Shakespeare

For the winter season in late 1611 he returned to court with two new plays. In the revels accounts there are references, on 5 November, to “A play Called ye winters nightes Tale.” Four days before, “Hallomas nyght was presented att Whithall before ye kinges Maiestie a play Called the Tempest.”⁶ No significance can be read into the date of All Hallows, 1 November, when the poor would sing for soul-cakes. Yet there remains an air of enchantment, not unmixed with melancholy, about Shakespeare’s last completed play. He would collaborate with other dramatists in future productions, lending his skills and experience to the work of others, but The Tempest has the distinction of being the final work he wrote alone.

As in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale there are large elements of masque and music in The Tempest. It seems very likely that he wrote the play for production in the indoors playhouse of Blackfriars. It is very specifically designed for intervals between the acts, particularly that between the fourth and fifth act, when music would be played. Ariel and Prospero leave the stage together at the end of the fourth act, and then enter together at the beginning of the fifth. This would not have been possible at the Globe, where action was continuous and uninterrupted.

Shakespeare’s imagination was always roused by the sea. It is no accident, therefore, that he was drawn to the recently published accounts of colonial voyages. Two years previously, some colonists on their way to Jamestown, in Virginia, were blown by a severe storm onto the Bermudas. Shakespeare had read their adventures. He had also read a book entitled A True and Sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia as well as Silvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels, both published in 1610. He was already acquainted with some of the principal members of the Virginia Company, such as the Earl of Pembroke, and he had ready access to first-hand accounts of mutiny and insubordination among some of the colonists. He read Montaigne’s essay, “Of the Canniballes,” in Florio’s translation. He remembered Marlowe’s Faustus, and his schoolboy reading of Ovid and of the storm in Virgil’s Aeneid. There was a riding-master in London called Prospero. So all these things came together, stirred by the report of a great storm.

The Tempest begins with a great shipwreck with its “tempestuous noise of Thunder and Lightning” and the entrance of the mariners “wet.” From this first scene onward, Shakespeare explores in a wholly practical sense all the possibilities of the indoors stage. It is a play of almost continuous spectacle. There are songs with “solemne and strange Musicke” in a drama that is accompanied by music composed once more by Robert Johnson. The late plays could easily be identified as works “by Shakespeare and Johnson.” The elaborate effects of magic and the supernatural are also accompanied by instruments, as, for example, in the scene where the spirits enter “in seuerall strange shapes, bringing in a Table and a Banket; and dance about it with gentle actions of salutations.” And there was of course now the almost obligatory inclusion of the masque, heralded once more by music and by the goddess Juno’s descent upon the stage. Then enter “certaine Reapers (properly habited:) they ioyne with the Nimphes, in a gracefull dance” until they are dismissed by Prospero with the utterance of some of the most famous lines in all of Shakespeare (1612-14):

… we are such stuffe

As dreames are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleepe.

Shakespeare has created the most artificial of all plays that becomes a meditation upon artifice itself. The Tempest also has the distinction of using a classical form, with the unities of time and place, for the purpose of conveying completely non-classical, which is to say magical, effects. It is as if he were, like Prospero, writing a lesson in theatrical enchantment. It is sometimes concluded that Prospero is an image of Shakespeare himself, renouncing his “potent art” at the close of a successful theatrical career. But that seems an unwarranted supposition. There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare deemed his theatrical career to be at an end. The model for Prospero might in any case have been Doctor John Dee, the magus of Mortlake (where Shakespeare once stayed) who declared that he had burned his books of magic.