Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

Many of the twentieth-century rewritings of The Tempest are inspired by New World concerns, and even are written from the point of view of the oppressed.

In many revisionist readings, Caliban becomes a more central and sympathetic figure.

What is most magical about the isle, however, is that in being many places at once, geographically, culturally, and mythographically hybrid, it eludes location and becomes a space for poetry, and for dream. It is not found on any map. Prospero's enchanted island, while drawn from real explorations and published accounts, is ultimately a country of the mind.

“O, I have sufferèd / With those that I saw suffer!” Miranda, whose name comes from the Latin word mirari, “to wonder at,” is the ideal spectator of tragedy and catharsis.

The question of whether art is linked primarily to ordinary being or to magical creation will lie, as we have already begun to sense, at the very heart of Shakespeare's play.

The shape of the play is predicated on the general thesis—one omnipresent in Renaissance literature and drama, and given eloquent expression in Shakespeare's plays as early as Puck's Epilogue in A Midsummer Night's Dream—that life may all be an illusion,

“our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” When Prospero enchants his beloved daughter, when Miranda sleeps, the audience is transported into the world of possibility that is also the world of theater and of art.

For the audience, the summoning of Ariel signals a fundamental shift in perception.

Thus the play is framed by the sleep of the mariners, who take no part in the action.

On a trice, so please you, Even in a dream, were we divided from them, And were brought moping hither. 5.1.241-243

In a sense, the whole play takes place during the mariners' dream, the dream of the uninformed, and the uninvolved.

It is significant, though, that for all of Ariel's capacity to describe and bring about metamorphosis, he himself remains under Prospero's control for almost the entire duration of the play.

The Tempest—a play that, unlike most by Shakespeare, obeys the three supposed classical “unities” of time, space, and action—is

“O brave new world / That has such people in't!” (5.1.186–187),

Used as thr title of a novel by Huxley.

Like other noble children raised outside the court in the romances—like Perdita in The Winter's Tale, or Guiderius and Arviragus

in Cymbeline— she exhibits a “natural” nobility and generosity of spirit that are manifestly lacking in some of the supposedly civilized Europeans who are shipwrecked on the island's shores.

Once again a cycle seems about to repeat itself—a second storm, and a second usurpation. Shakespeare's craftsmanship in this play is superbly evocative and economical,

so that such doublings and repetitions become an intrinsic, almost uncanny, part of the structure and effect of the play.

the Geneva Bible of 1560, which was Shakespeare's most likely text:

in act 2, scene 2, the strange fish comes to life, revealing itself to be Caliban, who has swallowed up his strange bedfellow, Trinculo. As with other Shakespearean comic low characters—Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream comes to mind—what is figurative or metaphorical in the “high” plot becomes literal or unmetaphored in the “low” one.

Ferdinand swiftly discovers the essential truth that a certain kind of freedom comes only through a certain kind of bondage. Again and again we hear him assert that it is in restraint that he has at last found liberty.

But if slavery is an issue that links the concerns of Shakespeare's time to those of our own, so is the question of gender and power. Why should the audience prefer Prospero the magician and his daughter Miranda over Sycorax the magician and her son Caliban? Both Sycorax and Prospero keep Ariel in a condition of bondage. What makes us choose Prospero over his predecessor?

this play is a romance or tragicomedy, and the father is playacting his opposition,

Genre

Generations of critics have identified him as a playwright, reading the play as a metadrama about Shakespeare the maker and the fictional creatures he has under his sway. Viewed in this way, Prospero becomes the end point

in a series of other “playwright figures,” from Prince Hal to Hamlet to the Duke in Measure for Measure, who cast roles and play them as a way of reordering their worlds.

in point of historical fact, The Tempest was not Shakespeare's last play,

The Tempest starts out, as we have noted, as a kind of “revenge play,” and then turns away from

that mode toward forgiveness at a crucial moment. Prospero, despite his intellectual inclinations and his paternal instincts, is as obsessed with retribution as any other English Renaissance stage revenger. And Prospero's conversion from vengeance to “virtue” comes—with a gesture typical of the late Shakespeare—through the agency of an unlikely figure. The agent of conversion is not a human being, but is instead the spirit Ariel,

Henry VIII (All Is True)

Play 37

VEN FOR THOSE who have never read or seen it, this play, initially entitled All Is True, enjoys a curious celebrity, since it was during its first performance at the Globe on June 29,1613, that the theater caught fire and burned down.

Its seriocomic events—a large-scale disaster happens, no one is injured, a man is saved by an inelegant but expeditious contrivance—could be said to mirror the typical events of tragicomedy and romance. But Henry VIII is a fascinating play in its own right.

Henry VIII was born in 1491, came to the throne in 1509, and died in 1547— sixty-six years and three monarchs prior to the date of the play that, in the Shakespeare First Folio, bears his name. By 1613 England was mourning the death of another Henry, the elder son of James I, who had died unexpectedly in 1612 at the age of eighteen.

the unhappy fate of Anne Bullen, her own fall, is not directly accounted for (although her absence indeed hints at it).

What ties these falls together, beyond their inevitability and remorseless dramatic succession (exacerbated by the play's severe truncation of historical events), is the word “divorce,” which appears, like an uncanny specter, linking the tragical plot of “falls of greatness” to the romantic plot of masque, courtship, marriage, and birth. Thus Buckingham, foreseeing his own beheading (“[e]ven as the axe falls”), calls it a “long divorce of steel” (2.1.62, 77).

Retitled when it was included among the history plays in the First Folio, Henry VIII is a play written at the end of Shakespeare's career that closes with the christening of Queen Elizabeth, and thus with the inauguration of the era that was to become so closely associated with his name.

The play was extremely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

For some scholars the fact of collaborative authorship (a common practice in the period, much as it is in screen-writing today) devalued the play,

Old Lady You would not be a queen? Anne No, not for all the riches under heaven. Old Lady 'Tis strange. A

threepence bowed would hire me, Old as I am, to queen it…. 2.3.34–37

The play is distinctive in its lengthy stage directions, which often pay meticulous attention to placement and to costumes and props, unlike the terser phrases that serve this purpose in other Shakespeare plays. The effect for the reader is one of a rich and sumptuous ceremony.

It has thd most stage directions od any Shakespeare play.

The cyclicality of structure offered by a play that ends with the birth of Elizabeth is mirrored, as well, by the clever and knowing way that locales within the play are tied to their contemporary (Jacobean) use.

Although he is often an onlooker rather than an actor in the play, Henry has a few strong dramatic moments,

And make 'em reel before 'em. No man living Could say “This is my wife” there, all were woven So strangely in one piece. 4.1.69–83

The Two Noble Kinsmen

38, Shakespeare's last

LATE PLAY, first published in 1634, The Two Noble Kinsmen is attributed, on its title page, to “the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr.

William Shakespeare, Gent.” Both Fletcher and Shakespeare were dead (Shakespeare died in 1616, Fletcher in 1625) by the time the published version appeared, but the title page cites its first performance,

Only gradually, however, has the play entered the popular Shakespeare canon, regularly taught and staged. Shakespeare had collaborated with Fletcher before, in Henry VIII, and a...

The chief source of the play is Chaucer's “Knight's Tale,” and the personae therefore have a certain commonality with Shakespeare's earlier comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream, which likewise opens with the expectation of the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and his Amazonian bride, Hippolyta.

The Two Noble Kinsmen is a tragicomedy, so described by the publisher in the Stationers' Register.

the virtues and pleasures this play offers are very considerable—it is full of magnificent poetry, and also of the kind of theatrical spectacle