The Tempest (17 page)

Lines 340–380:
Prospero invites the whole company to his cell to rest for one night during which he will relate the events of his life and how he came to the island. He will then accompany them all to Naples for the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. Afterward he
will retire to Milan to contemplate old age and death. He promises them a good voyage and finally releases Ariel.

As the other characters leave the stage, Prospero delivers the Epilogue in which he tells the audience that he has no more magic, only his own strength. He must therefore be confined to the island unless they release him by the power of their breath and hands, and begs indulgence for his sins as the audience too would wish to be pardoned. This metatheatrical conclusion seems to round off the play on a positive note, but a brief reflection reveals that the most complex problems have been left unresolved and the future for many of the characters is far from clear. The departing spectator is left wondering if Antonio is really reconciled to his brother’s return, exactly what Prospero means when he has said that “Every third thought” will be his “grave,” where Ariel will go now that he is free, and what will happen to Caliban—is he to remain on the island, its lonely king once more, or will he accompany Prospero to Milan?

The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.

We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

Finally, we go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director. He, or sometimes she (like musical conducting, theater directing remains a male-dominated profession), must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.

The Tempest
’s first recorded performance was at the court of James I on Hallowmass Night, 1 November 1611.
¹
In 1613 it was performed at court again, this time as one of fourteen plays chosen to celebrate the marriage of James I’s daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine.
²
These performances and the masque in Act 4 have sometimes suggested a special association with the Jacobean court. However, the effects called for in the masque—descents, ascents, and the use of a trapdoor—all suggest performance in the public theaters used by the King’s Men, the Globe and the smaller indoor Blackfriars Theatre.

This was one of the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be revived after the Restoration and the reopening of the theaters. Samuel Pepys saw the first performance in 1667:

The “old play of Shakespeare’s” described by Pepys was not, however, Shakespeare’s
Tempest
but an adaptation by Sir William Davenant and John Dryden called
The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island
, which developed the plot to suit Restoration tastes and capitalized on the newly permitted presence of women onstage by inventing a sister for Miranda called Dorinda, together with the cross-dressed “breeches” part of Hippolito, Prospero’s ward. Sycorax became Caliban’s sister and even Ariel had a female consort, Milcha. Whereas scholars were busy recovering Shakespeare’s text for published editions from the early eighteenth century, this adaptation, and a revised operatic version by Thomas Shadwell with music by Henry Purcell dating from 1674, supplanted Shakespeare’s on the stage for more than a century and a half. They had machinery, elaborate effects, spectacular staging and music, and proved immensely profitable and popular with London theatergoers. The highlight seems to have been the storm scene, which was moved to
Act 2 in order to accommodate latecomers. This adaptation in turn spawned Thomas Duffett’s obscene burlesque,
The Mock Tempest, or the Enchanted Castle
, in which Miranda and Dorinda feature as prostitutes.

David Garrick had briefly presented Shakespeare’s original play, with some cuts, in the mid-eighteenth century, but in the next generation John Philip Kemble returned to the Restoration version. When Shakespeare’s text was finally restored by William Charles Macready in 1838, the spectacular staging of the storm scene and the masque were fixed theatrical traditions, which Macready retained, together with much of the music. By the end of the nineteenth century two contrasting production modes were evident—the elaborate spectacle, exemplified by directors such as Herbert Beerbohm Tree in London and Augustin Daly in New York, which offered scenic staging and pantomimic action with a full orchestral score versus the innovatory pared-down productions by F. R. Benson at Stratford and William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society, which used a bare set on an open stage.

The dominant theme in twentieth-century productions was the exploration of the play as colonial experience, evident even in the pro-imperial Beerbohm Tree production of 1904. Romanticism had changed attitudes to Caliban and it was Macready’s 1838 revival of Shakespeare’s text that “confirmed … the romantic critics’ more sympathetic conceptions of Caliban.”
⁴
As Vaughan and Vaughan record, it was in this production that “the modern Caliban, victim of oppression, was born.”
⁵
Caliban became less comic but more monstrous; when in 1854 in New York the leading comic actor William Burton took the part in his own theater, the anonymous
New York Times
reviewer records how

Charles Kean’s 1857 Caliban had similarly animal overtones suggesting “the dawn of the apish Caliban”
⁷
which dominated stage versions toward the end of the nineteenth century, influenced by Daniel Wilson’s
Caliban, the Missing Link
(1873) in which Shakespeare’s creation of the misshapen Caliban suggested the Bard’s intuitive grasp of evolutionary theory.

Actor-managers Beerbohm Tree and F. R. Benson both chose to play Caliban in preference to Prospero. Benson’s wife records how her husband “spent many hours watching monkeys and baboons in the Zoo, in order to get the movements and postures in keeping with his ‘make-up,’ ” in a costume which she described as “half-monkey, half coco-nut,” noting that he “delighted in swarming up a tree on the stage and hanging from the branches head downwards while he gibbered at ‘Trinculo.’ ”
⁸
Tyrone Power in Daly’s 1897 production invoked the same idea. According to William Winter, the
New York Daily Tribune
reviewer, he played Caliban as a “brutish creature, the hideous, malignant clod of evil, in whom, nevertheless, the germs of intelligence, feeling and fanciful perception are beginning to stir.”
⁹
Beerbohm Tree’s Caliban in 1904 stressed Caliban’s humanity, arguing that “in his love of music and his affinity with the unseen world, we discern in the soul which inhabits the brutish body of this elemental man the germs of a sense of beauty, the dawn of art.”
¹⁰
The production’s most famous scene was the final tableau showing Caliban alone once more on his island as the Neapolitans sailed for home:

In the second half of the twentieth century Caliban has frequently been represented as black, initially by white actors in blackface. The first black actor to play the part was Canada Lee in Margaret Webster’s 1945 New York production, although in many ways his performance harked back to the monstrous representations of earlier productions: “Lee wore a scaly costume and grotesque mask, moved with an animal-like crouch, and emphasized Caliban’s monstrousness.”
¹²
In the past fifty years Caliban has evolved from comic grotesque to “noble savage.” Jeanne Addison Roberts described Henry Baker’s performance at the 1970 Washington Summer Festival Shakespeare production: “Baker’s black skin, his somewhat flawed enunciation, a minstrel-show mouth painted grotesquely in a greenish face, and the use of the word ‘slave’ evoked instantly for the Washington audience the American Negro.”
¹³

1.
Frank Benson as a fish-eating Caliban in the 1890s, represented as a creature akin to Charles Darwin’s “missing link” between ape and human.

Baker’s Caliban refused to be cowed or subdued: “Caliban was now a black militant, angry and recalcitrant.”
¹⁴
In the same year Jonathan Miller’s production at the Mermaid Theatre drew on Octave Mannoni’s anthropological study of colonial oppression,
Prospero and Caliban
,
¹⁵
which used these two characters as emblems of the colonial
paradigm. One reviewer described Rudolph Walker’s Caliban as “an uneducated field Negro” in contrast to Norman Beaton’s Ariel, a “competent, educated ‘houseboy.’ ”
¹⁶
Historians of the play’s afterlife regard the early 1980s as representing the “climax of Caliban’s politicization”
¹⁷
in productions around the world. It is perhaps as a reaction against this trend that directors in the early twenty-first century seem to have become interested in Ariel again.

Whereas Prospero had traditionally been regarded as an elderly benign father-figure, a tradition that continued well into the twentieth century, more recent productions have often cast a much younger man and explored the contradictions within the text to reveal a complex, demanding character. The actor most deeply associated with the role in the twentieth century was Sir John Gielgud who performed it four times in the theater, the first time at the Old Vic in 1930 at the astonishingly young age of twenty-six. His interpretation evolved over the years and subsequent productions, culminating in the grave, beautiful performance in Peter Greenaway’s extraordinary film adaptation,
Prospero
’
s Books
. As one critic puts it,

With the impact of “realistic” media such as film and television, there has been renewed interest and focus on the theatricality of theater and the metatheatricality of
The Tempest
has been explored by a number of directors. In 1968 Peter Brook directed a radical experimental production at the Roundhouse against a background of the cultural revolution of the 1960s which brought together players from France, Britain, Japan and the United States to explore theatrical techniques of expression. For the opening storm, for instance, a Japanese actor crouched vocalising sounds of wind and terror whilst the rest huddled together whimpering and trembling. It was an investigation of certain themes of the play, essentially mounted as an exercise for actors. It was, however, to bear fruit in many of Brook’s subsequent productions, most notably his celebrated
Midsummer Night
’s
Dream
in 1970.
¹⁹