The Tempest

 

The Tempest (W.W. Norton, 2019)

by William Shakespeare [edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman]

England, c. 1610

I hadn't read any Shakespeare in about 20 years so I thought it was time for a reboot.  While maybe a little bit more of a mixed bag entertainment-wise than I'd remembered, The Tempest didn't really disappoint in spite of a non-canonical dull stretch or two.  I was secretly tickled, for example, to be reminded right off the bat just what a coarse, crass fellow the Greatest Writer in the English Language could be.  I mean, he doesn't even get out of Act 1, Scene 1 before the "honest old councillor" Gonzalo opines that the boatswain of the sinking ship that's going down probably won't die from drowning even "though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an unstanched wench" (1.1.41-43).  Oof, a vivid but not necessarily the most "family-friendly" image!  Similarly, Antonio, "the usurping Duke of Milan," whose unlawful moves against his brother Prospero, "the right duke of Milan," have set the romance's whole shipwreck + magic + revenge machinations in motion, also doesn't wait long before exclaiming that he wishes that same ill-regarded mariner "mightst lie drowning the washing of ten tides!" (1.1.52-53)--what the notes to my edition helpfully explain as "an exaggerated form of the sentence passed on pirates, who were hanged on the shore at low-water mark and left there until three tides had flowed" (6).  Wow, King James' England is in the house!  Culture and civilization are in the eye of the beholder, of course, and in this light one of the most interesting/least superficial things about The Tempest for me this time around was coming to grips with how cleverly the play's events unfold at a crossroads between the dream or magical world of the action, itself influenced by classical literature at times, and the modern world contemporaneous with the writing of the play.  A few words about the "man-monster" Caliban (3.2.11) should help explain what I mean.  Although Caliban is said to have been "hag-born" of the witch Sycorax (1.2.283), he lives in perpetual fear of Prospero because Prospero's magic powers are greater than those of Caliban's own god Setebos (1.2.372).  Setebos, the editors of the Norton edition explain, was "a devil of the Patagonian natives, according to Richard Eden's 1555 translation of Antonio Pigafetta's account of Magellan's circumnavigatory expedition" (19).  Caliban, who is elsewhere feared as somebody with connections to "devils...savages and men of Ind" (2.2.54-56) at a time when the people of England were laying out coins to see "a dead Indian" for the novelty of the spectacle (2.2.31), is hence a link to the New World of the Age of Discovery just as surely as Prospero's "Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves" speech in 5.1.33-50 textually riffs on a Medea incantation from Ovid's Metamorphoses.  Shakespeare, not too shabby a playwright for a guy not above an uncouth reference to an unmarried woman's "virgin-knot" (4.1.15) nor a syphilis joke or two!

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)