1 00:00:04,260 --> 00:00:08,180 So today's lecture is on Tempest. 2 00:00:08,180 --> 00:00:15,840 And as you know, I've been in the habit of beginning lectures by placing the play chronologically as a prelude to discussing it. 3 00:00:15,840 --> 00:00:20,250 One of the things I want to show in this lecture is that the presumed chronological 4 00:00:20,250 --> 00:00:25,470 position of The Tempest is absolutely inseparable from critical discussion about the play. 5 00:00:25,470 --> 00:00:28,380 So it's it's it is itself an interpretive act. 6 00:00:28,380 --> 00:00:38,190 What we say about where the tempest fits in Shakespeare's career, the idea that The Tempest is Shakespeare's last play. 7 00:00:38,190 --> 00:00:42,420 That's an assumption I want to challenge a little bit during the course of this lecture. 8 00:00:42,420 --> 00:00:50,370 But let's start with it as an assumption. The idea that The Tempest is Shakespeare's last play has been entirely intertwined with it, 9 00:00:50,370 --> 00:00:57,630 with views of the play as a poetic summation of Shakespeare's career and more particularly as a self-portrait. 10 00:00:57,630 --> 00:01:04,410 The portrait of the artist as an old man, the old man saying farewell to the stage. 11 00:01:04,410 --> 00:01:08,940 So the question I want this lecture to focus on and the way I want to try and 12 00:01:08,940 --> 00:01:14,040 approach some of the themes and the critical reception of this play is the question, 13 00:01:14,040 --> 00:01:20,450 is Prospero. Shakespeare is Prospero. Shakespeare. 14 00:01:20,450 --> 00:01:29,660 So let's start by reviewing the play together. A storm causes a shipwreck and noblemen are washed up on an island. 15 00:01:29,660 --> 00:01:33,590 We discover that the storm has been magicked up by Prospero. 16 00:01:33,590 --> 00:01:43,910 The former Duke of Milan and a magician who had been exiled to the island 12 years previously by his brother Antonio, who was deposed him. 17 00:01:43,910 --> 00:01:50,160 Prospero is accompanied on the island by his daughter Miranda and two unwilling servants. 18 00:01:50,160 --> 00:01:58,480 Ariel, a moody spirit, and Caliban, a reviled, embittered creature. 19 00:01:58,480 --> 00:02:02,690 The shipwrecked King Alonzo believes his son Ferdinand is drowned. 20 00:02:02,690 --> 00:02:09,380 But in fact, he's on another part of the island and is brought by Prospero into contact with Miranda. 21 00:02:09,380 --> 00:02:12,290 The couple duley fall in love. 22 00:02:12,290 --> 00:02:21,440 Two servants from the ship Tranquilo and Stefano fall into a drunken conspiracy with Caliban and plot to overthrow Prospero. 23 00:02:21,440 --> 00:02:23,150 Two nobles from the ship. 24 00:02:23,150 --> 00:02:32,840 Sebastian and Antonio Prospero's brother plot to kill Alonzo Aeriel is watching over these plots and prevents them coming to fruition. 25 00:02:32,840 --> 00:02:38,330 Prospero conjures a marriage mask for Ferdinand Miranda. 26 00:02:38,330 --> 00:02:43,820 He punishes the conspirators with various magic tricks and eventually prompted by Ariel. 27 00:02:43,820 --> 00:02:53,540 He decides to forgive rather than take revenge on his brother Antonio Prospero varas to give up his magic and to return to his dupe them in Milan, 28 00:02:53,540 --> 00:02:59,630 freeing Ariel as his final act on the island and asking for freedom by the audience. 29 00:02:59,630 --> 00:03:01,220 For the audience to give him his freedom. 30 00:03:01,220 --> 00:03:09,320 In conclusion, on the face of it then it might be slightly difficult to see why Prospero would be Shakespeare, 31 00:03:09,320 --> 00:03:13,460 or to imagine an allegory in which this reading would work. 32 00:03:13,460 --> 00:03:22,490 What's the island? Who would Caliban be? Who is Antonio? It's like all the dark lady, rival, poet, beautiful boy stuff in the sonnets. 33 00:03:22,490 --> 00:03:32,750 The idea that the sonnets somehow have reference outside themselves Real-Life people who can be identified and give us the key to open the poetry. 34 00:03:32,750 --> 00:03:38,930 I think that's a mad idea because it's based on a premise that must be unsustainable. 35 00:03:38,930 --> 00:03:44,840 It's the mistaken assumption that what Shakespeare is writing is autobiography. 36 00:03:44,840 --> 00:03:46,370 That's the same premise. 37 00:03:46,370 --> 00:03:55,490 The premise that the plays and poems are autobiographical that lies behind the fantasies of those who think Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. 38 00:03:55,490 --> 00:03:58,790 If you've seen Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous, 39 00:03:58,790 --> 00:04:06,350 you'll know that the main argumentative procedure for the case for Oxfords authorship of the plays in that film is biographical. 40 00:04:06,350 --> 00:04:10,250 He, like Hamlet, stabbed somebody mistakenly behind the Arris. 41 00:04:10,250 --> 00:04:18,590 He knows and dislike somebody with a hunchback cops off with Queen Elizabeth and so writes a kind of romantic tragedy. 42 00:04:18,590 --> 00:04:25,340 So there's an obvious kind of biographical links are made between the person who writes and the writing they do, 43 00:04:25,340 --> 00:04:33,530 and that those biographical links may be there. But to suggest that that's a clue about authorship is a mistake. 44 00:04:33,530 --> 00:04:41,660 The kind of writing Shakespeare or Marlowe or Johnson or Middleton or Sidney or Spencer or even the Earl of Oxford is doing during this period. 45 00:04:41,660 --> 00:04:46,850 People do not write autobiography. We are not in a period where the mind of the author, 46 00:04:46,850 --> 00:04:51,230 the inner workings of the author is seemed to be the most interesting thing that they can write about. 47 00:04:51,230 --> 00:04:58,400 That comes in a much, much later literary fashion through romanticism into the confessional poetry. 48 00:04:58,400 --> 00:05:05,780 And so one of the 20th century. I don't think it's a generic is recognisable as a genre in this period. 49 00:05:05,780 --> 00:05:14,390 But nevertheless, the idea that The Tempest serves as an allegory for Shakespeare as a playwright does have a long, critical history. 50 00:05:14,390 --> 00:05:20,660 When John Dryden and William Davenant restoration playwrights who were ransacking 51 00:05:20,660 --> 00:05:26,390 Shakespeare's plays for productions for the newly opened playhouses in the mid 17th century, 52 00:05:26,390 --> 00:05:36,200 when they rewrote The Tempest as the Enchanted Island, they identified a substantial parallel between the playwright and the protagonist. 53 00:05:36,200 --> 00:05:42,340 In one phrase from the play's prologue and the phrase is Shakespeare's magic. 54 00:05:42,340 --> 00:05:53,090 They talk about Shakespeare's magic and how that sort of combines both Prospero and Shakespeare. 55 00:05:53,090 --> 00:06:01,820 So let's see how this connexion between the magic in the play and the magic of the theatre or in the theatre might 56 00:06:01,820 --> 00:06:10,370 fit together were thrown immediately at the start of The Tempest into the scene of The Tempest tossed ship. 57 00:06:10,370 --> 00:06:13,810 It's the only scene in the play which doesn't take place on the island. 58 00:06:13,810 --> 00:06:20,510 And it's a scene which is complete with Mariners', a good deal of technical jargon and most importantly, 59 00:06:20,510 --> 00:06:29,240 the aristocratic passengers who are completely bewildered. Their usual status has been completely levelled by these elemental force. 60 00:06:29,240 --> 00:06:34,450 What can these roars for the name of King Cross the boats and what can these roar? 61 00:06:34,450 --> 00:06:37,910 As for the name of King, the roar as being the waves? 62 00:06:37,910 --> 00:06:43,250 We think or at least we think we're supposed to think that we're in the presence of a real storm. 63 00:06:43,250 --> 00:06:49,730 There's nothing in the play at the beginning to suggest that this is not real by the conventions of the theatre. 64 00:06:49,730 --> 00:06:52,940 I think that's quite an important element of the opening scenes, are that for me, 65 00:06:52,940 --> 00:07:00,530 productions of the play which show this scene taking place in a ship, in a bottle or under the direction of Prospero right from the start. 66 00:07:00,530 --> 00:07:05,600 I think they missed the point because I think what we're supposed to think at the beginning is this is a real storm. 67 00:07:05,600 --> 00:07:09,830 Then we pan back and we see that that's not what we thought, isn't it? Isn't what we thought. 68 00:07:09,830 --> 00:07:13,400 The next scene proves that the apparent realism was not so. 69 00:07:13,400 --> 00:07:19,490 We've been deceived by a theatrical illusion. The storm was magic done by Prospero. 70 00:07:19,490 --> 00:07:23,810 It was under his control all along. The passengers were never in any danger. 71 00:07:23,810 --> 00:07:29,810 All was being managed. Stage managed. We might think from the island as part of a plan not yet revealed to us. 72 00:07:29,810 --> 00:07:39,800 It's a very clear metaphor for the play itself. This play any play events happen controlled by the playwright in order to further a yet unknown plot. 73 00:07:39,800 --> 00:07:44,090 We in the theatre believe events that are actually illusory. 74 00:07:44,090 --> 00:07:51,340 They're just a matter of a few props and a believable script, but they have no real substance. 75 00:07:51,340 --> 00:07:56,540 The sailors, Prospero reassures Maranda, won't even have their clothes whetted by the storm. 76 00:07:56,540 --> 00:08:04,520 They are actors pretending to sway and tumble on the deck of an imaginary stage ship. 77 00:08:04,520 --> 00:08:09,320 Throughout The Tempest, Prospero describes his magic as my art. 78 00:08:09,320 --> 00:08:15,340 Further than developing the analogy between magic and the act of writing or creation. 79 00:08:15,340 --> 00:08:20,120 So Prospero uses Magic to make things happen. Just as an author does. 80 00:08:20,120 --> 00:08:21,980 Just as an author uses writing. 81 00:08:21,980 --> 00:08:29,150 He moves the shipwrecked Italians around his island stage in order to create pleasing dialogues and meaningful encounters. 82 00:08:29,150 --> 00:08:38,550 Just as an author handles his or her characters like an author, Prospero controls the present and the past of the characters. 83 00:08:38,550 --> 00:08:43,400 It's he, for example, who tells the story of his brother's usurpation. 84 00:08:43,400 --> 00:08:48,890 He who tells the story of their exile. He who tells of Ariel's imprisonment in a tree. 85 00:08:48,890 --> 00:08:53,530 Many other details of previous events. And none of these have independent corroboration. 86 00:08:53,530 --> 00:08:56,150 So he's telling us about the past. 87 00:08:56,150 --> 00:09:04,330 It says if Prospero is inventing all the other characters and fleshing out their past lives to develop the force of his creation, 88 00:09:04,330 --> 00:09:10,520 I think again about a kind of writer or even a method actor thinking about how did we get to this point in. 89 00:09:10,520 --> 00:09:17,270 Peter Greenaway is weirdly creative film based on this play, a film called Prospero's Books. 90 00:09:17,270 --> 00:09:24,470 Greenaway Literals is this power by Prospero, by having him speak literally every character's lines. 91 00:09:24,470 --> 00:09:28,640 They're all like ventriloquist dummies without any words of their own. 92 00:09:28,640 --> 00:09:35,220 It's an extreme but revealing depiction of the extent of Prospero's authorial control. 93 00:09:35,220 --> 00:09:40,820 And when Prospero acknowledges the theatricality of his own magic as presented in the wading mask in Act four, 94 00:09:40,820 --> 00:09:46,350 he does so in terms which are famously redolent of the theatre. You'll recognise this quotation. 95 00:09:46,350 --> 00:09:55,040 Our revels now are ended. These are actors. As I foretold, you were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air. 96 00:09:55,040 --> 00:10:01,310 And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud cap towers, the globe, gorgeous palaces, 97 00:10:01,310 --> 00:10:06,920 the solemn temples, the great globe itself yé all which it inherit shall dissolve. 98 00:10:06,920 --> 00:10:13,880 And like this insubstantial pageant faded leave not a rack behind. 99 00:10:13,880 --> 00:10:22,610 We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep. 100 00:10:22,610 --> 00:10:30,230 When in 1740, in an important step in Shakespeare's canonisation as national poet, 101 00:10:30,230 --> 00:10:35,060 a Life-Size statue of him was erected in Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey. 102 00:10:35,060 --> 00:10:45,200 It's still there if you want to go and look at it. These associations of Shakespeare and Prospero received concrete or perhaps rather marble form. 103 00:10:45,200 --> 00:10:50,600 The statue depicts the dramatist leaning his elbow on a pile of books and pointing to 104 00:10:50,600 --> 00:10:55,820 a scroll on which are written a variant of those valedictory lines in The Tempest. 105 00:10:55,820 --> 00:11:00,260 The cloud cap towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, 106 00:11:00,260 --> 00:11:09,650 the great globe itself yé all which it inherit shall dissolve and like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave, not a rack behind. 107 00:11:09,650 --> 00:11:16,850 The text here on this statue in Westminster Abbey serves as an epitaph for the poet and their original speaker in the play, 108 00:11:16,850 --> 00:11:24,470 Prospero becomes merely a transparent mask for Shakespeare himself. 109 00:11:24,470 --> 00:11:28,370 Firmly attached them to this prominent myth of Shakespeare and Prospero. 110 00:11:28,370 --> 00:11:37,820 It's the question of the play's chronology, although it does come at the end of Shakespeare's active theatrical work in London. 111 00:11:37,820 --> 00:11:48,650 There is no definitive external evidence to confirm that The Tempest written unperformed in 16 ten eleven is Shakespeare's final play. 112 00:11:48,650 --> 00:11:53,150 No definitive external evidence to confirm that. 113 00:11:53,150 --> 00:11:54,610 We can't guarantee its place. 114 00:11:54,610 --> 00:12:03,470 That's to say amid other late plays from this period, The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline, either of these could be after The Tempest. 115 00:12:03,470 --> 00:12:08,030 It is precisely because we want the play's closing movement to read as Shakespeare's 116 00:12:08,030 --> 00:12:13,010 farewell to the stage that we place The Tempest at the end of Shakespeare's career. 117 00:12:13,010 --> 00:12:19,100 Then we use that position to affirm that the play must dramatise Shakespeare's own feelings. 118 00:12:19,100 --> 00:12:25,880 So we say it's at the end of his career because it fits the narrative we want and then we say because it's at the end of his career. 119 00:12:25,880 --> 00:12:32,330 This is what it must be about. It's a circularity of argument we're going to see again this morning. 120 00:12:32,330 --> 00:12:36,530 What we do know is that Shakespeare works on two noble kinsmen and all is true, 121 00:12:36,530 --> 00:12:44,060 or Henry the Eighth and the Lost Cardini go play based on Don Quixote with John Fletcher after The Tempest. 122 00:12:44,060 --> 00:12:49,610 So we know Shakespeare keeps working after The Tempest. The Tempest is certainly therefore not his last. 123 00:12:49,610 --> 00:12:53,500 Writing for the stage, even if it were his last solo play. 124 00:12:53,500 --> 00:12:56,000 And we don't even know that. 125 00:12:56,000 --> 00:13:04,640 But it has been felt to be particularly appropriate that Prospero's epilogue figures his own freedom from the play in terms of leaving the theatre. 126 00:13:04,640 --> 00:13:11,450 Although, as you'll know from reading the other plays which have epilogues by Shakespeare or by other people in this period, 127 00:13:11,450 --> 00:13:19,550 it's fairly conventional for epilogues to be spoken from a subject position, which is not really that of the character, but more that of the actor. 128 00:13:19,550 --> 00:13:27,770 What the epilogue does is to dissolve the illusion and remind us that we are in a theatre and that what we have to do now is clap. 129 00:13:27,770 --> 00:13:35,140 Let's hear that play epilogue, though, from The Tempest to see why these associations have been activated. 130 00:13:35,140 --> 00:13:40,310 So this is an interesting, short, slightly incantatory lines. 131 00:13:40,310 --> 00:13:43,100 The Rhythm of POCs epilogue in Midsummer Night's Dream. 132 00:13:43,100 --> 00:13:51,380 We might think this is still a kind of magic key sort of syntax and a much sort of magic kind of rhetoric. 133 00:13:51,380 --> 00:13:56,960 It's not. It's not. It's not iambic pentameter. Now my charms are all thrown on what strength? 134 00:13:56,960 --> 00:14:00,350 I have my own, which is most faint now. Tis crew. 135 00:14:00,350 --> 00:14:04,400 I must be here confined by you or sent to Naples. 136 00:14:04,400 --> 00:14:13,100 Let me not since I have my Duplin God and pardon the deceiver dwell in this bear island by your spell. 137 00:14:13,100 --> 00:14:18,440 But release me from your bands with the help of your good hands. 138 00:14:18,440 --> 00:14:24,470 Gentle breath of yours. My sails must fail, or else my project fails. Which was to please. 139 00:14:24,470 --> 00:14:29,150 Now I want spirits to enforce art to enchant. 140 00:14:29,150 --> 00:14:34,550 My ending is despair unless I be relieved by prayer which pierces so that it 141 00:14:34,550 --> 00:14:42,710 assault's mercy itself and frees all faults as you from crimes would pass and be. 142 00:14:42,710 --> 00:14:47,080 Let your indulgence set me free. 143 00:14:47,080 --> 00:14:59,920 So the Lexus here released despair, prayers, faults, indulgence, connects farewell with liberation, but also perhaps implicitly, with death. 144 00:14:59,920 --> 00:15:06,190 Ruth Nivo in a stimulating book on the late plays called Shakespeare's Other Language. 145 00:15:06,190 --> 00:15:14,590 Ruth Nivo, Shakespeare's other language, acknowledges that the play has two generic movements which are exemplified in this final speech. 146 00:15:14,590 --> 00:15:19,900 Niveau asks, What is the nature of this momentum in the play towards death? 147 00:15:19,900 --> 00:15:24,640 Every third thought shall be my grave. One of Prospero's lines. 148 00:15:24,640 --> 00:15:28,360 Every third thought shall be my grave. What is the nature of this movement? Sorry. 149 00:15:28,360 --> 00:15:37,790 What is the nature of this momentum in the play towards death? Synchronic with its movement towards and fulfilment of a rejoicing beyond common joy. 150 00:15:37,790 --> 00:15:41,770 So she says, it's moving the pace. Moving both towards death. The death of Prospero. 151 00:15:41,770 --> 00:15:50,170 And towards the end of my marriage, conclusion's comic conclusions in the marriage of Ferdinando Miranda. 152 00:15:50,170 --> 00:15:56,290 We can see a clearer version, perhaps, of this interpretation in W.H. Auden as poetic meditation on The Tempest. 153 00:15:56,290 --> 00:16:05,020 A series of poems called The Sea and the Mirror, which are all done in the voice of different characters in in Shakespeare's play. 154 00:16:05,020 --> 00:16:09,760 The poem Prospero to Ariel sees the protagonist at the end of the play. 155 00:16:09,760 --> 00:16:17,820 Addressing his newly freed spirit to this is prosperous. Ariel, stay with me, Ariel, while I pack with your first free act. 156 00:16:17,820 --> 00:16:24,550 Delight my leaving share my resigning thoughts of you as you have served my revelling wishes, 157 00:16:24,550 --> 00:16:32,350 then brave spirit ages to you of song and daring and to me briefly Milan then 158 00:16:32,350 --> 00:16:37,350 earth in all things have turned out better than I once expected or ever deserved. 159 00:16:37,350 --> 00:16:41,110 I am glad that I did not recover my kingdom till I do not want it. 160 00:16:41,110 --> 00:16:46,300 I am glad that Miranda no longer pays me any attention. I am glad I have freed you. 161 00:16:46,300 --> 00:16:50,890 So at last I can really believe I shall die for under your influence. 162 00:16:50,890 --> 00:16:59,310 Death is inconceivable. So in these readings and others like them, Prospero's farewell is not only Shakespeare's farewell to the theatre, 163 00:16:59,310 --> 00:17:09,170 but in some sense his dying breath will bracket that he doesn't die for another five years against this fruitfully poetic cluster of associations. 164 00:17:09,170 --> 00:17:16,170 It may seem a little prosaic to counter the Shakespeare's last performed words were almost certainly not Prospero's epilogue, 165 00:17:16,170 --> 00:17:24,660 but rather Theseus is somewhat un sonorous. Let's go off and bare as like the time which comes at the end of two noble kinsmen. 166 00:17:24,660 --> 00:17:30,240 Most scholars think Fletcher wrote the epilogue to that play. 167 00:17:30,240 --> 00:17:37,440 So we can say, I hope that chronology and interpretation start to become mutually enforcing a mutually constitutive, 168 00:17:37,440 --> 00:17:45,180 the Templars must be Shakespeare's last play because it depicts his own renunciation of the art of theatre in the guise of Prospero. 169 00:17:45,180 --> 00:17:50,700 Because Prospero is Shakespeare, The Tempest must be Shakespeare's last play. 170 00:17:50,700 --> 00:17:58,320 We can extend this, perhaps, to notice that all authorial chronologies are, in some sense biographical readings. 171 00:17:58,320 --> 00:18:07,420 The Tempest is not the only play to have its meaning determined by an assumed place in Shakespeare's writing career. 172 00:18:07,420 --> 00:18:13,460 So I want to talk about how the implications of having The Tempest as a as a late play. 173 00:18:13,460 --> 00:18:23,390 Now, readings of The Tempest as Shakespeare's last play activates various culturally charged associations of lateness, unusually for Shakespeare. 174 00:18:23,390 --> 00:18:27,120 There is no major source for this play. 175 00:18:27,120 --> 00:18:37,860 We might rather see that his source here, as in the contemporaneous Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and two Noble Kinsman, is his own earlier plays. 176 00:18:37,860 --> 00:18:44,040 He has his own source. Certainly The Tempest recaps earlier motifs. 177 00:18:44,040 --> 00:18:48,340 It's a retelling of Hamlet in the context of Midsummer Night's Dream, 178 00:18:48,340 --> 00:18:52,770 a revenge quest between brothers in which forgiveness ultimately trumps violence 179 00:18:52,770 --> 00:18:59,000 through an encounter with the magical its young lovers recall Shakespeare's comedies. 180 00:18:59,000 --> 00:19:03,750 Its makers figure recalls the Patriarchs, Lear and parallelise. 181 00:19:03,750 --> 00:19:08,520 Its structure conforming to the unities of time, place and action. 182 00:19:08,520 --> 00:19:14,880 Recall's comedy of errors. For some reason, we don't understand. 183 00:19:14,880 --> 00:19:19,140 The Tempest is the first play in the collected edition. 184 00:19:19,140 --> 00:19:25,240 We know is the First Folio of sixteen twenty three, and that's its first printed edition. 185 00:19:25,240 --> 00:19:34,960 The fact that it's the first play led earlier commentators, not unreasonably, to imagine that it was Shakespeare's first play rather than his last. 186 00:19:34,960 --> 00:19:38,920 And it's interesting to look back at that commentary just because it's so revealing. They judged it. 187 00:19:38,920 --> 00:19:46,030 Having thought that because it was at the beginning of the book, it must be an early play. They found the play entirely to reinforce that view. 188 00:19:46,030 --> 00:19:51,200 There's a sense that whatever our preconception is, whatever our assumption is, we can make the play work out. 189 00:19:51,200 --> 00:19:54,340 So The Tempest is shortlist became a sign of immaturity, 190 00:19:54,340 --> 00:19:59,710 someone who can't quite write a full length play rather than as other kinds of arguments would have it, 191 00:19:59,710 --> 00:20:05,620 somebody who's able to distil in this very compressed way. At the end of a career. 192 00:20:05,620 --> 00:20:15,040 So thinking about how what we expect to find in a play gives us maybe governs what we actually find. 193 00:20:15,040 --> 00:20:20,020 I think it's worth it is worth being aware of. 194 00:20:20,020 --> 00:20:27,670 In fact, we could see the whole of the tempest structured as a response and renovation of another play of the early 15 nineties, 195 00:20:27,670 --> 00:20:33,190 not one by Shakespeare. And that's Marlowe's play. Dr. Fasters. 196 00:20:33,190 --> 00:20:43,390 Francis presents the dark side of Prospero's magical learning, promising desperately to burn his books at the end of that play, just as Prospero. 197 00:20:43,390 --> 00:20:48,820 At the end of Shakespeare's anticipate drowning his. 198 00:20:48,820 --> 00:20:57,900 So as in as in a lot of the plays at the end of Shakespeare's career, there is a very definite recourse. 199 00:20:57,900 --> 00:21:00,580 Back to the 50 nineties daily, 50 90. 200 00:21:00,580 --> 00:21:07,300 OK, so they go back to the beginning of Shakespeare's career in their sources and their and their style and their interests. 201 00:21:07,300 --> 00:21:10,990 And one way of reading all these echoes of the 15 nineties of comedy of errors 202 00:21:10,990 --> 00:21:18,520 or of early romances or of not fasters when we're reading all those echoes, 203 00:21:18,520 --> 00:21:25,030 is to say that this is a play which is derivative. Shakespeare has run out of steam. 204 00:21:25,030 --> 00:21:34,960 One association of cultural or aesthetic lateness is as a decline from earlier achievement or prowess, we might think. 205 00:21:34,960 --> 00:21:45,970 Thomas Hardy, Ben Johnson, Alfred Hitchcock, Lady Gaga, Kenneth Branagh, artists who go off rather than on Litten straight. 206 00:21:45,970 --> 00:21:50,720 She proposed that in The Tempest chase me with getting bored with his art and 207 00:21:50,720 --> 00:21:55,000 he couldn't really be bothered with either the characters or the situation. 208 00:21:55,000 --> 00:22:02,110 And that's a view echoed by Gary Taylor in a newspaper article headlined Shakespeare's Midlife Crisis. 209 00:22:02,110 --> 00:22:10,750 Taylor argues that after a period of high commercial popularity in the 15 nineties, Shakespeare's career in the 17th century was in the doldrums. 210 00:22:10,750 --> 00:22:14,980 Like many other has Beane's, Taylor continues provocatively. 211 00:22:14,980 --> 00:22:24,110 Shakespeare, in his 40s tried to rescue his sinking reputation by recycling his 20s and 30s, according to Taylor. 212 00:22:24,110 --> 00:22:28,330 Then Shakespeare's collaboration's with John Fletcher at the end of his career, 213 00:22:28,330 --> 00:22:35,650 become in a revisionist argument, a desperate attempt by a worn out writer to piggyback on a younger one. 214 00:22:35,650 --> 00:22:42,970 Rather than as we've tended to see them, the idea of The Apprentice working under the old master's supervision. 215 00:22:42,970 --> 00:22:51,460 Taylor's argument is challenging precisely because it's so unexpected, far more prevalent as a response to the idea of a play being late. 216 00:22:51,460 --> 00:22:55,330 Is the idea that it's a summation? A high point? 217 00:22:55,330 --> 00:22:59,410 A culmination of wisdom and of humanity? 218 00:22:59,410 --> 00:23:05,800 So this is an argument that I write is just get better and better, that their last thing should be their best in this reading. 219 00:23:05,800 --> 00:23:12,070 Prospero's own wisdom, which leads him to forgive Antonio rather than punish him and to renounce his magic rather than 220 00:23:12,070 --> 00:23:19,920 continue it occupies an ethical high ground that we can associate with Shakespeare himself. 221 00:23:19,920 --> 00:23:25,020 Edward Dowden writing in a hugely influential intellectual biography of Shakespeare. 222 00:23:25,020 --> 00:23:29,370 At the end of the 19th century exemplifies this association. 223 00:23:29,370 --> 00:23:38,960 This is Dowden. It is not cheap, chiefly because Prospero is a great enchanter now about to break his magic staff to drown his book deeper than ever, 224 00:23:38,960 --> 00:23:44,510 Plummet sounded to dismiss his air spirits and to return to the practical service of his dukedom. 225 00:23:44,510 --> 00:23:50,690 It is not because of those that we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself. 226 00:23:50,690 --> 00:23:52,310 And this is this is what I think is interesting about doubt, 227 00:23:52,310 --> 00:23:59,240 and it is rather because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self mastery, 228 00:23:59,240 --> 00:24:04,130 his calm validity of will, his sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, 229 00:24:04,130 --> 00:24:10,100 and with these a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world. 230 00:24:10,100 --> 00:24:17,360 These are characteristic of Shakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays. 231 00:24:17,360 --> 00:24:20,850 Dowd's argument is beautiful, I think, and beautifully circular, 232 00:24:20,850 --> 00:24:27,990 Prospero reminds us of Shakespeare because his character constructs our idea of what Shakespeare must have been like. 233 00:24:27,990 --> 00:24:32,610 It's a complete syllogism. One, Prospero is a good guy, too. 234 00:24:32,610 --> 00:24:36,810 Shakespeare is a good guy. Three. Therefore, Prospero is Shakespeare. 235 00:24:36,810 --> 00:24:41,460 Or we could put those propositions in any order. Really. One, three, two, three, two, one. 236 00:24:41,460 --> 00:24:45,510 Any kind of order because the association is is an assertion. 237 00:24:45,510 --> 00:24:53,940 It's not it's not causal. I'm going to come back to the issue in a moment, which is crucial to that syllogism of whether Prospero is a good guy. 238 00:24:53,940 --> 00:25:02,070 We'll just park that for a moment. And I want to stick for now with the point about the players supposed position in Shakespeare's career. 239 00:25:02,070 --> 00:25:08,430 If The Tempest largely has benefited from assumptions about the aesthetic values of lateness, we think it's late. 240 00:25:08,430 --> 00:25:13,020 Therefore, we think it must be good. Therefore, we try hard to make it so. 241 00:25:13,020 --> 00:25:20,740 Other players have been pigeonholed through differently, pigeonholed, I think, through chronological evaluation. 242 00:25:20,740 --> 00:25:30,010 As Anthony Dawson pointed out in a nice, provocative essay in a nice collection called Bad Shakespeare, which is also a good title. 243 00:25:30,010 --> 00:25:36,510 How many unexpected virtues would suddenly appear if two gentlemen of Verona were proven to date from 15, 97 or 60? 244 00:25:36,510 --> 00:25:42,760 No. Three. He goes on to talk about a play which a play has a critical position and critical 245 00:25:42,760 --> 00:25:47,410 estimation is inseparably tied up with the fact that it's thought to be early. 246 00:25:47,410 --> 00:25:52,240 So because it's early, you can't expect it to be very good and therefore not really much point in spending much time on it, 247 00:25:52,240 --> 00:25:53,860 and therefore it never looks any better. 248 00:25:53,860 --> 00:26:00,250 But if it turned out to be later, perhaps we would go back to it and think this is someone who's writing this play after Twelfth Night. 249 00:26:00,250 --> 00:26:08,690 And probably then it would turn out to be much more interesting, even though the play itself would not have changed at all. 250 00:26:08,690 --> 00:26:11,810 I think the counterfactual scenario in Dawson's case, 251 00:26:11,810 --> 00:26:17,240 about two gentlemen of Verona sardonically reveals that apparently chronological words like early, 252 00:26:17,240 --> 00:26:26,240 late or mature carry with them implicit value judgements, and they predetermine our critical response. 253 00:26:26,240 --> 00:26:32,870 If you look, for example, at the Oxford Shakespeare, the Collected Oxford and Oxford Shakespeare, 254 00:26:32,870 --> 00:26:35,420 edited by Welles and Taylor or the Norton Shakespeare, 255 00:26:35,420 --> 00:26:41,900 which follows that text, that's a collected edition which orders the plays by presumed chronology. 256 00:26:41,900 --> 00:26:45,410 When I talk about Richard, the second I was talking about how the First Folio organises the plays, 257 00:26:45,410 --> 00:26:51,110 you might remember, and that of Nazism by genre comedies, histories and tragedies. 258 00:26:51,110 --> 00:26:57,290 And we saw in that lecture how in particular the history play section has been ordered in its 259 00:26:57,290 --> 00:27:01,730 historical sequence rather than anything to do with the order in which Shakespeare wrote them. 260 00:27:01,730 --> 00:27:08,840 So that's one kind of organising principle. The Oxford joke, but has another one, which is really rather like Dowden, 261 00:27:08,840 --> 00:27:14,750 to try and make a sort of intellectual biography of Shakespeare by putting the plays in order of composition. 262 00:27:14,750 --> 00:27:21,860 This has does have the advantage of challenging readers used to the generic divisions of the First Folio, 263 00:27:21,860 --> 00:27:25,430 and it does give some unexpected and fruitful juxtapositions. 264 00:27:25,430 --> 00:27:31,790 If you look at the complete Oxford edition table of Content Contents and look at just look at two plays which are next to each other, 265 00:27:31,790 --> 00:27:40,160 that can often be quite an unexpected but productive way of trying to cut Shakespeare up and think about how his work develops. 266 00:27:40,160 --> 00:27:45,590 But these are all interpretations which ultimately privilege and implicitly biographical reading, 267 00:27:45,590 --> 00:27:51,920 because the chronology that we're interested in, the connexion that the plays have is only really the connexion of the author's life. 268 00:27:51,920 --> 00:27:59,510 They're written at the same time or next to each other, and therefore their connexion is is primarily biographical. 269 00:27:59,510 --> 00:28:02,900 So so far I've been trying to unpack the ways that critics have wanted to 270 00:28:02,900 --> 00:28:07,370 connect The Tempest with Shakespeare and how in doing so they have ossified a 271 00:28:07,370 --> 00:28:11,630 network of often unexamined assumptions about the play's chronological position 272 00:28:11,630 --> 00:28:16,850 and what that chronology might mean in terms of critical interpretation. 273 00:28:16,850 --> 00:28:22,970 I want in the second part of the lecture to think about the character of Prospero to try and interrogate this 274 00:28:22,970 --> 00:28:30,830 question from another angle to see how which might try and meet the popular assertion that Prospero is Shakespeare. 275 00:28:30,830 --> 00:28:38,310 I've already said that Shakespeare doesn't write autobiography. The primary impulse behind early modern dramaturge, 276 00:28:38,310 --> 00:28:47,040 the primary impulse behind the development of drama as the dominant mode of this period seems to be the influence of rhetorical training. 277 00:28:47,040 --> 00:28:54,510 The technique of arguing we've had this before in the tranquil part term, in a tranquil parlour term, both sides of the question. 278 00:28:54,510 --> 00:28:59,610 This is really crucial to humanist education, where both at school and at university. 279 00:28:59,610 --> 00:29:05,310 The idea of inhabiting the voices of people on different sides of an argument is. 280 00:29:05,310 --> 00:29:09,720 And making that real. Making that convincing, whatever your own views. 281 00:29:09,720 --> 00:29:15,380 That's a really important piece of training in Elizabethan schools. 282 00:29:15,380 --> 00:29:21,660 No literature of this period, I think, has the revelation of the artist's own inner feelings that it's legible core. 283 00:29:21,660 --> 00:29:23,880 And as I've said before, perhaps a drama, 284 00:29:23,880 --> 00:29:32,580 even less so because drama depends on making different voices and different people equally estimable and equally interesting. 285 00:29:32,580 --> 00:29:39,000 That might differentiate that from this, a single narrative consciousness like this or traditional realist novel. 286 00:29:39,000 --> 00:29:43,070 For example. We might, though, want to modify this. 287 00:29:43,070 --> 00:29:49,900 We might want to acknowledge that in this play, perhaps uniquely, or you might think of some. 288 00:29:49,900 --> 00:29:55,970 You must think of some other examples. Hamlet, maybe Shakespeare's interest is only really in the main character. 289 00:29:55,970 --> 00:30:00,860 The only character in The Tempest that has any real effort bestowed on it. 290 00:30:00,860 --> 00:30:07,460 I think probably is Prospero. There are a gallery of two dimensional functional figures flanking him. 291 00:30:07,460 --> 00:30:11,690 We've talked about different kinds of characterisation earlier on in these lectures. 292 00:30:11,690 --> 00:30:24,860 Tempest is quite a good example of how lots of flat in any and Faustus tub's or two dimensional characters people this stage for Virgin under Miranda, 293 00:30:24,860 --> 00:30:30,230 for example, have little of the energy or youthful verve we see in earlier romantic couples. 294 00:30:30,230 --> 00:30:39,530 Antonio has nothing like books of antagonistic energy that we've seen in villains or antagonists in in earlier plays. 295 00:30:39,530 --> 00:30:41,150 Perhaps we should understand it then. 296 00:30:41,150 --> 00:30:50,000 Like its prototype, Dr. Fasters as another version of that late mediaeval morality play technique Psycho McKeough, the psycho Makhija. 297 00:30:50,000 --> 00:30:58,220 That technique of showing the interior of the character through exterior arising elements into different actors on the stage. 298 00:30:58,220 --> 00:31:06,710 Certainly it's been a fruitful theory to see Caliban and Ariel as parts of Prospero that he attempts to keep in cheque. 299 00:31:06,710 --> 00:31:16,190 Caliban, repeatedly associated with the Earth, with carrying fuel, with uncontrolled appetites for food and particularly for sex. 300 00:31:16,190 --> 00:31:19,130 And Ariel associated with the air, 301 00:31:19,130 --> 00:31:27,290 dashing about like Tinkerbell to enact his master's commands and prompting him to the higher spiritual and ethical values of forgiveness. 302 00:31:27,290 --> 00:31:32,150 These seem to be psychic functions which map so clearly onto Freudian ideas about the ID, 303 00:31:32,150 --> 00:31:39,800 ego and superego as the locations of instinct, the reality, principle and conscience, respectively. 304 00:31:39,800 --> 00:31:44,060 So the ID, ego and superego as a kind of version of Caliban, 305 00:31:44,060 --> 00:31:52,520 Prospero and Ariel that the map so clearly that it's tempting to think that Shakespeare must have read Freud's beyond the pleasure principle. 306 00:31:52,520 --> 00:32:05,230 Of course, the reality is the other way around. But together, this composite Prospero, Ariel Caliban speak almost half the play's lines. 307 00:32:05,230 --> 00:32:09,490 If, though there are certainly analogies between Prospero and the dramatist, 308 00:32:09,490 --> 00:32:15,400 these need not be autobiographical analogies between Prospero and Shakespeare. 309 00:32:15,400 --> 00:32:21,790 So I think there are roles. There are ways in which Prospero has sort of theatrical associations or mathematical associations. 310 00:32:21,790 --> 00:32:24,250 But they needn't be solely with Shakespeare. 311 00:32:24,250 --> 00:32:32,180 Prospero's role in writing the script of his revenge against his enemies picks up a long association in the revenge tragedy genre. 312 00:32:32,180 --> 00:32:37,930 The Tempest is a late version. Interesting. I think it really interesting the a late version of revenge tragedy hit because 313 00:32:37,930 --> 00:32:42,520 of a long association in that genre between the Avenger and the Artist. 314 00:32:42,520 --> 00:32:49,060 That association has its clearest iteration right at the beginning of Elizabethan revenge, tragedy in kids, Spanish tragedy, 315 00:32:49,060 --> 00:32:57,490 where you might remember that Hiran M.O. enact his revenge through a play he has written and that's presented before the Spanish court. 316 00:32:57,490 --> 00:33:03,910 So it's a structural and thematic topics of revenge, tragedy, the genre The Tempest works to read, right, 317 00:33:03,910 --> 00:33:10,780 that there is something there is an association of that theatricality and artistry in the character of the revenge. 318 00:33:10,780 --> 00:33:17,260 So saying that Prospero's role in the play is akin to that of a dramatist does not mean he is a self portrayed. 319 00:33:17,260 --> 00:33:23,710 But it does allow us perhaps to link him with other directive figures elsewhere in the canon. 320 00:33:23,710 --> 00:33:31,510 It's striking that these figures, these people who direct action in the plays, tend to be negative ones. 321 00:33:31,510 --> 00:33:35,290 He Argo, the arch plotter of Othello, 322 00:33:35,290 --> 00:33:44,530 of whom Haslet Haslet described him as an amateur of tragedy in real life and quite an extended the actual image about the Argo, 323 00:33:44,530 --> 00:33:47,530 an amateur of tragedy in real life. 324 00:33:47,530 --> 00:33:56,710 We might add the Duke who manipulates events in the guise of a frier in measure for Measure Pauliina, the keeper of Secrets in the Winter's Tale. 325 00:33:56,710 --> 00:34:03,550 Helena, who writes her own romantic comedy script with some decidedly unconvinced actors in all's well that ends well. 326 00:34:03,550 --> 00:34:05,260 These all tend to be ambivalent figures. 327 00:34:05,260 --> 00:34:15,610 I think within their plays, we might also want to see the self reflexivity of the tempest alongside that of, say, Hamlet or A Midsummer Night's Dream. 328 00:34:15,610 --> 00:34:18,580 These are all plays which perform inset plays, 329 00:34:18,580 --> 00:34:29,910 which occasion commentary on the nature of theatre and the difficulties of drawing the lines clearly between theatre and reality. 330 00:34:29,910 --> 00:34:31,260 Outside of Shakespeare's plays, 331 00:34:31,260 --> 00:34:37,860 and perhaps it's in these these kinds of comparisons that we can best break the hold of implicitly biographical readings, 332 00:34:37,860 --> 00:34:44,850 we might want to compare the theatricality of Prospero's magic with that of the Trickster's in Johnsen's The Alchemist. 333 00:34:44,850 --> 00:34:54,570 So to associate the magic in the temblors with theatre need not inevitably plays Prospero and Shakespeare together. 334 00:34:54,570 --> 00:35:01,690 So we've seen that the Association of Prospero with Shakespeare requires a reading of Prospero's character that is ultimately positive, 335 00:35:01,690 --> 00:35:08,280 Downton's syllogistic logic rests on an interpretation of Prospero's grave harmony, 336 00:35:08,280 --> 00:35:14,350 self mastery, Carme validity of will, sensitivity to Tarong, unfaltering justice, 337 00:35:14,350 --> 00:35:19,600 as Poppy tells us a good deal about late 19th century ideas of patriarchal authority. 338 00:35:19,600 --> 00:35:29,110 But more modern critics and their directors have seen a rather different Prospero irascible, tyrannical, 339 00:35:29,110 --> 00:35:35,350 subjecting Caliban to slavery and Ferdinand Caliburn double to unnecessary physical 340 00:35:35,350 --> 00:35:40,630 hardship as part of a thoroughgoing ambivalence towards Miranda's marriage. 341 00:35:40,630 --> 00:35:47,650 Prospero is entirely preoccupied with Miranda's chastity, in part for plot reasons, 342 00:35:47,650 --> 00:35:53,650 because her main function is to be a token to secure his own successful return to Milan. 343 00:35:53,650 --> 00:36:00,730 Her marriage buys off her new father in law, who was formerly a supporter of Antonio. 344 00:36:00,730 --> 00:36:06,560 Prospero's antagonism towards Ferdinand is in part a ruse to bring the couple together. 345 00:36:06,560 --> 00:36:13,690 Prospero is trying to play the part of the traditional comic blocking figure, the father like Jesus in Merchant of Venice. 346 00:36:13,690 --> 00:36:19,660 Sorry, McMinns Midsummer Night's Dream for Shylock in Merchant of Venice or my darkly broadband tale in Othello. 347 00:36:19,660 --> 00:36:26,710 Those father figures who oppose the marriage and thereby perversely sort of cement it. 348 00:36:26,710 --> 00:36:32,920 They make the couple and the audience invest more in their relationship. 349 00:36:32,920 --> 00:36:38,710 And in the end, the blocking figures have to they have to step back. 350 00:36:38,710 --> 00:36:47,560 So Prospero needs Miranda to be chased because he he needs her to be a token in his political rehabilitate meditation. 351 00:36:47,560 --> 00:36:52,360 And he needs to oppose her marriage because he's being a sort of comic blocking figure. 352 00:36:52,360 --> 00:36:58,240 But for both of those, I think his behaviour is in excess of that generic point. 353 00:36:58,240 --> 00:37:06,310 This is what he says to Ferdinand. If now does break her virgin, not before all sanctimonious ceremonies may with full and holy right ministered. 354 00:37:06,310 --> 00:37:11,080 No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall to make this contract grow. 355 00:37:11,080 --> 00:37:18,310 But Baron hate sour. I disdain and discord shall be strew the union of your bed. 356 00:37:18,310 --> 00:37:27,370 We talked last week about Latin at unusual Latin words at times of strain and kind of emotional stress in Antony's speech, remember. 357 00:37:27,370 --> 00:37:34,210 And I think sanctimonious. Their sanctimonious is just about got its two meanings, one meaning holy and reverent, 358 00:37:34,210 --> 00:37:39,280 and one meaning pretending to be wholly and reverent at this time. 359 00:37:39,280 --> 00:37:45,220 But it's an unusual word for Shakespeare to use and quite a quite a new word. 360 00:37:45,220 --> 00:37:49,600 The marriage of daughters, though, is a source of sorrow and loss more widely in the play. 361 00:37:49,600 --> 00:37:56,200 The ill fated sea voyage, which brought the nobleman close enough to Prospero's island for him to capture them in the storm, 362 00:37:56,200 --> 00:38:00,400 was undertaken for the marriage of Alonzo's daughter, Clarabelle, 363 00:38:00,400 --> 00:38:08,980 married to a Tunisian prince, part then of the play's undercurrent of anxious interest in international and particularly colonial politics, 364 00:38:08,980 --> 00:38:11,920 which are going to move on to talk about. 365 00:38:11,920 --> 00:38:19,360 So one way of seeing Prospero is actually as a distinctly unlikeable, manipulative, manipulative control freak out. 366 00:38:19,360 --> 00:38:25,420 One scene two in which he's introduced gives us a good example of this behaviour, 367 00:38:25,420 --> 00:38:31,990 because Shakespeare has set himself the task of writing a play where real time and story time are equivalent. 368 00:38:31,990 --> 00:38:38,020 So the action of the play takes the two and a half or three hours that the play itself takes. 369 00:38:38,020 --> 00:38:42,910 It's an extreme version of Aristotle's prescribed unity of time. So because of this decision, 370 00:38:42,910 --> 00:38:47,680 he has the structural problem of how to convey the previous part of the story mount to look at the 371 00:38:47,680 --> 00:38:55,510 Winter's Tale for a completely different way of how you deal with a story which spans two generations. 372 00:38:55,510 --> 00:38:59,320 What Shakespeare does in The Tempest is true is to tell it. 373 00:38:59,320 --> 00:39:04,870 Tell us what happened in the past through an extended series of narrations about that history. 374 00:39:04,870 --> 00:39:06,970 And that's what formed the long seen act. 375 00:39:06,970 --> 00:39:17,110 One scene to these narrations are punctuated by Miranda's apparent disregard and eventually her falling asleep, albeit by magical intervention. 376 00:39:17,110 --> 00:39:19,390 But these seem like nervous tics in the narrative, 377 00:39:19,390 --> 00:39:25,960 which seemed to me to betray the fear that this scene is actually quite boring, heavy with diagnosis. 378 00:39:25,960 --> 00:39:31,750 The narrative term for telling not showing my misses are showing says dialectically. 379 00:39:31,750 --> 00:39:39,190 Very heavy, huge amount of material has got to be got through. And there's there's an unease about how the play is actually managing that. 380 00:39:39,190 --> 00:39:47,400 But part of the purpose of the scene, I think, is to establish Prospero as a tyrant physically and psychologically. 381 00:39:47,400 --> 00:39:58,490 And also to collapse the distinction between his own supposedly benign scholarly magic and the maligned feminised magic of Caliban mother, 382 00:39:58,490 --> 00:40:01,830 Taliban's mother is the Witch Seeker Act. And we never see her in the play. 383 00:40:01,830 --> 00:40:08,310 But she's an important recollection and kind of compass point in this early scene. 384 00:40:08,310 --> 00:40:12,180 Prospero charges Ariel with forgetting how she treated him. 385 00:40:12,180 --> 00:40:18,310 You can see one of the ways the plot is clunky at this point. Prospero says to have you forgot the file, which secour? 386 00:40:18,310 --> 00:40:25,810 And Ariel says no. But Prospero has as a yes, you have because he has to tell us, because we've never heard of her. 387 00:40:25,810 --> 00:40:37,200 He charges area with remembering cigarettes is cruelties to him, Ariel imprisoning him in a pine tree and reminds Ariel that he Prospero released him. 388 00:40:37,200 --> 00:40:44,310 He acknowledges that he released him into another kind of servitude or servitude that Ariel is grumbling about all the way through the play. 389 00:40:44,310 --> 00:40:51,330 And he keeps him he keeps Ariel obedient to him against the threat of being rehme, prisoned. 390 00:40:51,330 --> 00:40:57,240 This time in a stronger tree, an oak. The ostensible purpose of this exchange, 391 00:40:57,240 --> 00:41:02,910 which is to establish the difference between Prospero and or acts collapses because actually they become the same thing. 392 00:41:02,910 --> 00:41:07,770 Prospero uses the same threats multiplied that cigarettes has done. 393 00:41:07,770 --> 00:41:16,600 He becomes the same kind of figure. It's part of it's a small part of a different and more compromised presentation of Prospero, 394 00:41:16,600 --> 00:41:23,500 which cannot participate in Darden's positive construction of his presumed presumed associations with Shakespeare. 395 00:41:23,500 --> 00:41:30,640 Or to put it another way. If this Prospero is Shakespeare, we wouldn't like Shakespeare. 396 00:41:30,640 --> 00:41:34,450 We might not like Shakespeare. Isn't too awful a prospect, really. 397 00:41:34,450 --> 00:41:41,800 No. Elizabethans Katherine Duncan Jones reminds us a nice revisionist biography of Shakespeare called Ungentle Shakespeare. 398 00:41:41,800 --> 00:41:49,660 No, Elizabethans were likeable in the sense of being modern, tolerant, hygienic, liberal people. 399 00:41:49,660 --> 00:41:56,680 Edward Bond's 1970s Play Bingo dramatises a negative version of the ageing playwright retired to Stratford, 400 00:41:56,680 --> 00:42:01,880 a useful corrective to more idealising biographical speculations. 401 00:42:01,880 --> 00:42:06,460 But the point is, I think that the Association of Prospero with Shakespeare has tended actually 402 00:42:06,460 --> 00:42:13,630 to obscure or misrepresent the ways Prospero's characterised in the play. 403 00:42:13,630 --> 00:42:19,840 And it's in this aspect that autobiographical readings of The Tempest have been eclipsed by colonial ones. 404 00:42:19,840 --> 00:42:25,150 More recent readings of The Tempest have been less interested in Prospero as playwright, 405 00:42:25,150 --> 00:42:30,520 specific or not, and more interested in him as colonial overlord. 406 00:42:30,520 --> 00:42:37,800 This is a Prospero who is less Shakespeare than slave master. 407 00:42:37,800 --> 00:42:40,500 Since at least the 19th century, the late 19th century, 408 00:42:40,500 --> 00:42:48,210 when the scholar Sidney Lee discussed how far knowledge of the new world had travelled to early modern England, 409 00:42:48,210 --> 00:42:57,090 The Tempest has been connected with stories of exploration and more distantly with the early colonisation of the Americas. 410 00:42:57,090 --> 00:43:04,350 I said before that there's no major source for the play. But two minor sources we have discovered both connect the play with exploration. 411 00:43:04,350 --> 00:43:14,800 Montaigne's essay on cannibals is one of the ways that a new kind of intellectual scepticism uses the discovery 412 00:43:14,800 --> 00:43:21,990 of the new world and the tales that come back to reflect on or a kind of relativist view of human human nature. 413 00:43:21,990 --> 00:43:29,280 I guess the Montaigne's essay on cannibals, as translated by Florio being in the 17th century, 414 00:43:29,280 --> 00:43:33,900 provides almost verbatim Gonzalo's account of the ideal Commonwealth. 415 00:43:33,900 --> 00:43:40,440 At the beginning of Act two, the name Caliban may actually have been intended as an anagram of cannibal, 416 00:43:40,440 --> 00:43:49,700 then a generic term for a rich Aboriginal peoples. The second source is a letter about a shipwreck in the Bermudas written by William Strait. 417 00:43:49,700 --> 00:43:54,720 Gee, this seems to provided some of the details of the early scenes. 418 00:43:54,720 --> 00:44:01,620 This reading of The Tempest, as in some sense a parable of early colonial expansion, 419 00:44:01,620 --> 00:44:09,010 has gained ground in the 20th century, particularly because of some significant post-colonial rewriting. 420 00:44:09,010 --> 00:44:13,650 And something about the tempest, which has made it more, I think, 421 00:44:13,650 --> 00:44:19,380 than any other play of Shakespeare's, the one that has been rewritten and reworked and responded to. 422 00:44:19,380 --> 00:44:28,560 It's it's sort of presented itself almost as one part of a dialogue, which needs to be which to which I reply needs to be given. 423 00:44:28,560 --> 00:44:34,470 So the colonial reading of the play has gained ground politically because of some significant post-colonial rewriting. 424 00:44:34,470 --> 00:44:40,020 Amongst them, the Martinique poet MSH Rs and Tempest from 1969, 425 00:44:40,020 --> 00:44:50,550 which retells the play really flagging up the interest in language, domination and defeat. 426 00:44:50,550 --> 00:44:58,980 When the French Madagascan psychoanalyst Octave Manin his book, which was actually called In French Psychology, the LA Colony's ASIL. 427 00:44:58,980 --> 00:45:07,230 You can see what that means. When that was translated into English in nineteen fifty six, it had a new title, Prospero and Caliban. 428 00:45:07,230 --> 00:45:11,850 We might sum up the shift in criticism by pointing to the difference between 429 00:45:11,850 --> 00:45:20,100 the second edition of the play in 1954 and the third in nineteen ninety nine. 430 00:45:20,100 --> 00:45:26,400 Frank Kermode introduces The Tempest in the second in the Ardern two edition briskly. 431 00:45:26,400 --> 00:45:30,480 It is as well to be clear that there is nothing in the tempest fundamental to its 432 00:45:30,480 --> 00:45:36,270 structure of ideas which could not have existed had America remained undiscovered. 433 00:45:36,270 --> 00:45:39,420 So I retargeted have come out as well, 434 00:45:39,420 --> 00:45:42,720 to be clear that there is nothing in The Tempest is fundamental to its structure 435 00:45:42,720 --> 00:45:47,060 of ideas which could not have existed had America remained undiscovered. 436 00:45:47,060 --> 00:45:52,410 So for commode, this is a really rather romantic 54. That is not important at all. 437 00:45:52,410 --> 00:46:03,300 If we look at Virginia Mason Vaughn and Alden Tyvon, who are editing the 3rd edition of the series in 1999, just come out in a new updated edition. 438 00:46:03,300 --> 00:46:04,730 This is what they say. 439 00:46:04,730 --> 00:46:12,540 The extensive and varied discourses of colonialism are deeply embedded in the languages in sorry, in the drama's language and events. 440 00:46:12,540 --> 00:46:19,590 I read again this I messed up. The extensive and varied discourses of colonialism are deeply embedded in the drama's language 441 00:46:19,590 --> 00:46:26,270 and events such that they say the play is a theatrical microcosm of the imperial paradigm. 442 00:46:26,270 --> 00:46:34,940 A theatrical microcosm of the imperial paradigm. So over 40 years, 45 years, the view of the play and what's important to it is completely changed. 443 00:46:34,940 --> 00:46:40,830 It's one good example of why you should try and read the most up to date editions you can find. 444 00:46:40,830 --> 00:46:51,060 A similar shift in interpretive priorities has taken place in the theatre after the director, Jonathan Miller's production of the play in 1970. 445 00:46:51,060 --> 00:46:58,900 It has been hard to recover a sympathetic Prospero unmarked by colonial guilt. 446 00:46:58,900 --> 00:47:07,780 Reviewers described that landmark production, Jonathan Miller's production in 1970 as giving us a Prospero who was a solemn, 447 00:47:07,780 --> 00:47:16,330 touchy, neurotic, the victim of a power complex who was arrogated to himself the godlike power of the instinctive colonist. 448 00:47:16,330 --> 00:47:21,680 By the end, wrote Michael Billington, the cycle of colonialism is complete. 449 00:47:21,680 --> 00:47:32,680 Ariel, the sophisticated African picks up Prospero's discarded wond clearly prepared himself to take on the role of bullying overlord. 450 00:47:32,680 --> 00:47:34,540 Recent Prospero's, that's to say, 451 00:47:34,540 --> 00:47:45,600 have tended to be so extremely unpleasant that any association with Shakespeare would reflect extremely badly on the playwright himself. 452 00:47:45,600 --> 00:47:50,370 So I've been trying to unpick why the association between Prospero and Shakespeare has 453 00:47:50,370 --> 00:47:54,480 been such a feature of critical and particularly biographical discourse on the plan, 454 00:47:54,480 --> 00:47:59,380 to use that to think about how we use biography more generally and perhaps a 455 00:47:59,380 --> 00:48:05,460 rather hidden in the way we think about Shakespeare's plays in their chronology. 456 00:48:05,460 --> 00:48:11,550 And then I've tried to think about some different methodologies to try and test the interpretive validity in. 457 00:48:11,550 --> 00:48:19,850 Some of those have rested on different views of Prospero's characterisation and how they have changed over the 20th century. 458 00:48:19,850 --> 00:48:28,070 Next week is my final lecture in this series, remember all ten previous lectures, so finally last year are available as podcasts. 459 00:48:28,070 --> 00:48:32,030 But next week for the last lecture, I'm gonna be talking about the first part of Henry the set. 460 00:48:32,030 --> 00:48:36,050 Henry the fourth. No, not Henry the sixth. First part of Henry the fourth. John Henry the sixth. 461 00:48:36,050 --> 00:48:44,460 Have to wait till next year. So the first part of Henry the Fourth and the focus of the lecture, I think is going to be why is Falstaff fat? 462 00:48:44,460 --> 00:48:58,357 Why is Falstaff that? So I hope I'll see some of you then.