The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

The Tempest is full of music of all kinds, yet it is not one of the plays in which, in a symbolic sense, harmony and con­cord finally triumph over dissonant disorder. The three roman­tic comedies which precede it, Pericles, Cymheline, and The Winter's Tale, and which deal with similar themes, injustice, plots, separation, all end in a blaze of joy—the wrongers re­pent, the wronged forgive, the earthly music is a true reflec­tion of the heavenly. The Tempest ends much more sourly. The only wrongdoer who expresses genuine repentance is Alonso; and what a world of difference there is between Cym- beline's "Pardon's the word to all," and Prospero's

For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive Thy rankest fault—all of them; and require My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know Thou must restore.

Justice has triumphed over injustice, not because it is more harmonious, but because it commands superior force; one might even say because it is louder.

The wedding masque is peculiar and disturbing. Ferdinand and Miranda, who seem as virginal and innocent as any fairy story lovers, are first treated to a moral lecture on the danger of anticipating their marriage vows, and the theme of the masque itself is a plot by Venus to get them to do so. The masque is not allowed to finish, but is broken off suddenly by Prospero, who mutters of another plot, "that foul conspiracy of the beast Caliban and his confederates against my life." As an entertain­ment for a wedding couple, the masque can scarcely be said to have been a success.

Prospero is more like the Duke in Measure for Measure than any other Shakespearian character. The victory of Justice which he brings about seems rather a duty than a source of joy to himself.

I'll bring you to your ship and so to Naples Where I have hope to see the nuptials Of these our dear-beloved solemnis'd And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave.

The tone is not that of a man who, putting behind him the vanities of mundane music, would meditate like Queen Katharine "upon that celestial harmony I go to," but rather of one who longs for a place where silence shall be all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He has been a resident of the United States since 1939 and an American citizen since 1946. Educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and at Christ Church College, Oxford, he be­came associated with a small group of young writers in London —among them Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood— who became recognized as the most promising of the new generation in English letters. He collaborated with Isherwood on the plays of The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F-6 and On the Frontier, as well as on Journey to a War, a prose record of experience in China. He has edited many anthologies including The Oxford Book of Light Verse and, with Norman Holmes Pearson, Poets of the English Language. In collabora­tion with Chester Kallman he has also written the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera, The Rake's Progress and Hans Henze's opera, Elegy for Young Lovers.

Mr. Auden is the author of several volumes of poetry, in­cluding The Double Man, For the Time Being, The Age of Anxiety, Nones, and The Shield of Achilles, which received the National Book Award in 1956. That same year he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford University. His Selected Poetry appears in the Modern Library. His most recent col­lection of poems is Homage to Clio, published in i960.

[1] Ebenezer Elliott, quoted by Aldous Huxley in Texts and Pretexts.

[2] AH the women I have met who drank heavily were lighter and thinner than average.