The Tempest

Performances
Plot Synopsis
Dates
Sources
“Of Wonders and Wondering”

Performances

Wednesday, November 1, 7:30pm
Thursday, November 2, 1:30pm
Thursday, November 2, 7:30pm
Sunday, November 5, 1:30pm
Tuesday, November 7, 7:30pm
Friday, November 10, 7:30pm
Sunday, November 12, 1:30pm

Performance will last approximately 2 hours and 40 minutes, including one 20-minute intermission.

Power Center for the Performing Arts
121 Fletcher Street

The Tempest is sponsored by Pfizer.

Individual Performances supported by Gil Omenn, Martha Darling, and David Omenn

Plot Synopsis

The play begins with a tempestuous storm at sea. Twelve years ago Prospero, the Duke of Milan, was usurped by his brother Antonio with the support of Alonso, King of Naples, and the king’s brother, Sebastian. But for the help of Alonso’s advisor, Gonzalo, he would have been killed with his only daughter Miranda. Gonzalo furnished them with the means to survive, including Prospero’s precious books, and cast them to sea. They eventually landed on a remote island, once ruled by the witch Sycorax, but now inhabited by her only son Caliban.

Upon his arrival Prospero released Ariel, a powerful spirit who had been enslaved, then imprisoned, by Sycorax before she died. Ariel promised to remain in Prospero’s service for the next 13 years. He adopted Caliban as a student and taught him with Miranda, until he attempted to rape her.

Prospero, aware that this is an auspicious day, has seen that a passing ship contains his brother and the co-conspirators. Prospero commands Ariel to raise a storm to shipwreck the usurpers, so he can execute his revenge.

On the island the stranded travellers are separated, with the invisible Ariel directing their wanderings. The King of Naples searches for his son Ferdinand, fearing he has drowned. The king’s brother plots to kill him and seize the crown. The drunken butler, Stephano, and the chef Trinculo encounter Caliban and are persuaded to kill Prospero so they can rule the island.

Ferdinand meets Miranda and the two fall instantly in love. Prospero sets heavy tasks to test Ferdinand and when he is satisfied that he has met all challenges, Prospero presents the young couple with a betrothal ceremony celebrating, and testing, their new unity.

As Prospero’s plan draws to its climax, he vows that upon its completion he will abandon his magic arts. Ariel brings the king and his followers to Prospero and he confronts his enemies.

Finally, Prospero grants Ariel his freedom and prepares to leave the island for Milan and his Dukedom.

Dates

The Tempest is the last complete play solely attributed to Shakespeare. The Revels Accounts state that it was presented at Court by Shakespeare’s Company in 1611, and it was printed in the First Folio in 1623.

Sources

The plot draws on folk tale and the romantic comedies of the day, and there are also linguistic echoes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the story and characters of The Tempest are Shakespeare’s own. He was influenced by the tide of exploration occurring at the time, in particular accounts of the shipwreck of a colonizing vessel, the Sea Adventurer, off the coast of Bermuda in 1609. The Tempest is Shakespeare’s only play apart from The Comedy of Errors to observe the classical convention of setting the action in a single location in a single day.

Of Wonders and Wondering

Marina Warner reflects on the power of The Tempest to challenge and inspire

Marina Warner is a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history. Her novel Indigo is a reworking of The Tempest.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays have generated lives beyond the text: Romeo & Juliet, the star-cross’d lovers; Iago, the evil counselor; Hamlet, who has become a generic figure of human personality. But the cast of characters in The Tempest and the tensions between them have inspired a myriad other metamorphoses. Musicians, poets, novelists, film-makers, and other playwrights have taken off from the situation that Shakespeare created. In The Tempest, unusually for him, Shakespeare was not working with an existing story from cosmopolitan folklore or historical chronicles. He had a “true report” — of a shipwreck in the New World, of its survivors’ experiences on an island, and the kindness of strangers there to them. But little else provided the matter of the play. He invented a cluster of people in tense relations in an enchanted and enclosed space, and something open and enigmatic in this creation has turned into a site of unending, ongoing fascination and discussion. It is a play filled with wonders, a mythopoeic poem which opens up lines of inquiry and of wonder: “to wonder” —mirari—is the [Latin] verb that is the key to Miranda’s name, and the mode which both she and Caliban use to describe their new encounters.

Although Prospero dominates the action and commands, even enslaves, all comers, The Tempest has stimulated so many re-interpretations because the magnetic pole of attraction keeps shifting away from him towards others—the secondary roles exert powerful influence on us, the audience, the readers. This dispersed focus of the dramatic interest, so characteristic of the later plays—the “romances” —arises from the quality they share with Miranda and Caliban, their questioning, circling negotiations of the experiences set before us on stage.

Late plays like The Tempest take issue with their great predecessors and modify the principles of classic drama in a mood of interrogation. The dominating dynamics of destiny no longer hold, as the playwright refuses that ineluctable train of events that impels the tragic heroes. Instead, he seems intent on dramatizing how interdependency between people can shape passions to different ends, how someone can discover how to move out of character and behave differently (this sounds banal, but it is revolutionary). For example The Tempest begins with Prospero’s usurpation by his brother, and follows his plans to avenge himself, but the play focuses on Prospero’s legal, dynastic, and familial provisions for others in the future.

This differs radically from Hamlet’s disturbance at his situation. Charles Lamb noticed this lacuna, and at the very start of his account of the play in his anthology Tales from Shakespeare, he explains that Hamlet is a young man who has been plunged into melancholy with good reason, as in spite of being the prince, he has not inherited the throne of Denmark, but been supplanted by his uncle.

Lamb’s offered rationale is far too pat and pragmatic: the tragedian in Shakespeare was never so interested in logical behavior, but rather fascinated by irrationality and the death drive. In The Tempest, such imperatives now interest Shakespeare far less, whereas inconsistency, forgetting, and the demands of futurity—with their attendant consequences of self-transformation—become rich psychological possibilities. This new way of characterizing has something to do with Gonzalo’s dream of a commonwealth in which nobody would tyrannize over others, and nobody would have to strive, but could remain idle and thrive.

This difference—between the intensely psychological and interior journeys in Hamlet and the social goals of Prospero’s purposes and prospects—shows Shakespeare arguing (wondering) about new possibilities and ideas through his characters, even more than through their natures, and specifically political and ethical ideas about power relations.

The “romances” are hard to classify, and the term only captures a part of their distinctiveness. The mercy and hope communicated by the reconciliation scenes at the close open horizons of possibility that can hardly fail to stir an audience to reciprocate. But with mixed feelings: enigmas linger with a difference in the aftermath. Some directors—as well as attentive readers—have noticed how, unlike the whole-hearted resolutions of the comedies, the final scenes of these plays find Shakespeare oddly at a loss for words, lapsing into crucial silences, silences that throw a shadow on the general festivity: Hermione does not speak to Leontes after her return to life. Auden, listening in carefully to Antonio, sounds a dissenting note of rejection in the general harmony at the end of The Tempest (“Your all is partial, Prospero;/My will is all my own…”), and many interpreters have made something dark of Prospero’s last ambiguous comment about Caliban, this “thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” and have found it equally troubling that Caliban’s resolve to “seek for grace” receives no response.

After the leggy plotting of Cymbeline and Pericles, Shakespeare abruptly turned away from unfolding a tale over time to reflect on questions of almost abstract character by making a present space for wonder. The temporal dimension of The Tempest resembles less the compressed unity of Sophoclean drama, to which it has been admiringly compared, than the elegant diurnal idling of the meditation, the essay, or even the sermon. Gonzalo’s speech about his ideal ruler, his commonwealth, and nature’s bounty contains several direct echoes of a famous essay—Des Cannibales, by Montaigne—whom Shakespeare was reading in John Florio’s translation (l603). Today, to reprise this theme with such explicit resonances would be like taking up a recent Booker Prize winner or other hotly discussed book.

Montaigne’s essays foreshadow the great writers of wonder in the coming decades—Robert Burton ( The Anatomy of Melancholy first appeared a decade after The Tempest), and a little deeper into the 17th century, Thomas Browne, whose marvelous thinking on the page about customs, curiosities, and virtue also fashioned this new approach in literature. John Donne, Shakespeare’s contemporary (his sermons sometimes written to mark a wedding, as The Tempest might have been), expands on complex ideas and dreams of goodness, spiraling lovely skeins of metaphors to do so. In this spirit, The Tempest could be subtitled “Of Wonders and Wondering,” or “On Princeliness and the Ideal Commonwealth,” or, perhaps, “Of The Print of Goodness.” By the time the play was staged, the Jacobean audience was growing accustomed to reflecting through drama and poetry on ideas, values, ways of thinking and behaving. Shakespeare’s wise, good counselor Gonzalo voices the play’s philosophizing bent, imagining the principles—kindness, tolerance, and freedom—that, in the end, will overturn Prospero’s near-fatal reliance on one-man tyranny and the uses of enchantment.