Russell Jackson

The Tempest begins with a ship breaking up in a storm. The royal passengers are put in their place by the boatswain: 'What cares these roarers for the name of king? ...You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence and work peace of the presence, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority.' By the end of the play, the same characters have been brought to a degree of self-knowledge - if not in every case repentance - finding themselves, 'when no man was his own.'

This is a play of overlapping stories. A young woman, Miranda, has been living on an island with two men - her magician father Prospero and a 'slave' - and has yet to learn any of the ways of the world, and then she encounters a young man with whom she instantly falls in love. Another of the island's inhabitants, Caliban, the son of a witch - now dead - was adopted by Prospero, taught to speak a new language, cherished and then rejected when he obeyed the promptings of nature and tried to rape Miranda. (Or at least, that is how his behaviour has been interpreted.) Now he has been reduced to slavery, and is kept in his place by spirits controlled by the magician - and he meets two strangers who introduce him to liquor and offer him liberation, so long as he subjects himself to them and helps them usurp the magician's power. Ferdinand, a young prince, arrives on the island, meets Miranda, falls in love with her, and is made to perform menial tasks by her father. A usurper, Antonio, and his fellow-conspirator are themselves threatened by conspiracy, and rescued from it by the magic powers of the duke whom they once supplanted. Then, of course, a common factor in all these stories is that of the duke himself. Regarded as 'prime' among his peers he became so absorbed in his studies that his brother, whom he had trained as a substitute, took his place by force. His escape - committed in a barely seaworthy boat to the mercy of the sea - has brought him to this island. His magic 'art' has created a version of a dukedom on it, as though he were a colonist given 'plantation' of a newly discovered territory.

The means by which these overlapping stories are managed is the 'rough magic' Prospero wields, but it is also his (and the playwright's) play-making and stage-management - the magic of the theatre. Prospero's own 'art' enables him to control the spirit Ariel, who in turn has 'meaner ministers' to execute his commands. In the play's second scene we discover that even the storm at the beginning of the play was an illusion, or in fact the illusion of an illusion, for in the theatre we connive willingly at our own deception by the artifice by which a storm is represented. The play's other shows - the banquet offered to the courtiers then snatched away from them, and the masque performed for the benefit (and instruction) of Ferdinand and Miranda - are also images of images. Everything that happens as we watch and listen takes place between quotation marks, so that what is 'real' is never certain. When Stephano and Trinculo, covered in filth and out of their minds with fear and drink stagger into the final scene, they need explaining as much as the more exotic Caliban. The spectacle of Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess is a 'show' - Prospero's last - that is in fact really happening, and acted by human beings who do not think they are playing a role. Nevertheless, like all the other shows, it begs to be interpreted. (we are left to work it out for ourselves from the lines they speak.)

This is a restless play, even though it has the unusual unity of an action completed within a day. What happens in The Tempest is the climax of a story - or a series of stories - begun many years before it opens. But the sense of arrival is qualified by the fact that all but two of the play's characters, Caliban and Ariel, will need to leave the island in order to bring their various stories to fruition or completion. Prospero achieves the restoration of his dukedom, and arranges a dynastic marriage that (this is after all a story) unites two young people who love each other. He has brought a sense of closure to one part of his life, drowning his book and his magic staff. All the same, there is still unfinished business. Has he really learned to forgive the man 'whom to call brother would infect my mouth' and has that brother really repented? Prospero says that he too has lost a child, a daughter, 'in this late tempest.' This sounds as though it is more than the commonplace expression from the parent of a bride, who has (so to speak) lost a daughter and gained a son: in this play loss and gain seem too serious to be mentioned in so offhand a manner. When he returns to Milan 'every third thought' will be his grave, and he will need prayer if his 'ending' is not to be despair. Is this the actor speaking? Or even the playwright?

This is likely to be the author's last unassisted work, but we do not need to make The Tempest into a 'farewell' - a romantic conclusion of his own story - to be strangely moved and disturbed by its final lines, spoken to us both by a magician who is no longer in possession of his powers, and also by an actor who within a few words steps in and out of the frame of the theatre. When Prospero suddenly remembers Caliban's conspiracy, he interrupts the masque of Iris, Ceres and Juno and explains that it was no more than a vision (he has already told Ariel it will be 'some vanity of mine art.') Then he goes further - all human life is no more permanent than this 'insubstantial pageant' and like it will dissolve and leave behind not even a trace like a 'wrack' or wisp of cloud. The play's two visions of an ideal world are not descriptions of the island itself, but images of hope conjured up with words: Gonzalo imagines a government on the island that would 'excel the golden Age' and Ceres wishes the young couple perpetual bounty, without even the natural interruption of winter:

Earth's increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty;
Vines with clust'ring bunches growing
Plants with goodly burden bowing;
Spring come to you at the farthest
In the very end of harvest!

When Prospero reassures Ferdinand, who seems 'dismayed' his words seem remarkably lacking in comfort. Everything is illusory, in the last analysis or on the last day:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Does this mean that our life ends in our own sleep of death, or that we are ourselves being dreamed by some other sleeper? (In which case, 'rounded with a sleep' could mean that our lives end when the dreamer wakes.) Or does it mean both at once? The play does not dwell on this, or mark it by having Ferdinand and Miranda respond with any sign of dismay, and they simply wish Prospero 'peace' as he seeks to 'still' his 'beating mind.'

The play is a story we cannot complete, and it has political, intellectual, emotional and spiritual dimensions that cannot easily be resolved by the promise of calm seas and auspicious gales or the union of Ferdinand and Miranda. Prospero's departing words are a conventional request for favourable reception (indulgence) at the audience's hands, but they also turn us back to the problems of our own lives and our own need for mercy:

As you from crimes would pardon'd be
Let your indulgence set me free.

Russell Jackson is Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Shakespeare Institute in the University of Birmingham.

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