The Tempest

[jsburbidge]

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see the Stratford production of The Tempest, and while it was a well produced play, with good acting and staging, they got something wrong which seems to me to relate to a fundamental change between the sort of understanding Shakespeare had and that which we have.

It's a commonplace to note that the play is, thematically, focussed on the nature / nurture polarity (and uses both terms regularly, or their synonyms). There's some playing with the (very typically Renaissance) opposition between nature and artifice, but it's mainly about nature / nurture and savage / civilized.

In writing about Tolkien, Tom Shippey quotes a Norse saying as a contrast to Lord Acton's "power corrupts": "When a man can do what he likes, he shows what he's like". Most of The Tempest reflects that pre-modern view of humanity: it's a succession of scenes which give people the opportunity to show their nature by giving them apparent power, or, at least, opportunity in its despite. Thus Ariel's casting of the Neapolitan party into sleep gives Antonio and Sebastian the chance to show their (continuing - certainly for Antonio) treacherous natures. The appearance of rich apparel left out tips Trinculo and Stephano into petty theft: as drunken sots, they can't even remain focussed on a scheme of attaining power promoted by Caliban. On the other extreme, Ferdinand's response to the harsh tasks set for him by Prospero reveals his essentially kindly and noble nature.

Even Alonso never really changes in nature: his previous actions against Prospero were hostile but not treacherous, war but not an inversion of hierarchy, and the nature he reveals is kingly even if not ideal.

Caliban represents the unchanging as the incorrigible. In light of some of the modern approaches to the play, it may be worth pointing out that although Shakespeare's presentation is influenced by some narratives of the New World, Caliban is neither native to the island - it was barren before Sycorax came there in her exile - nor an example of natural man, having a devil for a father as well as a goetic witch for a mother. Nature, earth's nature, in the play, as in As You Like It, is presented as a fecund and pleasant force, offering fruits and fresh waters ready to hand: Shakespeare is to some degree playing off the theme of a golden age. Caliban knows how to exploit nature, but he is not presented as, in that sense, natural. The nature - in the sense of characteristics - he has is set; Prospero teaches him speech but cannot alter his character.

The production tried to make Prospero an exception to the rule, to suggest that Prospero changes his mind, is taught pity by Ariel. But they were working against the strong sense of the text. There are plenty of indications that what happens, down to and including the recognition scene, is exactly what Prospero has intended should happen from the very first, and that he stage-manages everything except the final applause.

By and large, Shakespeare really isn't very accepting of fundamental character change. The exceptions prove the rule: the younger Duke in As You Like It converts miraculously on his progress towards Arden with an army, but we are barely to treat that as anything other than a wonder, a deus ex machina. Leontes is seized with a madness of jealousy suddenly and just as suddenly falls out of it on the reported death of his wife and son. Whatever that is, it is not character development in any modern sense. (Perdita, by the way, is a classic example of nature triumphing over nurture in a trope going all the way back to the Greek Novel.) Claudio may repent of his actions regarding Hero, but not as the result of any inward change of character; only because he's proved wrong. Macbeth may be the closest to a counterexample, but it's arguable that the play depicts his being revealed as ambitious and ruthless rather than becoming so after the (very minimal) nudge by the witches and encouragement by his wife.

Moderns are habituated to narratives of character change. Aesthetically, they're burnt into the novel (Fielding and Sterne and Austen and Bronte place growth and learning front and centre (although Jane Austen, the most conservative of the set, tends more towards combining constancy of character with reform of manners, her narratives nevertheless involve her central characters learning: "Until this moment, I hardly knew myself.")). Morally, we tend to favour an emphasis on nurture rather than nature, and politically we favour believing in social mobility based on mutability of character rather than the "blood will out" fixed nature of an aristocratic age. (These are tendencies: the Renaissance has a long history of conversion stories; modern discourse has plenty of examples of people who cannot seem to learn, or, occasionally, never need to. But the weight still falls differently on balance, overall.)

Importing those preferences into a play which was written to showcase the older view, though, is problematic. If a canon with any depth into the past has a value, it's that it teaches us how other, different people approached the world. A modern-dress production (Richard III as fascist) or a production which explicitly departs from the text - adjusts Kate and Petruchio, or Claudio and Hero - to make an explicit point accept the text but then enter into a dialogue with it. But a period-dress staging which puts forward a problematic modern reading as what the play puts forward is engaged in distorting the past and playing to our prejudices.

Shakespeare, at a reasonable guess, agreed with Ulysses and Menenius Agrippa regarding degree and accepted a divine stamp on the role of a monarch. He seems to have been at the very least a pragmatic social climber, working within the system to raise his status and wealth, and may very well have been a strong adherent of that system. The idea of unchanging character, largely derived, ultimately, from the classical world and transmitted via the chivalric ethos, is not a part of a universal Renaissance world view - a Christian model holding out a continual possibility of conversion of life was also tremendously important and the ancestor of our modern attitude by way of the bourgeoisie - but it was certainly part of Shakespeare's view. If you want a Renaissance play about personal growth, you might try Samson Agonistes instead.

Comments

[ndrosen]

It is, as usual, a pleasure to read such analysis from a man of your learning.