The play moves at a good pace, with a galaxy of different one-dimensional characters knitted together by Gower’s chorus function and by Pericles himself on his quest, that allows for different episodes or tales to be told. It is a much-underrated enjoyable narrative drama. The budget version for the BBC Complete Shakespeare, directed by David Jones, with a thoughtful articulate performance of Pericles by Mike Gwilym, is a good evening’s entertainment to be recommended. Not all productions need lavish expenditure, which in itself says a great deal about Shakespeare.

The Tempest

The Tempest (1611), although the first play printed in the 1623 First Folio, is often regarded as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. As we have seen above, it is not his last play but in regarding it as his last solely authored work some have regarded it as his retirement goodbye, linking Shakespeare the writer with Prospero the usurped duke and magician. Prospero’s breaking of his magic staff at the end of the play is given an autobiographical force as a personal gesture by Shakespeare, marking the public ending of his dramatic career. In such readings he then returns to Stratford to his family and his large house, just as Prospero is to return to Milan as Duke.

Prospero tells us:

…– I have bedimmed

The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,

And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault

Set roaring war

(5.1.41–4)

Has not, metaphorically some might ask, Shakespeare done the same for his audiences throughout his career? Moreover:

…graves at my command

Have waked their sleepers, ope’d and let ’em forth

By my so potent art.

(5.1.48–50)

Shakespeare places the bookish Prospero on an island because of his misdeeds when in power as much as because of the machinations of others. There he uses his magic, but even so Prospero can only ‘prosper’ by opportunism. Although he can raise a tempest, he only does so when:

By accident most strange, bountiful fortune

…

hath mine enemies

Brought to this shore; and by my prescience

I find my zenith doth depend upon

A most auspicious star, whose influence

If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes

Will ever after droop.

(1.2.178–84)

These lines seem to express and affirm a positive vision of the future as an extension of Renaissance values. Those values, however, the play itself proceeds to challenge. Certainly, Shakespeare’s ‘art’ has been potent and regarded as such through the centuries. But here his last great character relinquishes his power. He will break his staff and bury his art deeper than a grave, so that it cannot be restored:

…But this rough magic

I here abjure;

…

…I’ll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I’ll drown my book.

(5.1.50–51, 54–7)

In the Epilogue, Prospero speaks with what some have thought to be autobiographical references:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown

And what strength I have’s my own,

Prospero then appeals to the audience to release him from his ‘bands/With the help of your good hands.’ He continues:

…Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

…

As you from crimes would pardoned be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

(Epilogue, 13–16, 19–20)

His last appeal is to the audience to release him from the (stage) island, to allow him to be free; otherwise, he says, ‘my project fails,/Which was to please’ (Epilogue, 12–13).

Recent literary criticism, however, goes beyond the association of the character with the author, and of a farewell to the theatre. Rather than the play embodying a romantic, sentimental farewell, Stephen Greenblatt regards this sentiment in the ‘Last Plays’ as an apotheosis of Shakespeare’s artistic direction and the ethical climate of his time.

‘The conclusion towards which these stories tend is not the cynical abandonment of all hope for decency in public life, but rather a deep scepticism about any attempt to formulate and obey an abstract moral law, independent of actual social, political, and psychological circumstances. This scepticism set Shakespeare at odds with the dominant currents of ethical reflection in his period. It is not that he set out, like Marlowe, to swim against these currents or to stage violent protests against them; he seems simply to have found them incompatible with his art.’

Greenblatt, S. (2010: 82), Shakespeare’s Freedom. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press

Greenblatt perhaps does not give enough credit here to the ethical dimension of Michel de Montaigne’s influence, particularly his essay ‘Of the Cannibals’ (1580, trans. Florio 1603). Shakespeare may well have been familiar with Montaigne’s writings through the translations of John Florio, tutor to the young Earl of Southampton who some think is the subject of the first 17 of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Many late twentieth-century interpretations of the play sought to emphasize the play’s colonial context. Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, for example, point to a particular production that changed theatrical interpretations:

‘After Jonathan Miller’s 1970 staging of the play it has been difficult to recover a sympathetic Prospero unmarked by colonial guilt. As reviewers described that landmark production, Prospero was “a solemn and touchy neurotic, the victim of a power complex” who ‘has arrogated to himself the god-like power of the instinctive colonist…by the end the cycle of colonialism is complete: Ariel, the sophisticated African, picks up Prospero’s discarded wand, clearly prepared himself to take on the role of bullying overlord. Recent Prosperos have tended to be so unpleasant that any association with Shakespeare would reflect very badly on the playwright himself.’

Maguire, L. and Smith, E. (2013: 135), 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare. Malden, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, quoting reviews by Eric Shorter and Michael Billington, recorded in excerpts in O’Connor, J. and Goodland, K. (2007: 1357–8), A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance, 1970–2005. Vol. 1: Great Britain, 1970–2005. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

This, however, is now as much a theatrical commonplace as associating Shakespeare with Prospero, and new interpretations are likely to emerge as new ‘spirits’ are conjured by Shakespeare’s revels in modern critical evaluations and theatrical production. What remains relatively steady, however, is the play’s firm structure and narrative.

Spotlight

Shakespeare displays in Prospero iconographic characteristics in his manipulation of a world portrayed through the metaphor of a dream. Shakespeare seems to have gone back to the dream plays of his early comedies, and to the iconic frame of plays such as Richard II and Henry V. What we find in The Tempest is a gallery of characters who all have a particular relationship with the icon Prospero, who in turn reflects images of an audience watching the play. Shakespeare does this in a virtuoso display while he actually returns to the neoclassical rules of the three Unities – place, time and action – which he had more or less abandoned after The Comedy of Errors. He appears to be foregrounding his art as intrinsic not only to the progress of the narrative but as an important thematic element of that narrative. The play does not so much reference the dramatist himself, but rather the function of a play written by a playwright and performed by actors.

DANCE OF DEATH?

In conventional readings of the play, Prospero appears to control everything, as does an author writing a play or other work, but do they? In a crude sense the symbol of his total command is found in Caliban as the representative of the earth:

…– What ho, slave! Caliban,

Thou earth, thou: speak!

(1.2.14–15)

Within the creation of the two contrasting characters, Caliban and Ariel, Shakespeare could be staging twin resistances to the magician’s authority, but equally he might also be expressing the dual constitutive elements of the icon’s identity, which at the end of the play are allowed to go their separate ways: Caliban, the body, remains firmly of the earth; the other, Ariel, takes to the air.

…Then to the elements

Be free, and fare thou well!

(5.1.319–20)

Thus an argument can be made that The Tempest works as a dance of death with the breaking of the staff at the end of the concluding dance of the play, representing the moment of death itself. The iconic Prospero takes centre stage in a dreamlike dance that will result in release.

THE TIME LIMIT

The narrative of the story, however, limits the credibility of such an interpretation since the plot doesn’t demand that Prospero die but return to Milan, where he will resume his dukedom. He does so within a play that not only observes the Unities but does so, as Jan Kott (1967: 238–9) proposes, by using a time limit which actually coincides with how long it will take for the play to be performed. Within this tight time limit, the action is also limited. There is the shipwreck, the dispersal of the passengers, the meeting of Ferdinand and Miranda, the plot against Alonso, the plot against Prospero and the recognition of all when at the magician’s cell.

THE DREAM MOTIF

That tight structure allows yet again for the Shakespearean dream motif – a state of mind that distorts reality and its otherwise mundane temporal order. It is through this dream that Shakespeare reveals the artistic power of Prospero. He is the controller of everyone’s sleep. He instructs his daughter:

…Here cease more questions.

Thou art inclined to sleep; ’tis a good dullness,

And give it way. I know thou canst not choose.

(1.2.184–6)

Similarly, Ferdinand, hearing strange music and seeing veiled sights, says:

My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up.

My father’s loss, the weakness which I feel,

The wreck of all my friends, nor this man’s threats

(To whom I am subdued) are but light to me, (1.2.487f.)

Gonzalo, Adrian and Francisco are charmed into sleep in Act 2, soon followed by Alonso and, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the implication is clear that the play itself is as a dream:

…Be cheerful, sir.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

…

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

(4.1.147–50, 156–8)

The relationship between the play, the dream and life merge, so that the question of reality itself is raised – the ‘parted eye’ of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is reflected also by Miranda when talking of her early childhood as being:

…rather like a dream than an assurance

That my remembrance warrants.

(1.2.45–6)

Shakespeare here reworks his tried and trusted formula, utilizing the dream in different ways, as we have seen through many of his plays. The controller of the dream finally includes himself in his fantasy: ‘We are such stuff/As dreams are made on’. He is the dreaming artist.

The structure of the dream defies logic – in dreams the movement of images challenge the seeming coherence of the narrative. Thus it is with Prospero, who, still as controller is enrapt in the revels, distractedly enjoying them to the point that he ‘…had forgot that foul conspiracy/Of the beast Caliban and his confederates/Against my life’ (4.1.139–41).

Francis Barker and Peter Hulme argue that ‘…conventional criticism has no difficulty in recognizing the importance of the themes of legitimacy and usurpation for The Tempest… However, these rebellions, treacheries, mutinies and conspiracies, referred to here collectively as usurpation, are not simply present in the text as extractable “Themes of the Play”. Rather, they are differentially embedded there, figural traces of the text’s anxiety concerning the very matters of domination and resistance.’ (p. 198). Earlier in their essay they contend that criticism points not only to the presence in the text of alternative viewpoints to the dominant one of Prospero but through ‘Discourse’, which is ‘the field in and through which texts are produced’:

‘Instead of having meaning, statements should be seen as performative of meaning; not as possessing some portable and “universal” content but, rather, as instrumental in the organization and legitimation of power-relations – which of course involves, as one of its components, control over the constitution of meaning.’

Drakakis, J. (1985: 196–7), Barker, F. and Hulme, P., ‘Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive contexts of The Tempest’

Shakespeare has Prospero elucidate the meaning of the ‘revels’ within the framework of dream and play, but Prospero isn’t actually the only authority in the play, nor is his discourse isolated. The danger is that we fall into the trap of the play and believe him to be the sole arbiter of meaning.

TAUNTING, COMFORTING, IDEALISTIC, CRUEL

A creative experience is found within the conduct of this remarkable play, which reflects a mutability within the discipline of Aristotelian or neoclassical structure, allowing the dream to be ambiguous: simultaneously taunting, comforting, idealistic and cruel:

ARIEL [SINGS]	Full fathom five thy father lies,
	Of his bones are coral made;
	Those are pearls that were his eyes,
	Nothing of him that doth fade
	But doth suffer a sea-change
	Into something rich and strange.
	Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.
SPIRITS	Ding dong.
ARIEL	Hark, now I hear them.
SPIRITS	Ding dong bell.
	(1.2.397–405)

It is the play which is the song, which suffers the sea-change, that through the tightness of its structure retains a valid trans-historical continuity. Even though the performance ends and Prospero’s books are to be discarded at the culmination of his sojourn, the play will continue to be re-enacted. It will emerge from the waters of time through interpretation, debate and discourse as rarified as the corals and the pearls that we now see and discuss. The Tempest, through its form and function, is a prophetic play.