William Shakespeare was forty-seven years old when he wrote The Tempest, and no one since 1611, when the play was first performed, has failed to notice that Shakespeare made the play into his formal farewell to the theater. The Tempestwas Shakespeare’s thirty-sixth play and, after twenty-three astonishing years of playwriting, he recapitulated in one of his shortest plays all the major themes and visions that had shaped his early romantic comedies, his many English histories, and the monumental tragedies of his maturity. Although we do not know why Shakespeare retired from the stage so relatively young (he died in Stratford-on-Avon five years later at 52), we do know that a series of pamphlets and first-hand reports of a strangely fortunate shipwreck in Bermuda triggered his invention of the plot of The Tempest.
One of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, The Tempestis steeped in the feverish excitement generated by the New World discoveries of the early colonizers of the Americas. Although the explicit geography within the play would logically place the magic island setting somewhere in the Mediterranean (between Naples and Tunis), The Tempestis clearly set in an imaginary place closer in tone to the “New World” that was invading the consciousness of Europe. In September of 1610, surviving passengers and crew of the Sea Adventure, the flagship of a nine-ship expedition that had set out from England fifteen months earlier, bound for the fledgling colony of Virginia, returned to England with a transfixing tale of adventure, shipwreck, and seemingly-miraculous survival. Internal evidence within The Tempestmakes it clear that Shakespeare read the published accounts, as well as a privately circulated letter by one William Strachey, whose description of the hurricane that wrecked the Sea Adventure, along with the narrative of the passengers’ and crew’s survival for many months on Bermuda, set the popular imagination of London into a frenzy.
Strachey and others described how the stranded Europeans not only survived unscathed the wreck of the Sea Adventure but managed months of surprisingly convivial habitation on a deserted island that had hitherto been shunned by sailors because of its reputation for enchantment by spirits and devils. The imaginary life Shakespeare gave the exiled Prospero, his daughter Miranda, and Prospero’s two attendants: the airy spirit Ariel and the monster Caliban, is essentially conditioned by tales of Bermuda. The intrepid real-life survivors of the Sea Adventure eventually rescued themselves in a pair of new-made boats that they fabricated on the island. They amazed their fellow colonists in Virginia by sailing into Jamestown one day–ten months after they had been separated from the rest of the fleet and given up for lost at sea. When the most prominent among the survivors returned to London the following September, their tale set the whole city abuzz with excitement, and the furor was used to recruit new colonists and raise funds for further investment in the Virginia plantation. Shakespeare immediately started writing The Tempest. We who are New Englanders know all too well that only nine years after Shakespeare finished the play, a bold boatload of similarly inspired pilgrims first set foot here, and we are living out the sequel to this day of the sort of wildly improbable adventure Shakespeare was alluding to in The Tempest. We will be opening the play around Thanksgiving, a colonial feast for which a prototype exists in the play.
Shakespeare had evidently pondered the complex problem of colonizing the New World even earlier than the return of William Strachey. One of his other undisputed sources for The Tempestis an essay by Montaigne–published in France in 1580 and available in English translation since 1603–entitled “Of Cannibals.” Caliban, whose name is an obvious anagram of Cannibal, seems to have been added to the play via Montaigne, who is also a source for the deeper meditations the play contains on cultural relativism and the vexed question of European colonial prerogatives. It is arresting, to say the least, to discover in our own moment of strident debate over “multi-culturalism” that Montaigne wrote (and Shakespeare read) passages such as the following some four hundred years ago:
Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country: as, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live. There [where we live] is always ‘the perfect religion,’ there ‘the perfect government,’ there ‘the perfect’ everything.
Shakespeare places his Prospero in the center of a new world he must order according to the best lights provided by his common sense and the wisdom of his whole tradition. His ideal rule over the sparsely inhabited island in which the play takes place is both an affirmation and a reconstruction of all that renaissance European culture could offer by way of enlightenment and experience. And debate continues to this day over the implications in this play. What are we to make in 1995, for instance, of the spectacle of a Prospero who, having tried to educate the “native” savage Caliban, finds the brute’s capacity for culture and self-restraint so limited that he takes on himself the problematic charge of subjecting and governing him? Montaigne had his own specific sources for his meditations on cannibals and the increasingly frequent interactions of European settlers with primitive native cultures. He relied heavily on tales told to him by one of the men who worked his seigniorial estate in the placid Dordogne valley.
This unnamed manservant had traveled to the New World with the French explorer Villegaignon in 1557, and spent twelve years of his life in a region known in the sixteenth century as “Antarctic France.” This region is part of present-day Brazil. Through the specific details of Montaigne’s probing and ruminative essay, Shakespeare thus absorbed and conflated early reports of Brazil with the Bermuda chronicles, and the resulting synthesis of these suggestive sources became a devised world of his own: a symbolic site for playing out issues of guilt, conscience, and retribution (a fundamentally Christian agenda with its roots in the Middle Ages), but also an ideal place in which to test and elucidate the necessary restraints of government and those rights of human freedom, which two centuries later the European Enlightenment would call “inalienable.”
The fact that Shakespeare almost certainly read Montaigne’s essay in its entirety (he quotes from it almost verbatim in II,i) conjures visions of a titanic intellectual collision as significant and eventually culture-shaping as the more literal historical collisions of Europeans with the populations and the geography of the New World. In the upcoming American Repertory Theater production, director Ron Daniels and set designer John Conklin (who together created the epic staging of Shakespeare’s Henry plays over the past two seasons) have translated such notions scenically into a large-scale visual collision between highly wrought European technological instruments and the edgeless elemental form of massive sand dunes. Montaigne’s essay also evoked the shifting sands of time in a startling passage that, long before the scientific enlightenment, imagines its way to an apprehension of geological time and huge geotectonic processes that dwarf the ever-faltering enterprises of men. Shakespeare carried into The Tempestsimilar preoccupations with the mechanisms of history. His elemental plot lays bare the faithlessness and cruelty of faltering human visions of the good, and through his agent Ariel (the embodiment of his poetic “magic”) Shakespeare/Prospero reveals to the misguided the error of their ways.
There is, of course, something wistful and ironic in the vision, for in the fantasy world of the play, making a show and pageant of Prospero’s version of the truth suffices to bring about a just resolution. The pat artificiality with which the dramaturgy accomplishes its ends is almost a despairing jest, a last wish that in the “real” world, justice might actually be so easily achieved. The Tempestdoes not take place in the “real” world, but in a strange way, neither did the European invasion of America: it was a blatant projection of hopes, fears, prejudices, and unchecked desires upon an unsuspecting continent, which was subjected to the excruciating ordeal (still in progress) of becoming every Tom, Dick, and, Harry’s idea of Eden. The righteous and irascible indignation Shakespeare lends to Prospero is akin to Montaign’s uncanny prescience in questioning the supposed superiority of our technological methods and artifacts as they assaulted the natural places, plants, and creatures of the New World. This theme of European exploitation, the collision of indoor court habits with outdoor island life, enriched with Brazilian and variously American imagery, will be central to the Daniels’ Tempest.
Suggestive as are all Shakespeare’s sources in real tales of travel and exploration, The Tempestdefies any rules of logic or geographical consistency because it takes place essentially in the mind of the poet. The world as we know it never appears in The Tempest. It is set, as Ariel reminds us at one of the climaxes of the play III, iii), in an “island where man doth not inhabit.” While it is demonstrably true that Shakespeare’s mind was flooded at the end of his career with tales of the New World, he exploited these metaphorically, finding in the idea of colonization and its infinite promise of renewal and regeneration, potent paradigms for redemptive internal processes within individual consciences. For Shakespeare, The Tempestwas a valedictory address, dispensing all that his observation and his dramaturgy had taught him about the human psyche, its self-knowledge, and its artistic means of self-representation. The poet Seamus Heaney–honored just weeks ago with the 1995 Nobel prize–might just as well have been talking of The Tempestwhen he wrote:
Art is not an inferior reflection of some ordained heavenly system but a rehearsal of it in earthly terms; art does not trace the given map of a better reality but improvises an inspired sketch of it.
A gifted cast is hard at work limning just such an inspired sketch, and we all look forward around Thanksgiving time (and on into December) to welcoming audiences to Ron Daniels’ vision of Shakespeare’s brave new world.
