Welcome from the Artistic Director

The Tempest is unique among Shakespeare’s works in many ways. It is, of course, generally considered to be his last play, the one in which (through the character of Prospero renouncing his magic), he seems to be saying his goodbye to the stage. Although The Tempest is drenched with the fatigue and resignation of old age, it is also permeated with a sense of youthful vigor. It is the only one of his works to be geographically located in the (brave) New World. Shakespeare, of course, had no personal experience of “the Bermoothes,” the land on which his tempest-tossed Renaissance Italians are to be stranded. The inhabitants of those Caribbean islands (recently in the news of Jacobean England) were as exotic to him as the “the Cannibals that each other eat, the Anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” described by Othello. Caliban (whose name is an anagram for “Cannibal”) is clearly an invention based on explorers’ reports and on the musings of Montaigne – brute man in a state of nature. And Caliban’s opposite, Ariel, is just as clearly an airy spirit borrowed from folklore and from plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream (indeed, Prospero’s diction, in speeches like “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,” makes him sound a little like an aging Oberon).

For these reasons The Tempest has always lent itself to considerable reinterpretation. Stimulated by New World ideas, George C. Wolfe’s recent New York Shakespeare Festival production was an essay on the kind of racial divisions caused when a colonial master imposes his will on a native Caribbean population. Our director, Ron Daniels–a native Brazilian himself expatriated for much of his life in England and America–has imagined the play as representing the synthesis of a variety of cultures into La Raza Cosmica, the Cosmic or fifth race. This may explain why that masque scene that Shakespeare borrowed from Beaumont and Fletcher involving Juno, Ceres, and Iris, has now been recast with characters named Americas, Europe, and Africa, the three major continents (and races) of the world.

But whatever the new interpretations, productions of The Tempest ultimately stand or fall on how well they deliver the characters and the story–a story of sin and forgiveness, of revenge softened by reconciliation, of drunken ribaldry, of magic and enchantment that test the human capacity for amazement. The Tempest is one of the first of those plays–later to be developed by the likes of Calderon (Life is a Dream) and Strindberg (A Dream Play)–that imagine our lives to be like dreams, with death not the end but the true awakening. His imagination fired by the endless possibilities of a new world, Shakespeare produced here some of his finest, most vitalized poetry. He then abandoned the stage, though still at the height of his powers, to await his own awakening in death some four years later.