7

Making Good in THE TEMPEST

A person is a person through other persons.

DESMOND TUTU, NO FUTURE WITHOUT FORGIVENESS

Hasn’t anyone who has been hurt wished above all that the one who harmed him could come to understand the measure of the hurt? This desire is informed by a longing for justice, but also a hunger for recognition as an aspect, even a condition of it. There are dangers in this. For in entertaining the idea that the person who hurt us will acknowledge the full dimensions of that hurt, we may forget that we must in this case see ourselves as the one so nearly crushed or defeated by that hurt, see ourselves as his victim when it might seem as if our very survival might depend on overcoming this fact.

This is Prospero’s dilemma. Why does Prospero appear before the conspirators dressed as the Duke of Milan? So that they might recognize him? So that the long time between might vanish? Or so that he does not have to see himself in their eyes as a mere man, and one brought low by their successes at that? If The Winter’s Tale through the figure of Leontes explored the contours of remorse in the mind of the harmer, The Tempest examines the hold of the past over the one who has been harmed, and the means by which the present can make its peace with the past. The possibility and resources of forgiveness can, after all, be fully grasped only if the mutuality of harmer and harmed, caught in the same act, can be mutually recognized. The Tempest explores the difficulties of such acknowledgments.

It was the practices of restitution as part of the sacrament of penance that had traditionally throughout the Middle Ages underwritten justice as a component part of charity. Justice entailed rendering to everyone his own.1 Yet such justice is inevitably concerned with the capacities for acknowledgment of the parties involved. It is with such complexities that The Tempest is concerned. Once again, we will find the play plumbing the resources, structures, and inherited languages of penance. Penance is after all traditionally understood as the “second plank after shipwreck,” an image repertoire Shakespeare consciously exploits in developing the supra-individual agency of the metamorphic sea.2

The languages of penance emerge most clearly in the play, first, through the exploration of the project of restitution, and second, through a eucharistic language of feast and participation. Like The Winter’s Tale, this play strives toward a recovery of memory from private language and private possession, and stages forms of public enactments that work as recoveries of self, language, and society at one and the same time.

At the beginning of the last act of The Tempest, Ariel gives Prospero a description of Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio and their followers. They are:

Confin’d together

In the same fashion as you gave in charge,

Just as you left them; all prisoners, sir,

In the line-grove which weather-fends your cell;

They cannot boudge till your release.

(5.1.7–11)

The men are brought to “sorrow and dismay” (5.1.14). Some are distracted and the others mourn around them. Gonzalo is crying. They lie in Prospero’s mercy.

Prospero does not characteristically ask questions. His language is almost invariably in the imperative mood. He issues commands, requests, orders, and demands. He also tells people things, or rather, he reminds people of things and these reminders (of which more later) are an integral part of the play’s exploration of the grammar of remembrance and its task in forgiveness. But here Ariel’s description elicits one of Prospero’s first genuine questions. Ariel has depicted the King and his companions in such a way as to arouse pity. But in case his description is not sufficient, he makes a suggestion:

Your charm so strongly works ’em

That if you now beheld them, your affections

Would become tender.

(5.1.17–19)

It is here that Prospero is prompted to ask: “Dost thou think so, spirit?” (5.1.20). Unlike his other questions this one requires no missing information to be supplied; nor is it about the execution of an order. Rather, Prospero wonders about an appropriate response of tender affections. He is, for the first time, curious and attentive to the workings of another mind—call it a not-yet-free spirit. What might it take for Prospero to be able to behold the “men of sin” (3.3.53) with tender affections? Ariel tutors Prospero in how to be human, how to be kind. Whatever his project has been, he makes the decisive move from vengeance to virtue.3 It is the work of the rest of the play to parse out the complexity of “They cannot boudge till your release.” “Your release” might be an echo of the Prosperian imperative, a reiteration that release is in his command. They can’t move until you release them. But the grammar reveals the release as fully reciprocal. They won’t be able to move until you yourself are released. The release of Prospero works as an objective and subjective genitive.

The release will unleash the past’s hold only if it is fully mutual. And this release for Prospero will involve learning to accept his humanity, becoming kind, inhabiting his kind. This mutuality is hard; it is hard because it depends on unreliable, recalcitrant others. If it turns out that becoming human is a task, a project, a goal that is never definitively accomplished, but that has to be endlessly begun, then it is also clearer than ever why it might be so tempting, so plausible and compelling to evade that task and its disappointments. Indeed the mood of disappointment that hangs over the end of this play can be seen to be not so much a despair rooted in Shakespearean biography, as many Shakespeare critics once held, but rather a logical consequence of the picture of language it enacts.

The Tempest is a play that has been fully bent on the project of making good. The “tempest” is itself the name for the action of the past in the present; it is what raises and allays passions of the mind. The project of making amends will involve the restitution of a usurped kingdom, but in the process of the profound exploration of memory that ensues, it becomes clear that there can be no such perfect exchange as that envisaged in restitution. In the confrontation with the irrevocable nature of the past’s losses, memory comes to be seen not as the private possession of Prospero’s imagining, but as fully intersubjective, incorrigibly temporal, utterly social. The hope of restitution will lie in a transformation by love, and the future such love might hold. In sounding the resources of the language of forgiveness in time, the play is making an argument for, and enacting a form of theater that will address our freedom, not our confinement. It will seek its redress in the risky, terrifying forms of mutual address, not the enactment of one person’s “present fancies.”4 In this activity it takes up crucial aspects of the work of penance: amendment, including restitution, and the ethical self-accounting this entails; the role of memory in confession, and as in Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, an exploration of the agencies of forgiveness. But, as in those plays, it places the penitential work of forgiveness in the entire community of speakers.

It is conventional to see in The Tempest a revenge plot that overcomes revenge.5 Yet, in the exploration of redress in the play, the role of restitution has been overlooked. In this chapter I show how the possibilities of communion and a eucharistic language of real-ization are explored through restitution. This project comes to be reimagined through the work of theater as a time-bound, linguistic medium. Finally, I show the play’s investment and enactment of such participation as a linguistic community and the paths taken to surpass or overcome that inescapable horizon in forms of magic and the autonomizing of language.

The Quaint Device

One of the central images in the exhortations to Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer and also in the “Homily of the Worthy Reception” is the image of the heavenly banquet where all must be guests “and not gazers, eaters and not lookers.”6 The great suggestiveness and longevity of this idea can be seen from the use Shakespeare makes of it in The Tempest.

In act 3, scene 3 of The Tempest, several “strange shapes” bring in a banquet, on which Alonso and his companions propose to feed.7 But Ariel, by means of a “quaint device,” causes it to vanish and confronts them with their own sin: “But remember / (For that’s my business to you) that you three / From Milan did supplant good Prospero” (3.3.68–70). The prospective feast becomes an act of remembrance of past selves that prevents participation until that memory has restored them to repentance. The feast depends on being in “charity”—and this will mean avowals, “heart’s sorrow” (3.3.81), a relinquishment of the usurped fruits of past ill deeds, and a restoration of the relations such acts have damaged through forgiveness. In the Book of Common Prayer, the minister could at his discretion “call and advertise” any “open and notorious evil livers” from communion, and the service for Holy Communion contains a number of exhortations to encourage and educate parishioners about worthy reception of the sacrament.8 These use the imagery of St. Luke’s banquet and St. Matthew’s wedding feast (Luke 14.15–24; Matthew 22.1–14) as well as the Pauline injunction of 1 Cor. 11.28–29: “But let a man examine himself. And so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.”9 Here the work of theater echoes the work of the mass in a substitution of haunting power and equivocation—for the feast can be realized only in those relations of charity.10 Without them it is insubstantial. Here we have finally moved away from the Aristotelian language of substance that had controlled eucharistic discussion for so long, to a language of participation. Shakespeare is taking up a dense source of controversy and allusion here.

In the eucharistic debates of the 1560s, John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, and Thomas Harding rehearse exactly this theme. Their debate shows the stakes of making the presence real in languages that echo in the airy nothings of the play, and help us to see how the island substantiates the desires and memories of each of the protagonists.11 Taking up the central idea that the eucharist is a “supper,” they both wonder: who can eat at the feast? For John Jewel the Roman Catholic mass is a meal for one, because the congregation does not partake of the bread or the cup. What kind of a meal is it when the cup is withdrawn from the guests, when the guests are invited to watch one man eat his solitary feast? Can it be a feast at all when only one person eats and the others watch?

To such a banquet Pasetes the juggler used sometimes to call his friends. There was a great shew of vanity, and plenty of all manner of meats and drinks, the table full: but, when any of the guests would have touched anything, it vanished suddenly away and was turned to nothing; and so, when their eyes were full, they put up their knives, and rose a hungred. Even thus Mr Harding feedeth and feasteth the people of God with shews and ceremonies, and suffereth them in the mean while to starve for hunger.12

The spectators of the feast are not participants at all according to Jewel; they “heareth nothing, understandeth nothing, eateth nothing, drinketh nothing, tasteth nothing.”13 This is feast theatricalized, and the spectators long for substance as they gaze on at the priest’s greedy and selfish plenitude.14

But for Harding it is precisely Jewel’s denial of transubstantiation that renders the feast a nullity. At Jewel’s feast, says Harding, there are only signs and figures, for no matter how strong the imagination of the participant, the body of Christ is merely bread and wine. So he asks:

whether of those two is the colder ceremony, and more simple supper, to have bread and wine, with a sign only of flesh and blood, or to have real flesh and blood, with such form of bread and wine as by the power of God do no less bodily nourish us than the substance would have done, we doubt not of men’s wise judgment. Ye have your carnal banquests fat and full enough of the best flesh, and it is with you superstitious to eat dry and Lenten meats. But ye will have your spiritual banquets so lean and carrion as a man may well discern whether ye have more fantasy to your flesh or to your spirit.15

It will be apparent how each man wishes to hold onto a version of real presence but understands that we arrive at it in different ways. And each man abhors the other’s view, imagining that it nullifies the very source and means of salvation and makes hungry where it should satisfy.

In the mass, as in the communion, the eucharist is judge as well as redeemer. It is diagnostic. What it shows is the shape of sin. That is why Ariel’s business is a reminder to the sinners of what they are. In The Tempest the possibilities of sitting down and eating together are going to depend on the art of memory in the activity of forgiveness.16 Indeed the fundamental premise of this play is that memory is communal, that it cannot be the possession of any one person alone.

How can they eat at the feast? How can the nothing of the feast become substantial and real for them? What will substantiate the body of Christ, make it actual as a people who might come to “the peace of the present”? The play goes on to explore the fully traditional project of restitution as a prerequisite for such a communion.

Making Good: The Project of Restitution

In this book I have been concerned with exploring the sea-changes entailed in the continuities and discontinuities in the reform of the sacrament of penance. I have examined the notion of sufficiency and satisfaction, the question about what is “enough” in the explorations of remorse in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline. Yet the precise relation between satisfaction and restitution remained a controversial part of reformed discussions of penance, as of medieval discussions. An under-remarked aspect of these transitions is the continuity in the practice of restitution. The Tempest addresses the afterlives of the sacrament of penance, and the grammar of forgiveness and acknowledgment, through a contemplation of restitution. The Tempest also turns out to be an exploration of the resources of theater in the work of penitence.

It is hard to get a grip on Prospero’s project, for the details about the execution of his plan are as precise as the project itself is vague. It is clear that “bountiful Fortune,” “a most auspicious star” (1.2.178, 182) has created an opportunity for him to encounter his enemies again, and his response to Ferdinand and Miranda’s courtship indicates that their love is something he desires, but cannot compel (“Heaven rains grace / On that which breeds between ’em” [3.1.75–76]). The only overt declaration of his purpose is strangely (and importantly) retrospective, coming after Ariel’s invitation to feel his common humanity with those confined, which seems to prompt a turn from vengeance to virtue:

They being penitent,

The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Not a frown further.

(5.1.28–29)

Vengeance or virtue, wild justice or penitential justice: both require the restoration of a kingdom:

I do forgive

Thy rankest fault—all of them; and require

My dukedom of thee, which perforce, I know

Thou must restore.

(5.1.131–34)

Prospero declares that his sole purpose lies in producing the penitence in his aggressors, but penitence would properly and naturally have entailed the restoration of what had been unjustly seized.

For all the radical changes in the theology of repentance and the liturgical enactment of it, there was, in fact, remarkable continuity in the extra- liturgical rites of reconciliation.17 It was still regarded as the preserve of the parish priest to ensure not just reconciliation, but, if necessary, restitution as an aspect of the preparation for communion. Being in charity with others entailed justice; justice was a component part of charity. To participate in the eucharist, to sit at the common table with one whom you had wronged was to take the sacrament to your damnation. It was this concern with unworthy reception of the sacrament that indicated that it was not a mere symbol of love but an actual embodiment of forgiveness.18 To understand the exploration of the losses and returns enacted in restitution, and to explore its failures and successes, I will need to say something more about this practice and its history.

A distinction between satisfaction and restitution was quite commonplace in the sacramental literature of the Middle Ages.19 Restitution was owed whenever justice had been violated, and justice could be violated when something proper to a person was taken away.20 This might entail damage to reputation as well as to property. Indeed Thomas Aquinas understood the sin of detraction to be accounted worse than theft, though not on the scale of homicide or adultery.21 The idea here is that something essential, yet intangible, had been violated: reputation, honor, identity. Restitution was therefore essential to any sense of tangible, visible justice. It is this aspect of justice as a component part of penance that has been psychologized away in the broadly pelagianizing framework of modern thought.22 But it is still very much available to Shakespeare.

What vitiates Claudius’s prayer in Hamlet is his unwillingness to restore the crown he has stolen: “May one be pardon’d and retain th’offense?” (3.3.47). He himself recognizes that this renders his attempted act of repentance utterly hollow.23 Restitution is understood as the prerequisite of a proper contrition for an act that has involved theft, or any wrongful or unlawful possession. Restitution is then bound up with the first part of the medieval tripartite component of penance: contrition rendering it actual rather than hollow. But it is also bound up with the third part of penance: satisfaction, and indeed sometimes dangerously confused with it.24 The necessity of restitution is a commonplace of medieval literature.

In that long and great tradition of scholastic commentary, the Commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, restitution takes up the lion’s share of discussions of penance in several treatments.25 Although conventionally understood to be the “satisfaction” owed to man, rather than to God, and not, in many senses, a formal part of the sacrament of penance, it was in practice a prerequisite for worthy reception of the sacrament, part of the preparation for annual or (in the case of the post-Reformation), tri-annual communion. It is fascinating to observe that the practice appears to be a continuous part of the role of the parish priest in the reconciliation of his parishioners. Medieval discussion of restitution is apparent, for example, in such pastoral manuals as Speculum Sacerdotale or Pupilla Oculi. Lyndwood’s Provinciale insists on the fact that restitution is a prerequisite for satisfaction.26 The attacks on friars for not insisting on it are a stock trope of anti-fraternalism, and the mode and method of restitution, as well as complaints about the evasion of it, are a central part of medieval penitential discourse.27

George Herbert in his A Priest to the Temple or, The Country Parson opens the first chapter with the pastoral “work of conciliation,” and goes on to exemplify the pastor on Sundays spending his time “in reconciling neighbours that are at variance or visiting the sick.”28 The pastor, says Herbert, is a lawyer and a physician as well as shepherd, and he wants his flock to resort to him as a judge before they go to law.29

Restitution remains an ideal and a pastoral practice, and is itself a testimony to some remarkable continuities in pre- and post-Reformation England. In the exhortation that precedes the order for communion in the first Book of Common Prayer, restitution is mandated as a requirement of worthy reception:

And yf any man have doen wrong to any other: let him make satisfaction, and due restitution of all landes and goodes, wrongfully taken away or withholden, before he come to Goddes borde, or at the least be in ful minde and purpose so to do, as sone as he is able, or els let him not come to this holy table, thinking to deceyue God, who seeth all menes hartes.30

The 1552 version of this exhortation is changed to emphasize the contexts of the great feast of communion. Those who refuse to participate in communion are like those who refuse to come to a great feast:

And wheras ye offend god so sore in refusing this holy Banquet, I admonishe, exhort, and beseche you, that unto this unkindness ye wyll not adde any more. Which thing ye shal doe, if ye stande by as gazers and lokers on them that doe communicate, and be no partakers of the same yourselves.31

The language about restitution has somewhat changed, however. After encouraging an examination and lamentation of sins, the curate is to return to the language of reconciliation and restitution:

And yf ye shal perceiue your senses to be such, as be not only against god, but also againste your neighbours: then ye shal reconcile your selues unto them, ready to make restitucion and satisfaccion according to the uttermost of your powers, for all injuries and wronges done by you to any other; and likewise beeyng ready to forgeue other that have offended you, as you would have forgeuenesse of your offences at gods hande….32

The language has again been changed. Notice that there is a subtle psychologization of harm-doing. The court of judgment is now the self-perception of the wrong-doer: “yf ye shal perceiue your senses to be such….” In addition there is the idea that there is a separation of sin against God and neighbor. This would have been quite alien to Thomas Aquinas, for example, who said that love of God includes love of neighbor because “it is specifically the same act whereby we love God, and whereby we love our neighbour.”33

In the Book of Common Prayer of 1559 the language has yet again changed. Now “open and notorious evil livers” who have offended the congregation or done wrong to a neighbor are to be called and advertised by the curate not to “presume to the Lord’s table” until they have repented, made amends so that the congregation are “satisfied,” and “recompensed the parties he hath done wrong unto, or at least declare himself to be in full purpose to do so, as soon as he conveniently may.”34 The word “restitution” has been removed completely, and though the language of amends and recompense is still very much present, the specification of “open and notorious evil livers” speaks the language of public scandal rather than harm and wrong-doing. This kind of a distinction between sins known, say, only to the priest, and those that are openly known and that have therefore brought public scandal onto the church, is a commonplace distinction in medieval commentaries. It is also a distinction maintained in the Genevan context of the consistory where the question of public scandal is as much a question of the pollution of a church as private sin.35 It is almost as if the ecclesiological implications have trumped the questions of sinfulness themselves so that it is the purity and pollution of the church that is at stake, as against the reform and repentance of the wrong-doers as component parts of that body.

In commenting on the language of the exhortation, Rowan Williams has maintained that the removal of the very specific and straightforward requirement for restitution from the 1549 prayer book “tells us…a good deal about what could or could not be said against the background of the later years of King Edward VI’s reign, when social rapacity had reached an unprecedented pitch.”36 That social rapacity was certainly part of the discussions about dominion as the old world encountered the new. I have tried to chart these changes to give some indication of the way in which, in giving up on the more straightforward injunction to restitution, a whole understanding of communion as a relation to justice, and justice as an aspect of charity, is lost.37 This is a very consequential loss. We are on the way to the psychologization of forgiveness that is a feature of the modern world and the kinds of splittings I outlined in part 1 of this book.38

In most of the treatments of restitution, it is understood as a practice organized around tangible things, possessions and property, as in clear cases of theft, robbery, and wrongful possession, but medieval handbooks as often meditate on intangible things that are harder, not to say impossible to give back.39 For example in the Fasciculus Morum, a fourteenth-century preacher’s handbook, restitution is treated in the section dealing with charity as the remedy for envy. In a commentary on the text: “This is my commandment that you love one another,” under the heading love of neighbor, there ensues the following discussion:

And notice: Let us assume you took some worldly goods from your neighbour. I ask you: who would absolve you without your making restitution? Indeed, no one alive, if you have the means. But ruining your good name is a greater harm than taking his worldly goods for according to the Wise Man, “a good name is better than many riches.” Therefore no one can absolve him unless he brings back his good name. But this cannot be done in any way; for when you began to defame your neighbour you added things that were not there in the first place, and the person who hears you has added more when he told this to someone else, and the third even more, and so on ad infinitum. How will you manage to revoke all these things, as you are required to do?40

It is fascinating in this reflection to see how quickly the preacher moves from the necessity of restitution for absolution to the impossibility of restitution in the realm of reputation when it is words, not goods, at stake. Words, it seems, cannot be taken back; they cannot be rendered back to their “owner.” They exist in a different medium of temporal and linguistic exchange, and their damages are thus irrevocable.

It is not just the Fasciculus Morum that concentrates on the difficulty of “giving back.” This is a leitmotif in many of the treatments in the Commentaries which discuss the obstacles to proper rendition. And, of course, in Piers Plowman, it is a moment of horrifying crisis in this great poem that explores pardon, in at least two points. The first is when Covetousness comes to realize that he will not be able to return what he’s taken: Repentance’s words to him: “Thow art an unkynde creature—I can thee noght assoille / Til thow make restiucion” drive him to despair; and the second moment is the moment when the Barn of Unity, which represents the Church and all of Christian society, is destroyed when the people decide that they will not practice restitution.41 It is evident that there is a very long literary life in these complex notions for it is also a major preoccupation of George Eliot’s Adam Bede. When Arthur Donnithorne realizes that his seduction of Hetty Sorrel has created the conditions for her infanticide, despair, and deportation, and ruined the courtship of the honorable Adam, a courtship that might have prevented Hetty’s delusive misconceptions about her role in Arthur’s future, it is the temporality of amends-making that is the theme:

if there had been any possibility of making Adam tenfold amends—if deeds of gift, or any other deeds, could have restored Adam’s contentment and regard for him as a benefactor, Arthur would not only have executed them all without hesitation, but would have felt bound all the more closely to Adam, and would never have been weary of making retribution. But Adam could receive no amends, his suffering could not be cancelled; his respect and affection could not be recovered by any prompt deeds of atonement. He stood like an immovable obstacle against which no pressure could avail; an embodiment of what Arthur most shrank from believing in—the irrevocableness of his own wrong-doing.42

Restitution can never restore, not only because of the very logic of human action, but because of its remorseless temporality. As the Fasciculus author knows, one saying sets in train another, which sets in train another, in such a way that it can never be recalled. In the context of this remark we might see The Tempest as exploring the problems that arise when time is taken into account in restitution, restoring the past’s losses. Perhaps Prospero’s hope is for a full restitution of his lands, an open acknowledgment of the harm done to him, and the full penitence of the wronged parties. In desiring this he would be desiring no more than the requirements of justice as it had been historically understood in the penitential system, but the play explores the precise ways in which such a hope might be disappointed by registering the social contexts of loss, possession, and restitution in the context of a fully temporal order. Involved in this fantasy is a spatialization of time: the island is the place where a variety of temporal fantasies coexist and must be made to become aware of each other.43 What The Tempest will end up suggesting is that our best hope lies in new beginnings disclosed by love. This is the example provided by Ferdinand and Miranda. This form of new beginning is completely different from the language of renovation offered in contemporary Calvinist discourses of the self, whose model of conversion is atemporal in that it insists on the complete death of the old self, and the complete and utter novelty of the new self. The older model of sin as habit had, on the contrary, worked with the logic of time’s passing.44

In The Tempest restitution is inextricably intertwined with recall, with memory. The place of putative reconciliation becomes the place for further greedy and murderous fantasies. Prospero’s remembrance of the conspirators interrupts the masque’s idealist theater, but the larger point here is that the greed and hatred that inspire such conspiracies will never be apocalyptically overcome, but will rather be encountered again and again.

To recall something is to perceive that it is utterly bound up with the minds and thoughts of others, their histories and their logics. This, in turn, means that there can be no absolute renovation, no brave new beginnings, just the fragile, precious and tenacious hope of starting over. The world can only seem brave and new on the basis of innocence rather than experience. If Prospero’s project of restitution, then, is utterly tied up with the question of recall and memory it is also, as the example from the Fasciculus poignantly reminds us, bound up with a relation to language. Prospero tries to enact a fantasy of restitution that can bypass the circuit of other minds, and the work of language.

The Grammar of Remembrance

The mood of remembrance in The Tempest is overwhelmingly imperative at the beginning of the play.

But remember

(For that’s my business to you)….

(3.3.68)

Remember

First to possess his books.

(3.2.91–2)

Remember I have done thee worthy service.

(1.2.247)

Characters implore, demand, entreat, and variously command each other to remember. They remind each other of pasts they have forgotten:

Dost thou forget

From what torment I did free thee?

(1.2.250–51)

Prospero in particular supplies the histories that are supposed to explain and justify the current state of relations on the island, relations that underwrite his mastery and the servitude of the island’s others. Prospero’s reminders tend to turn to a piece of history, supply a necessary piece of information that needs to be brought to the fore, as if he can fill the gaps of the other’s recalcitrantly wandering mind. His memory is used in these conversations to bring people back to heel, whether it is Ariel to his bonded service, Caliban to his interminable servitude, or Miranda to her father’s precepts. But memory cannot be supplied like a possession from one person to another. It is not in the definition of any one person, however powerful, however authoritative. So the imperative mood of remembrance is radically undercut by a competing sense of the complex interdependency of memory in the relations of each to each.

This complex interdependency emerges as early as the second scene of the first act, structured around Prospero’s three encounters with Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban. It is Prospero’s conversation with Miranda I will analyze here to pursue the question of the grammar of remembrance. Prospero supplies both Miranda and the spectators of The Tempest with a narrative about their arrival on the island. This story releases him from the present’s confinement, and makes him “more better / Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell” (1.2.19–20). Miranda is ignorant, he declares, not simply of the history of their arrival, but of “what thou art.” In supplying a narrative about their arrival he hopes to tell her who and what she is, and Miranda initially appears to accept his terms: “You have often / Begun to tell me what I am, but stopped / And left me to a bootless inquisition” (1.2.34–35). Prospero imagines that she is a blank slate unable to remember anything because she was only three when she came to the island: “Canst thou remember / A time before we came to this cell?” (1.2.38–39). But he answers his own question before she has a chance to do so: “I do not think thou canst. For then thou wast not / Out three years old” (1.2.40–41).

And yet her clear response is that she can indeed remember the four or five women who tended her. This memory is much more like a dream than an assurance (1.2.45). It cannot provide any “warrant,” yet it is here to work as a testimony that she cannot be the blank slate that Prospero imagines she is. Miranda’s response to Prospero is not so much a statement as a question: “Had I not / four or five women once, that tended me?” It affirms that their memories are shared, parsed out together.

What we find throughout this scene is that Prospero’s notion that he can supply Miranda’s memory entirely from his own, as the donation of his history, is economically and beautifully short-circuited. Miranda, child of the father, turns out to be the subtlest of tutors. When she hears the story of their shared history, of their exile in the ship, their vulnerability to the seas, she twice supplies the response she was too young to give then: “O my heart bleeds / to think o’th’ teen I have turn’d you to, / Which is from my remembrance!” (1.2.63–64). Prospero is not yet ready to hear this, but she repeats a similar sentiment several lines later: “Alack, for pity! / I, not rememb’ring how I cried out then, / Will cry it o’er again” (1.2.132–34). The present, not just the past, has become newly available to her. Out of that new present, Miranda gives Prospero succor in the form of sympathy, so that he will not feel so alone. Memory here is put into the context of our deepest dependencies. Miranda, or so Prospero thinks, must learn who she is at his hands. Yet, giving her fresh response, she thinks of the trouble she must have been for him, and learns that she was so far from a trouble as the creature who preserved him.

Prospero imagines that he can grant her permission to remember as if the discourse of remembrance is in his control: “If thou rememb’rest aught ere thou cam’st here / How thou cam’st here thou may’st” (1.1.51–52). But the deeper implications of this encounter concern the subtle, pervasive interdependencies of memory. Miranda is a child; her history will indeed be given to her from the language of the elders in her life: where else can it come from? Yet she has imagined a past that he cannot conceive she has. This makes memory something shared in language, and something through which new feelings may emerge of love, care, and tenderness, of a father and infant oddly protecting each other from the unruly, violent betrayals of history, and the pain and terrible vicissitudes of the sea. Memory is not a private possession; it cannot be passed on intact from one to the other. The story, once told, provides new contexts for sharing, and this turns out to change the felt sense of the story, to transform both the past and the present.

The grammar of remembrance is, of course, also related to the grammar of forgetting, and here the question of the control of memory and the ownership of it become even more pointed. If characters in the play are continuously being enjoined to remember their histories, histories supplied to them by powerful others, then it turns out that characters also forget at the most crucial moments of action. Miranda thankfully “forgets” her father’s precepts about Ferdinand to such an extent that she is able to conduct a clandestine marriage with him (3.1.58–59, 85–90). Her forgetting is in the most significant way tied up with her freedom and her desires. Forgetting is involuntary; it reveals the limits of the human will.

This same logic of forgetting also applies to Prospero, who has arranged a masque to celebrate the wedding of his children. The masque, as many critics have noted, is the perfect piece of idealist theater.45 Its underlying ideology is neoplatonic, in which courtiers body forth the perfection of heavenly essence, all designed to help construct a sovereign viewpoint. It is a familiar point that this piece of idealist theater is interrupted by Prospero’s memory of the “foul conspiracy,” and is thereby aborted. Prospero’s lapse of memory is something he has failed to do rather than something he does. His involuntary forgetting shows that his “present fancies” are not transparently available to him.46 They are radically distended and extended, suborned not just by the conspirators, but by his own forgetting of them, an involuntary gap in his mind that threatens to repeat the neglect of political affairs in the past that spawned the new creatures who displaced him. Prospero’s forgettings are a testimony to time’s dark abysm. They also pay witness to the limitations of any pelagian philosophy and its investments in the autonomous choices of a sovereign will.47

It is for this very reason that it is, in my view, a mistake to stage The Tempest as entirely internal to the imaginings of Prospero. There have been many contemporary versions of this reading, especially Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books. Perhaps the most extreme stage version of this was Tim Carroll’s 2005 Globe production in which three actors, Mark Rylance, Alex Hassell, and Edward Hogg, aided by six dancers, played all the roles. Rylance, as Prospero, began alone on stage with a toy ship which he moved around as if the toy was in a tempestuous sea, while miming all the other speaking parts. He thus set up the shipwreck as a revengeful fantasy that emerged entirely out of his own longings and desires. Yet the action of the play is emphatically not confined to Prospero’s mind. It is not an internal psychodrama. While Prospero’s desires are indeed highly pertinent and material to the working through of the plot of The Tempest, this staging subverts the logic of the play which seeks to bring Prospero to an encounter with those whose otherness he might learn to recognize. If the other characters are merely extensions of his own psyche, then the work of the play in exploring precisely the painful relinquishment of this fantasy, the painful realization of others, is all undone. It is true that all the different parts of the play are welded together not through the normal theatrical mechanisms of dialogue and encounter, but because they are part of Prospero’s “project.” “Their association,” says Anne Barton, “depends firstly upon the fact that all of them meet in the consciousness of Prospero.”48 The various groups on the island—the court party of Antonio, Sebastian, Alonso, and Gonzalo, the new lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda, and the conspirators Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban, have been ignorant of each other’s existence until the last scene. Yet the drive of the play is to bring their separate fantasies and conversations—about marriage, about conspiracy, about grief and guilt—into relation. For all of them this will involve the encounter with others and the reality of others’ thoughts, feelings, and utterances. It is to Prospero’s crucial encounters with the minds of others that I now turn. This can be understood only by addressing Prospero’s relation to language.

Prospero, Language, and Other Minds

Critics have debated at length the nature of Prospero’s magic arts. Counterpointed with Sycorax, yet using the words of Ovid’s Medea, Prospero’s secret studies have nurtured the political ambitions of those around him and away from prudential rulership. It is clear, then, that the magic arts are linked to a conversation about rule: service, servitude, and lordship, instruction and education, the idealist neoplatonizing vision of masque, and the ambitions of empire as Shakespeare alludes to Virgilian Rome, and the widow Dido left behind at its founding (2.1.77–86).49 Yet the most important dimension of Prospero’s relation to magic is its relation to language. Above all, what Prospero’s magic gives him is a way of autonomizing language, and so of relating to others in such a way that he does not have to be exposed in language. Above all, this power is predicated on avoiding his own exposure in language. To become too obsessed about the exact nature of Prospero’s magic (John Dee, Marcilio Ficino, etc.) is, then, to miss the more central point about language itself.

It is clear enough that his magic gives him power over others. He can send them into a stupefied sleep at any point; he can prevent Ferdinand, for example, from drawing his sword, and he can put to sleep and awake the courtly party at will. He can also render himself invisible so that he can watch others without their seeing that he is watching them. Thus, he watches over the supposedly clandestine betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda, and he watches over the eucharistic banquet brought and removed by Ariel to bring the guilty men to penitence. “My high charms work,” he says,

And these, mine enemies, are all knit up

In their distractions. They are now in my pow’r

And in these fits I leave them.

(3.3.88–91)

Prospero’s charms are a kind of speech act that exercise a hypnotic effect over their victims; they are not words addressed to the freedom of the other, but rather treat that other as the mere instrument of a predetermined will. They require no response that might surprise the charmer. And so the charmer never has to be singled out or exposed in his own responses. So this use of language gives him a full exposure to others without ever exposing himself in any way.

His magic is thus a way of imagining that he can overcome or supersede the damages and dangers of the past without acknowledgment. Or rather, it allows him to imagine that he can be acknowledged on his terms alone. Since acknowledgment must be mutual, this is no acknowledgment at all. He imagines recovering his kingdom with an accusation only. In confronting the conspirators he hopes and expects not only restitution, but their remorse. But he bypasses the necessity for expression in this endeavor; he bypasses any mutuality of response in his dealings with others. Why would he want to do this?

It will be impossible to motivate this question, at least to give it a nonmoralistic answer, without thinking about the central discourse about “becoming human” in the play. I have suggested that Ariel tutors Prospero in an appropriate response of pity rather than vengeance, one which seems to motivate Prospero’s relinquishment of magic, which means in the play his relinquishment over a certain kind of instrumentalizing language. To relinquish such language is to put yourself on the same ground as the others; it is to risk your own expression and response, your own legibility, and hence vulnerability, to others. The Tempest turns out to be a play about the task and difficulty of “becoming human.”

Becoming Human

Surely being human is not a task; is it not just a fact of our biology? Caliban is clearly a man; we are told he has a human shape. Yet, taking cues from the various ascriptions of him by other characters, he has been variously portrayed as a fish, a dog with one or two heads, a lizard, a monkey, a snake, half-ape, half-man with fins for arms, the missing link, and even a tortoise.50 In fact, the stage history of Caliban, including his description by Prospero as a “savage and deformed slave” and his racialization, is itself testimony that to see someone as human is a task. We characteristically say in our criticisms of the deadening cruelties of slave societies, that slave-owners treated their slaves like animals; that they do not see slaves as human beings. In The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell argues that this phrase cannot be meant:

When he wants to be served at table by a black hand, he would not be satisfied to be served by a black paw. When he rapes a slave or takes her as concubine, he does not feel he has, by that fact itself, embraced sodomy…. He does not go to great length to convert his horses to Christianity or to prevent their getting wind of it. Everything in his relation to his slaves shows that he treats them as more or less human—his humiliations of them, his disappointments, his jealousies, his fears, his punishments, his attachments.51

Slave-owners, he suggests, are not missing a piece of information—that slaves are, after all, human beings. What, then, are slave-owners missing? Cavell suggests that the slave-owner takes himself to be “private in respect to them, unknowable to them.” As well as power over the slaves, he thus has “power over his experience in relation to them.” For Cavell, this means that he has placed the slaves outside the circle of linguistic mutuality and therefore justice. Should he stop seeing himself as having that power, or they find the power to acknowledge him in terms other than his mastery, he might see himself through their eyes and know that they had seen themselves through his.52 Another way of putting this might be: he can speak for the slave, but the slave cannot speak for him.

Prospero regards himself as the sole authority, if you like, on himself, but the result is that he remains unknown, unimplicated in the lives of others. Cavell’s assessment here is reliant on his reading of Wittgenstein’s “private language argument” in the Philosophical Investigations. Most commentators read Wittgenstein’s remarks here as an argument about the impossibility of the private linguist’s attempts. Language is public and shared. The private linguist cannot do what he wants to do and, when we try to imagine this, we fail. Cavell, however, reads the moral of the argument less as a thesis than as the release of a fantasy of a desire to be inexpressive. If we have a picture of language in which we are the sole authority on the inner objects in our own minds and in which we cannot make these known to others, then we are released from the responsibility of making ourselves known to others. So the fantasy expresses the extent to which language is shared and why we might seek to deny or evade this fact. Here our expressiveness becomes a burden we cannot escape. The fantasy gives us an escape route at the price of our own immense loneliness and isolation. This too has been Prospero’s fantasy; the play gives it expression and release.53

This is essentially Prospero’s predicament in The Tempest, and it is why I insist on the island as the place of necessary expression and encounter, not a place fully internal to the workings of Prospero’s mind. To conceive it in this way is to extend the hold of this fantasy and the loneliness and isolation it ensures.

Prospero’s harnessing of the power of magic is a wish to escape his terrible vulnerability as he confronts the murderous conspirators. In his case, as in so many others, nothing is more human than the desire to escape being human. Prospero’s relation to language, his charms, his spells, his aspirations to be more than human are both an attempt to escape his vulnerabilities to others, and his exposure to them. This attempt involves a theatricalization of others, and this is why the play is also an exploration of the resources of theater in the task of acknowledgment.

It is the last scene which gives us the clearest way of seeing both the models of theater at work here, and the difficulty of acknowledgment, and its relation to the task of becoming human.

They cannot boudge till your release

Prospero vows to relinquish his charms and magic; this means that he will relinquish, as I have argued, a particular relation to language. Is this borne out by the last scene? What versions of theater and theatricality does the last scene offer?

The island is the place, as Simon Palfrey has phrased it, of “perilous repentance, projection and self-rehearsal.”54 It is a place which each of the characters imagines he can create in his own image: a place where one might make oneself a fortune, gain a kingdom, imagine a perfect social order, restore all that was once taken from you. In the final scene it is as if all these individual psyches and groups are to meet together, to be confronted with each other in such a way as to place limits on each other’s projections. So the language of “coming to the senses,” of materializing, is the language of giving form and shape to a new community of memory, one in communion with others. Is there to be a brave new world? Can it be founded in the renovation of forgiveness? What forms of acknowledgment are entailed in such a project?

What seems most striking in the careful orchestration of this last scene is the way in which mutuality of response is still pointedly averted. The men of sin are brought in and stand within a charmed circle. The spell that has kept them in wonder and amazement, and immobilized their bodies and their minds, is about to wear off. The recognitions and realizations of the last scene await. In the last three great scenes of recognition we have explored in Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, it is the mutuality of response that is lovingly evoked in scenes that extend the vocabulary of theater. Here, it seems that mutuality is at first avoided. Let us first examine some of these avoidances and what is at stake in them.

Prospero’s first words address the “solemn air” that accompanies the entrance of Ariel escorting the men of sin to the charmed circle:

A solemn air, and the best comforter

To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains.

(5.1.58)

Is “cure thy brains” a command, an entreaty, a prayer, an invocation? Any decision we make about this is an assessment of Prospero’s new relation to language and the extent of his “reformation.” If this is not yet clear, it is at least clear that none of those who stand charmed are capable of a response until line 106. For nearly fifty lines he talks at them, not to them, veering between direct apostrophe and third-person speech in a highly unstable combination. If he is intensely aware of their presence, they are not aware of his presence at all. He cries when he sees Gonzalo “falls fellowly drops” (l. 64), and the implicit stage directions we can read from his speech tells us that they are beginning to stir. At this point he addresses Gonzalo and speaks to him, but it is clear that Gonzalo and Alonso cannot at this point respond to him, so his own words, his expression of fellow-feeling, his accusation of Alonso, and his deep sense of betrayal by Sebastian—including the words of forgiveness—are uttered in the absence of any possible response. “I do forgive thee / Unnatural though thou art” (5.2.78–79) precedes “Their understanding / Begins to swell” (5.1.79–80). Here is the crucial line: “Not one of them / That yet looks on me or would know me.” This implies they are looking at him but without any recognition. It is at this point that Ariel fetches the hat and rapier in his cell, and he now presents himself as the former Milan. But he is playing fancy dress. He is no longer or not yet Milan. He is staging himself for them. If they recognize him as the former Milan, they will not see what they have reduced him to, and he might hope to elicit their awe, but not their compassion. After he is reclothed in these new garments, Gonzalo begins to stir, and after this Prospero announces himself. This is not quite “It is I, Hamlet the Dane,” but a kind of self-conjuring: “Behold, sir King / The wronged Duke of Milan, Prospero” (5.2.107–8). When Alonso begins to come to a realization of something outside of his own dazed senses, Prospero replies to Gonzalo, and then when he tries to embrace him, Gonzalo replies, not to Prospero but to Alonso—“whether this be or be not, I’ll not swear” (5.2.123–24). Prospero then addresses them all, singling out Sebastian and Antonio in an aside. Sebastian assumes that he is the devil or someone bewitched, and so that he is not seeing a human being at all.

Prospero then appears to speak directly to Antonio—first forgiving not him, but his rankest fault, and then demanding the restoration of his kingdom. There is, of course, no spoken response from Antonio. Then he embarks on the last round of his working on them—his last piece of theater—saying to Alonso he has lost his daughter, and collapsing the two tempests—“in this last tempest” (5.1.153). Then he unfolds another spectacle as he discloses Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess: “I will requite you with as good a thing / At least bring forth a wonder to content ye / As much as me my dukedom.” Antonio never responds to him, but he has in fact carefully calculated all his words to them as words to which they cannot respond. When they come to, he has had the chance to re-present himself as one-time Milan, and he can produce the two lovers as a fait accompli—the future unfolded in an instant.

It is as if he can reveal himself in his vulnerability as the one wronged only when they cannot see him, when they cannot therefore acknowledge him as the one they have wronged. So this freezing has the effect of being able to isolate out in time the reactions first, of the wronged to the wrongers, and then, of the wrongers to the wronged. And perhaps this is part of the point of this temporal delay. The response will not be simultaneous. This is crucial. Prospero has always tried to protect himself from the responses of others. He wants to see them but not be seen. In this way he withholds himself from any just response. His is a flight from the particularity of relationship, and the doubleness, the essential mutuality of acknowledgment. When I acknowledge, I am exposed to the other and to my concept of the other. (We don’t know when we have reached the limits of acknowledgment, and therefore when and whether we are avoiding it.) Acknowledgment singles out the knower and the known.

The play has offered us a series of ways of thinking about theater, and its powers and limits: the masque and the feast are opposed images of spectatorship and participation that themselves compose meta-theatrical spectacles of gazing and looking on. In this last scene we are offered a different model of theater and theatricalization. This scene explores and exposes a fantasy of nonreciprocal response. And this of course is a model of theater. In theater, as Stanley Cavell has discussed, the characters we see before us are in our presence. That is part of our task in theater—to make them present to us. This means responding to them with all our powers of empathic projection. But we are not in their presence. To be in their presence would simply mean to dissolve the show. The conditions of theater itself relieve us from the perennially endless task of our own expressiveness in respect of others, of our perpetual response to others.55 Because we are not present to them, we do not have to do anything in relation to our own responses; we can’t do anything. We are enjoined to “suffer with those we see suffer,” but relieved of the responsibility of having to act on the basis of our felt responses. In everyday life we are never relieved of this burden of response and responsibility.

Prospero relinquishes his charms; he begins therefore to place himself as a man among men; but he still wishes to evade his own legibility to others. He theatricalizes himself, withholding himself from others until the last. Theatricalization is here understood as any act that makes my face or yours a mask.56 If I withhold my emotions from my face, and from my language, I am presenting you with a role. If I also refuse to grant that your expressions are yours, I do the same thing, make a role for you.

Miranda can brave a response of wonder and of warmth, but her exemplary empathic projections, her capacity for compassion and wonder are, we are informed, based on her innocence, an innocence which must nevertheless be cherished, for the future will depend upon it. Can wonder and pity survive experience, betrayal, irreparable loss, powerlessness?

Prospero has tried to be beyond the human and has therefore rendered himself inhuman, and nothing is more human than this. The brave new world discovered in The Tempest abjures the Pauline language of putting on the new man, for the new can only be patiently made out of the old and the fallen. The projects of any total renovation are empty, as in Gonzalo’s utopian fantasies.

It is not therefore surprising that an air of disappointment hangs over the ending of this play. Scholars have often read a Shakespearean biography in this ending. It is Shakespeare’s last singly authored play; so it is his farewell to the stage and its limits before he crawls toward death in Stratford upon Avon.57 But there is no need to posit a Shakespearean biography for this disappointment. Perhaps if we make the disappointment a part of the story of Shakespeare’s life, we will not have to make it part of our own story.

The ending of this play is not disappointing simply because it is so unresolved: the silent Antonio, the ambiguous response of Sebastian, the premature consolation of Gonzalo which does not seem to sum up the play we ourselves have seen, all these make any definitive closure impossible. It is disappointing because it returns us to inescapably human horizons, and we long for more than those. To return to those merely human horizons is to return to the circuits of linguistic exchange and the limits of our own desire to express ourselves, and read each other’s expressions. The disappointments of the ending turn out to be fully internal to the view of language Shakespeare has been intent on articulating. The conclusion of this great play is, it turns out, the unsurpassable horizon of our mutual responses to others. This is what forms and founds community; not the epic Virgilian drives of Aeneas in his founding of Rome, nor the ceaseless counter-epic transformations that inform the Ovidian unpicking of that epic in Medean witchcraft and its powers. Nothing underwrites this community, or can act as its guarantor; it can come to no final resolution, but only commit itself to future conversations that cannot supersede the horizons of our agreements in language.58

In the last few sublime lines of the play, actor, character and audience meet in the speech act of prayer.

Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,

Which pierces so, that it assaults

Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon’d be

Let your indulgence set me free.

(Epilogue 13–20).

The words of the actor pass over to the prayers of the audience and the mutual longing for a mercy necessary to all. Pardon comes not from a sovereign will but is granted from sinner to sinner in mutual acknowledgment, forgiving as we are forgiven. Only in this way, without enforcement, without enchantment, can art yield its good works.