The Tempest (Lecture 1 of 2)

okay we're in the homestretch here two more lectures to go and then a review session a week from today happy Shakespeare's birthday I would have a sing happy birthday but it's also his death day so it's a little hard to celebrate April 23rd because he died on the same day anyway but it's nice time to remember Shakespeare he really deserves a lot of credit if this course has been successful is because of Shakespeare in terms of films to view the tempest as a little hard for me to recommend this time the ones on YouTube that are available I didn't recognize going down all the ones available I'm guessing the best one is the one where Christopher Plummer plays Prospero he's a wonderful actor I've never seen that version it's from a Stratford Ontario production I did see a halfway-decent production of The Tempest there with a bad a bad Prospero but Plummer has to be good so I would I'm gonna recommend that one on a guest there's an older TV version with Maurice Evans as Prospero I haven't seen it since I was a kid and saw it I remember it as being very good and I always picked the weird casting one this has Richard Burton as Caliban in one of the strangest bits of cat casting ever Roddy McDowall is Ariel a comic you've never heard of his Tom Poston as Trinculo but anyway I remember this being pretty good and that's also available for once I am not recommending the Helen Mirren version there's a rumor around I have a thing about Helen Mirren and maybe I do but I there's a very weird version directed by Julie Taymor where Helen Mirren plays Prospero and we have a female Prospero and I don't have too much of an objection to that now it does throw things off balance a bit but it's not a very good movie so we'll forget about that one okay we're winding up with the tempest I've arranged this course around the idea of genre we've looked at some histories which had elements of comedy and tragedy in them we look at some tragedies we looked at some comedies now we're going to look at a tragic comedy I tried to show you that these genres have a political dimension to them and political implications also I have been trying to show you the scale of Shakespeare's achievement we've looked at all these brilliant details and wonderful lines of poetry but I try to show you how each play forms into a whole and quite an extraordinary one but I've gone beyond that and tried to show how these plays echo each other how they fit together how they comment on each other Shakespeare's plays constitute a universe or a cosmos of their own and one could spend a lifetime as I have more or less done exploring that universe and I think if we could ever understand all those plays and the way they fit together maybe wouldn't we would understand the riddle of humanity so I want to now turn to the last category of Shakespeare's plays again try to I'm gonna try to show that our political approach helps us to understand the nature of tragic comedy The Tempest is usually grouped with three other plays that Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career Pericles Winter's Tale and Cymbeline I should say that these four plays are not grouped separately in the first folio and indeed Pericles doesn't even appear in the first folio the first folio seems to recognize only three categories companies tragedies and histories but for a variety of reasons for and for a long time critics have grouped these four plays together they are sometimes called Shakespeare his last plays or his final plays which is a pretty good description of them they do appear to be the last plays he ruled on zone and a lot of people including our editor and the Signet like to think that the tempest in shakespeare's last play he went on to write a few collaborations with John Fletcher Henry the 8th to noble kinsman a play called Cardini Oh which has been lost but the The Tempest appears to be his own farewell to the theatre it's long been thought that when Prospero renounces his magic art it's Shakespeare renouncing his Dramatic Arts it's just too wonderful to think of it that way so we'll continue to do that and I do think the play is an attempt to create a certain retrospective look at Shakespeare's whole career and I'll stress that next time so again a lot of people just call them these the last plays some people call them Shakespeare's romances all four plays seem to be working in the genre of Greek romance the prototype of that is the Odyssey these are stories of perilous sea journeys of people being lost at sea of people dying and coming back to life of families being split up and being reunited stories with strange tokens of recognition all those elements come out of Greek romance and and and and and seem to be present in these four plays but again a lot of people call them tragic comedies that is not a term that critics in today's world have invented that is tragic comedy was a term used in Shakespeare's day it was already used by Italian critics of drama earlier in the Renaissance I think it is a good term and that's why I'm using it a tragic comedy is fundamentally a comedy in that the story ends happily and in that sense comically and often is here in the tempest with the promise of marriage just as we saw in the comedies but tragic comedies have more tragic material in them than normal comedy is this is a hazy line and it's difficult to categorize things exactly but generally speaking we call something a tragic comedy when it seems to start off tragically and really we take the tragic elements seriously and then it veers in the direction of comedy towards the end that's limits less evident in The Tempest than these three other plays because Shakespeare picks up the story late and the main tragic elements are in the backstory in the story of Prospero being deposed from Milan nevertheless the tempest has many of these elements that there's threat of death and there's more suffering normally than a comedy and therefore this feeling of tragedy being resolved to produce comedy and hence tragic comedy and I'll say more about tragic comedy as a genre on on Tuesday but in any case I want to explore this fourth is honor I've chose to the tempest it's the best of these four plays more importantly it's the only one of the four I even have a prayer of understanding these are very strange plays they're very experimental I think Shakespeare finally worked the proper formula out in the tempest and it relates very well to the political issues we've been discussing the central issue of Plato's philosopher-king now there have been many attempts to explain this grouping again these plays come at roughly the same time namely at the end of Shakespeare's career in the 19th century there was a great effort of biographical readings of Shakespeare and so people talked about Shakespeare's dark period that when he wrote the plays from like Hamlet and King Lear that he was in a dark mood and something had gone wrong and so he wrote tragedies and then these late plays are assumed to be a brightening of Shakespeare's spirit when he was on the heights as Edward now doubt and put it that that he had gone beyond whatever was causing him to write tragedy and now was reconciled with the world now there may be some truth to this but we know nothing about Shakespeare's in their life other than while we read the play is so these arguments are completely circular so I we're gonna just look at the thematic core of The Tempest to try to relate it to Shakespeare's other place I should say there's there's also a good argument that can be made that these four plays reflect the opening of the Blackfriars theater that the Shakespeare Shakespeare's company had got moved to a new theatre or opened up a second theater around 1609 and these plays may have been an effort to cultivate in a rustic Radek audience which actually seems to have succeeded but in any case let's let's discuss them purely in internally and see what the tempest has to say itself now to get to the tempest let's step back a moment to the King Lear and I wasn't really fair to garner all so you look up on page 100 which is act 4 scene to its line 26 Goneril actually states the central theme of King Lear oh the difference of man and man now she's referring to the fact that she finds Edmund a lot sexier than Albany but oh the difference of man and man King Lear is all about human difference we start out with the confusion of difference a world in which the relevant differences among human beings are not being taken account of we saw that Lear is ignoring the differences between Cornwall and Albany in creating his plan as he goes to execute the plan it requires him publicly to cover over the difference between Cordelia on one hand and Goneril and Regan on the other we saw a sword at Gloucester effectively equates his two sons Edmund and Edgar even though we know how different they are I think this is Shakespeare is saying something about the political realm it often demands that we cover over human difference again for political reasons you often have to treat people equally when they're in fact unequal you sometimes you have to treat the best and the worst people the same way we call that the rule of law for example and as we saw there's something middling about the political order it goes for the middle it doesn't take account of what's best and worse than humanity some ways it settles for the middle and deals with the middle and that quite frankly means often dealing with mediocrity and so the plot of King Lear is the exposure of human difference when the political or dissolves as we saw both the best and the worst in human beings come to the surface and as leader says let the great gods find out their enemies now that also means find out their friends and the whole center of the play works to differentiate the cast of characters into the very evil like or laundry and so on and and the very good like Cordelia at Kent and the fool and we see that there is a hierarchy I wrote that word on the board because you often get spells so strange words saying strange ways and exams I wanted to see what I'm saying what I say hierarchy what King Lear points to is the difference between the conventional hierarchy and the natural hierarchy that's in a way the central theme of everything we've been looking at in Shakespeare but the idea there Shakespeare is looking at aristocracy's and as tragedies societies that have these social ranks that differentiated and what he shows us is that that hierarchy is not natural it's not rooted in the natural differences among human beings so the course of King Lear the conventional hierarchy is dissolved and in the chaos that results the natural hierarchy starts to emerge so that for example at the centre of the play we discovered that a Duke the Duke of Cornwall is a wretch and one of his servants is Noble in the sense that the Duke of Cornwall does terrible things and ignoble things really and this peasant as the Duke of Cornwall calls him actually stands up to injustice and and and writes the wrong against Gloucester at least in the sense of killing Cornwall and I mentioned how unbelievably daring it was of Shakespeare to show that on the stage however much we hate the Duke of Cornwall to show a peasant killing a Duke that was pretty strong stuff at the time that's homeless French Revolution stuff now to think Shakespeare was a budding French revolutionary in fact what I am saying is that he does believe in a natural hierarchy he does believe in fundamental differences of quality among human beings that sounds very nasty to us it sounds very undemocratic and it is I will cushion the blow for you somewhat by insisting again that Shakespeare does not embrace the conventional hierarchy but only the natural hierarchy that is he is not deluded into thinking that just because someone is born a duke or an earl that that person is better than other people indeed no work of writing could show better than King Lear does how false that position is on the other hand Shakespeare would say that just because the conventional hierarchy is false doesn't mean there isn't some kind of natural natural hierarchy even Thomas Jefferson spoke of the natural aristocracy so this view is not totally compatible with the view of a Democrat now in fact again I think we would very much like Shakespeare to be a Liberal Democrat I don't think he is I do think he has an aristocratic vision of humanity but again I'll stress it's based on the notion of natural aristocrats in the sense you can say the fundamental political problem for Shakespeare is that the conventional hierarchy and the natural hiring hierarchy did not correspond and that's something we've seen from the beginning in the history plays the people who rule are not always the best people you might say the best people should rule but that's not saying that the people who rule are the best it's a very fundamental distinction it's the fundamental political for a fact for Shakespeare in many ways it is the fundamental tragic fact that the political the conventional political hierarchy and the natural hierarchy of human worth do not correspond in a way this is reflected in the division between comedy and tragedy in Shakespeare and may explain why he was able to do so well in both genres unlike almost anybody else Shakespeare has a remarkable sense of both human similarity and human difference the comedies are let me say democratic that's a little wrong but I'll say it anyway and the the the tragedies are aristocratic by that I mean the comedies emphasize human similarity and the tragedies emphasize human difference that is as we've seen the comedies dwell in the world of everyday common experience it's one reason they so frequently deal with eros because that's something all human beings experience the comedy is deal with those aspects of human life that give continuity to our lives that bring us together bring us together in families and in communities give us long life and prosperity that time one generation together with another and the comedies are very suspicious of difference they tend to expose the thoughts of heroism Malvolio things he's better than he really is and above all he thinks he's better than anyone else in the play the comedy shows that ridiculous that is it exposes how unfounded his sense of being better is I think it's similar with Jay cos that he prides himself on being so smart and cynical and bitter and Shakespeare has us laugh at that shakespeare's comedy is not bitter Shakespeare is really largely accepting of human folly and he gently rebukes it and makes fun of it we see with the lovers they would like to be heroic they would like to be Romeo and Juliet they keep insisting their experience is unique that it's at odds with the rest of society that's the Romeo and Juliet mode that's tragic and Shakespeare's comedies the lovers are not up to that they take it just so far and then they realized this is not for us what's for us is marriage and children and long life family and living on is not dying in a flash of lightning the way Romeo and Juliet do so so the comedies can they offer people that claim to be different but the comedies keep stressing how we really are similar and as we've seen again and again in Shakespeare we're similar when we look at our bodies and so we're similar in sexuality because we're looking at our bodies something that's physical and again the comedies are very wary of any claims to preeminence in comedy those claims turn out to be pretension the heroes are shown to be have feet of clay and there's a lot of people who write great comedy who have that view of humanity Ben Jonson would be the best example among Shakespeare's contemporaries but Shakespeare also was acutely aware of you difference that some people really are different and quite frankly better and they're more heroic and they're more daring and they want to stand alone and they have the courage to stand alone so I threw Austen so much at work in the tragedies the designer distinguish yourself and then the tragedy is care heroism is real it's not fake there really are people who see the world differently and more power to them that's their greatness and that's why in the tragedies these people who are genuinely different in higher sense get killed off be a society can't assemble around figures such as that so if we take that view again if you see that Shakespeare is so we're both how we are similar and how some of us are different and higher and again quite frankly better or at least more heroic for that then I think you can see how comedy and tragedy interact in Shakespeare now all of this is encapsulated in the opening scene in The Tempest it's just astounding the the level Shakespeare has achieved at this point in his career so let's turn to page three in The Tempest The Tempest makes all sorts of reference this to Shakespeare's earlier plays unfortunately for example a lot of the references are to Macbeth and we haven't read Macbeth in this class so I won't dwell on that fortunately one of the major reference points in The Tempest if not the major reference point is King Lear so I will be able to use that with you so look just page three this is act 1 scene 1 line 7 blow to outburst I wind if room enough there it is it's for King Lear blow winds and crack your cheeks and there are several points in the play where where Shakespeare invokes the storm of King Lear look at page 14 for example this is act 1 scene 2 about line 261 Juve's lightnings the precursors of the dreadful thunderclaps more momentary inside out running or not the fire and cracks of sulfurous roaring the most mighty Neptune seemed to proceed again this echoes a King Lear and the storm the Jones lightnings the dreadful thunderclaps the so furious of fires their Shakespeare he named the play The Tempest he's invoking the kind of storm we saw hinted at in Midsummer Night's Dream and that we saw very strongly realized in King Lear the storm is tragedy the storm is the threat to human life and we see it evoked here in the most fundamental form a storm at sea and we get a very ancient metaphor of the ship of state here that what we see on board the ship is a microcosm of the political community an image for the political community this images in Plato's Republic for example the idea of talking about the the state as a ship and it's quite extraordinary how quickly Shakespeare exploits it if you turn to page four so Act one Scene one about line 13 where is the master antonio asks this is the question that resounds throughout this opening scene where's the master and it is the fundamental political question who rules and especially who should rule here play opens with the fundamental political question and what Shakespeare does is to expose the gap between the conventional hierarchy and the natural hierarchy because we have two sets of people in this opening scene one are the sailors and the captain and the bosun and then a court party the King of Naples the Duke of millon and these are both authorities the hierarchy of the ship and the hierarchy of the land you might say and they're in conflict when Antonio asks where is the master the bosun is is annoyed you Maura labor says line 13 keep your cabins you do assist the storm these sailors are desperately trying to save the ship in the storm and and they if anyone's gonna do it it's going to be them they have the skill they know how to read a ship incidentally Mariners have looked at this opening scene and said that all the orders given are correct this is what you would do Shakespeare probably sat down with some sea captain and got this right it's very funny because John Dryden rewrote the play and added so many more directions people say it would have immediately sunk the ship but Shakespeare knows what to say here and when the these conventional aristocrats press their an insist on getting involved and and Gonzalo says line 15 be patient the boat says when the sea is hence what cares these roars for the name of King and there it is nature undermines the conventional hierarchy in the face of a hostile nature who cares if you're a king or Duke or Earl or whatever what cares these wars for the native King and and Gonzalo says good yet remember whom now has the board and the bosun gives the very basic answer in politics none that I'm more loved than myself that in ordinary circumstances you can defer to conventional Authority but if you think your life is at stake you're not listening to any but your own guidance here and both of those you are a counselor if you can command these elements to silence and work the piece of the president we will not hand a robe more use your authority if you cannot give thanks you have lived so long basically challenging them if you guys are so great if you are the masters of the universe stop the store now this is the whole lesson of King Lear compressed into this one Scene here remember what Lear said when the Thunder would not peace at my bidding and I smelt him out that is Lear learned that nature did not obey his commands that there was a gap between his conventional Authority and any kind of command over nature so this opening see I can't just in a few lines Shakespeare distills out the essence of the whole experience of his tragedies this gap between the natural hierarchy and the conventional hierarchy and it shows us that the tempest will be another Anatomy of society once again Shakespeare will dissolve a society into its constituent elements and see if he can put it back together and so what we see here is that the the storm brings out this egoism that's at the heart of humanity none that I love none that I more love than myself just to jump ahead and show you how carefully planned this paid play is if you if you turn to page 84 so this is acts 5 scene one line two 56 at the end of the play a semi drunken Stefano will stagger it and say everyman shift for all the rest and look no man take care for himself for all as much fortune that's the perfect inversion of the boast in this plan the bosun claims none that I'm more loved than myself Stefano will eventually say every man shiver all the rest and let no man take care for himself shake understands that you can't have society if this kind of egoism surfaces and stays there that society rests on the illusion that there are people you love more than yourself and it rests on the illusion of some kind of deference for authority in the absent crisis here the life-threatening moment of crisis authority dissolves because suddenly people run up against the nun that I love more than myself but somehow in the craziness of the play Shakespeare and through Prospero a surrogate is gonna have to whirl these guys around and around till they forget the lesson of the storm and the nun that I love more than myself stuff and kept back to let everybody take care of everybody else so he's good at once against gonna be like King Lear we're gonna dissolve a story and reconstitute it but what's really interesting about this opening scene is it reveals the principle of natural hierarchy the principle of natural right if you will and that is wisdom who should run the ship the guys who know how to run the ship in others in the moment of crisis you don't want a guy up there because he's a Duke or he's a king you want a guy up there who knows what to do in a storm what is key here is knowledge and this this this whole play is there gonna be about wisdom and foolishness about wise men and fools and it Harper's the principal who should rule the why should rule that that's so true and yet we refuse to accept it sounds a little little elitist to us doesn't it if you say well it's obvious who should rule the people who know how to rule wisdom is what entitles people to rule and actually we bought at that it's that sounds awful to us the reason of course is it's so hard to find out who is wise and we would want to get into all sorts of arguments like well what really constitutes political wisdom it's you can it's very easy in the ship situation that there are some people who know how to navigate and some people who don't but when you apply that to politics the question of navigational skills there's a little more up for grabs and we get worried about you're saying the washroom who are these rot wise and how are they going to get to rule pardon me for repeating this but William Buckley famously said I'd rather be ruled by the first 200 people in the Boston telephone directory that the Faculty of Harvard University and that shows skepticism about whether the wise should rule because frankly we're not sure who's really wise and we start getting to the questions what full of wisdom entitles you to rule and is there some difference between academic smart aleck enos and true political prudence and so on so we're right to be suspicious of the simple statement the wise should rule in a way it's so simple and so true but how do you translate it into real politics and indeed that one way of looking at a lot of political theories has been ways to find if you will substitutes for the rule of the wise for example in Aristotle he claims effectively the gentleman should rule and that our Nobles that's because he has a certain presumption which sees a certain perception of wisdom on their part that people who are nobly born and given the leisure to develop their talents and their prudence and quite frankly to be educating thinks is more likely that a regime ruled by gentlemen will be embodied body wisdom quite frankly our democratic theory attempts something similar to the extent it's not just pure democratic theory it's trying to argue that the democratic process will produce the wisest leaders quite for I mean if you frankly right now the political theater in the United States is if someone is smart enough to raise a lot of money and smart enough to run a good campaign that he or she is smart enough to be President that's if you want a justification for a current political system it's basically that whether it produces that result it is another question but in some ways a lot of our politics and our political arrangements are attempt to solve the problem of how you would find the wisest people to rule through something other than just having somebody show up and proclaim I'm the wisest I should rule but that's the issue Shakespeare explorers in this play and again I think he tries to expose the issue in its nakedness form in this opening scene so that we can at least think about it in the most extreme terms and this is the link to King Lear and and the play is linked to King Lear in many many ways one way of thinking about this play The Tempest is that we see what would have happened if leader and Cordelia had gone off to prison as leader wanted to do in act 5 and they'd had years to spend together as as Prospero Miranda have there's a real similarity between Lear and Cordelia on the one hand and Prospero on Miranda on the other Shakespeare especially in these last plays puts a special emphasis on the relationship between a father and a daughter and here it's presented in its many ways purest and most beautiful form but just to show you the connection Prospero has learned from leaders mistake Lear had a wonderful plan to turn over political power to his daughter but she balked when he seemed to be forcing her into a marriage now Prospero also has a political plan for coming back to power in millon but also for securing what he achieves for his daughter she's very much at the center of his concern and everything's gonna hinge on a relationship of ferdinand de Miranda they've got to get married the whole plan rests on ultimately uniting millon and Naples but Prospero is smart enough not to let Miranda know that if he tells her she's got to marry Ferdinand it's all over it'll be little ear Cordelia thing once again no he's got a convince her she's in Romeo and Juliet that our father hates Ferdinand that her father stands in the way and then she'll fall in love with Ferdinand and everything will work out so Prospero sneakier than King Lear is that a long time to think about it so again I just suggest these things so you see what the connections are in this play in so many interesting ways is a transformation of King Lear and the most fundamental way is that once again Shakespeare deals with the issue in Plato of the philosopher and the king by the way if you have the Signet Edition please turn to page 103 I do want to show you there are connections between Shakespeare and Plato we do not have hard evidence that they have a red play-doh I showed you one buried quotation from Plato in Henry the fourth plays there's a very notation in Julius Caesar as well but you don't know too much about Shakespeare's reading but if you have this signet on page 102 and 103 your editor offers excerpts from an essay by Michele de Montaigne called of the cannibals and it seems pretty likely that this is one of the sources of The Tempest it there's no source for the play as a whole but as you're know did the signet points out Shakespeare was working from some sources the very name Caliban may be a kind of permutation of cannibal and if you read this model these excerpts from montains essay on of the cannibals you'll see how it bears on several issues in the tempest and especially that Gonzalo speech about the Commonwealth seems to be derive this now what's really interesting is Montaigne mentions Plato several times in this passage it's on page 103 in the middle paragraph I won't read it all but just look at it there are three mentions from Plato three mentions of Plato and in fact Montaigne is referring to the Republic in this passage this may this indicates if Shakespeare didn't know Plato directly he surely knew of Plato indirectly and this could easily have prompted him to ask somebody what is this Plato's Republic about and so I think the tempest draws heavily upon Plato's Republic it may be through Shakespeare's direct reading of it but it could be indirectly in this Montand connection is a good example of that so in King Lear Shakespeare raised the question could a king become a philosopher not to be too schematic but in The Tempest Shakespeare raises the issue can a philosopher become a king that is in the King Lear we saw how difficult it would be for a king to be open to philosophy how much in his position is king stood in the way of it how much of his temperament his kingly demonic temperament would stand in the way of becoming a king and indeed we saw to our horror in our way the deepest tragedy that once Lia gained wisdom he lost his kingly nature wholly lost that to mas that noble anger that had made him such an effective King well it looks to me that Shakespeare now in the tempest wants to approach a problem from the other angle now in fact Prospero did have a leader like experienced in the past he was in fact Duke of Milan and has been deposed by his evil brother sort of thing we saw in as you like it the key here and we'll talk about this more on Tuesday is that Prospero has had time to absorb the experience in a way in tragedies things happen too fast too fast for people to adjust if you turn to page 7 so act 1 scene 2 line 13 Prospero's first words in the play are be collected and that's very unlike leader is always flying off the handle and getting angry of things Prospero is a collected kind of guy he's had time as we would say to process his experience and so the challenge now will be has he learned from it and can this man who is philosophical by Nature now rise to the kingship now as we look at the backstory in the play how Prospero got to pose in the lion the answer is that he was too philosophical by interest in by nature's butt and by nature this is page 9 so act 1 scene 2 about mine 71 and Prospero the prime Duke being so reputed in dignity and for the liberal arts without a parallel those being all my study the government account i cast upon my brother and to my state grew stranger being transported and wrapped in secret studies so we see the problem with the liberal arts here you lose your job he's so wrapped up in his secret studies that he becomes alienated from a state he's likable tonic philosopher-king in that sense he really didn't want to rule he didn't want to be bothered with ruling he was interested in the liberal arts and that's why his brother was able to depose him just continuing with this motif page 10 line 89 I best neglecting worldly ends all dedicated to closeness and the bettering of my mind with that which were what by being so retired or Prize for popular rate and my false brother awaked an evil nature there is he's not ambitious you can say his whole problem was dude was he didn't care enough about ruling he didn't want it that much his brother wanted it and Prospero didn't so he declared worldly ends devote himself to the bettering of my mind and if you look over at page 11 now so I line 109 and the seen me poor man my library was dukedom large enough it's a man content with Widener not with being governor state of Massachusetts Danny this is very philosophical honest part and again it's it's a matter of his mind the focus of his interests he's studying nature as the basis of his magical art that's what he's interested in it's also a matter of temperament that it just doesn't have political ambition and so who we see here the problem with a person who's philosophical by nature he's not interested in the political things he's not committed to them strongly enough and it does seem that that Prospero has studied something to the neglect of the political things because this is it's his brother who understands politics Antonio this is the bottom of page 9 so about line 79 and act 1 scene 2 when Prospero is explaining what Antonio did to supplant him being once perfected two grand suits how to deny them who to advance and who to trash for overtopping new created the creatures that remind I say or change them or else new formed him having both the key of officer and office set all hearts of the state to what tune please his ear now this shows some political knowledge and political skill on Antonio's part and what it seems to be knowledge of his human nature he knew who to advance and he knew who to fire and thereby created a new state new and new formed him it's not just that Prospero is wise and Antonio was stupid Antonio has a kind of political wisdom or at least political cost the cunning and so he has he studied rule or had some sense of how to rule and how to handle human nature and so the the original Prospero is a kind of pre-socratic philosopher he's a philosopher was interested in the world of nature as opposed to the world of politics and the result is he's thrown out of office fortunately ends up on this island and still with his books but we do see that there was a defect in his knowledge as much as he was devoted to knowledge there was something missing and that seems to be a knowledge of the political things and this play will show us how he has gained knowledge of political things because he is quite a political problem to solve in this play in a way it goes so smoothly that we forget what the challenge tomb is but if you think about it when all these people from Italy show up on prosperous Magic Island if he just said to that remember me I'm Prospero I want to be do camilan again how's that by the way I'd like to be reunited with the house of Naples there's a lot of people in this group who do like Prospero and who have profited from his being deposed and would not support it what's amazing is his support has been brought back to power it's amazing by the end of the play Prospero has made it so that everybody with the possible exception that Antonio Sebastian want to see him back in Italy and back on the throne of melanin in fact and to see the houses of Milan and Naples United so he's actually got a political problem here and is gonna use his cleverness in order to reinstate himself for one thing we see that he is somehow now ambitious in a way that he wasn't additionally he does want political power and presumably the reason is that he's seen what happens when he abandoned political power to evil people like his brother against the lesson leader learns that as much contempt as you may have for politics it's the only thing standing between you and the triumph of evil in the world and Prospero seems to have learned that lesson and again I said the good fortune to be able to do so now I think Shakespeare embodies Prospero's lessons in the figures of Caliban an area that we see this dealings with Caliban an area what Prospero has learned about human nature in order to make him able to deal with people these people from Italy in a way that he was not initially back in millon able to do so now it's only to this class that I could say that Caliban represents zero scenario represents FAMAS I've given you the guy background for understand that it's even it's a bit of a strange claim but let me try to prove it here what I think Shakespeare is done in Caliban and Ariel is too abstract into into a pure form those aspects of human nature that are both present in all of us as human beings and it's a way of isolating the two problems of rule now in the case of Caliban I think it's not much of a stretch to claim he represents the force of eros he especially represents the force of sexual desire but he's interested in eating and drinking it's particularly impressed with alcohol when stefano and Rick Lowe show up as we know he wanted to rape Miranda at the first opportunity and he represents that problem that political problem that we've seen throughout Shakespeare that eros represents a challenge to the political order the people's desires can be so strong that they don't want to submit to the political order what makes our Taliban so difficult to deal with is that he does seem to be such a pure form of eros with no sense of what we would call pride or of shame look at page 20 this is act 1 scene 2 about line 350 where Prospero saying why he has to punish Caliban and points out that you you tried to rape my daughter and Caliban reaction is Oh would it have been done that just prevent me I had peopled else this Isle with caliban's no shame no remorse just had this desire and would I'd carried it out now in in defense of Caliban he's lacking a human sense of shame because he may not even be human there's this question of whether his half-animal half-human or whatever and in any case nobody treats him like a human being what do you want to say to him is have you no dignity as a human being how dare you rape an innocent woman it's shameful well that works not even all the time with human beings but it's harder to say it will work with this perhaps subhuman creature and again no one treats them with any dignity and how can you appeal to his dignity so you see the problem of dealing with pure eros Dinah's will see at the end Prospero makes Caliban develop a little sense of shame to realize what a fool I was to serve this God in the case of Stefano again but basically we see here a human problem with dealing with euros that's why we have to have strict laws against rape and strict punishments for rape because sometimes and some people the power desire so it's so great they lose their sense of being human beings and do inhuman things and so Prospero does not mess around with area with with Caliban so act 1 scene 2 line 294 Oh actually that's that is that page 21 is his threat to Caliban this is so still act 1 scene 2 about line 368 if thou neglects or does some willingly while i command i'll rack thee with old cramps fill all my bones with aches make thee roar that beasts shall tremble at thy din and Caliban says I must obey his art is of such power it would control my dams God Setebos and make a vassal of him so with this kind of being you got to get really tough and you can say that Prospero has learned some toughness from his experience back in millon he was too easygoing he just let his brother walk all over him again no one deposed his kingly enlike figures while they're in the peak of their power that are too frightening and one thing we'll talk about again and again is Prospero in fact was initially lacking leaders no Langer he didn't have enough to us he just didn't care enough about his dignity what you see in this play is a man who has become acutely aware of his dignity and who gets angry I would say has to force himself to get angry at times but he's learned that anger is part of ruling that tough love is sometimes necessary even as we'll see with his daughter now the case of Ariel is complicated I have to confess I thought of him as fool mouth simply on a kind of structural principle and here we had eros from what I've seen in Shakespeare we ought to also have two most after all and Henry the fourth we had Prince Hal representing reason and then we had hospital representing to Mawson Falstaff representing eros I think Shakespeare very much had Shakespeare's tripartite division of the solo on mine now again this is fundamental to Plato's Republic what's interesting in the Republic is that Shakespeare gives excuse me Plato gives a very positive portrait of Tomas in the Republic now he sees its problems and the whole issue of educating the guardians has to do with taming their two mosques but in the Republic Tomas is the great ally of long rows of reason against eros it's the power that that logos has to engage in order to keep eros in line I like to think of the tempest as a kind of hyper Republic super Republic in which you would see an even more positive image of thermosphere as REO as as as prosperous Ally now I could simply point to the fact that area was repeatedly called a spirit in the play and that's helpful the connection between spirit and spirit is but what makes me think of Ariel in terms of thermals is his will to freedom and independence he's like Dumas in the sense that he has no eros it's rather interesting about him there's nothing he desires except pure freedom for example he never asked Prospero for a little Ariela to accompany him on a weekend in the Bermudas he seems to have no interest in sexuality indeed he seems to be an asexual being and it's very interesting the part has always been played by men or women indifferently as if we feel that either sex could be passed in the role and what we see about what what makes Ariel problematic to ruler is simply that he doesn't want to be ruled and this of course is what makes famosa problem in politics that we there's this element in us that wants to be first that doesn't want to have a master and an aerial is very strong as a result Prospero has to get tough with Aria that's what I started read on page 18 so act more the scene to line 294 if not more murmurs i will render oak and peg Lila's not enter else till thou us held away to have winters notice Prospero threatens Caliban with pain with the opposite of pleasure he threatens Ariel simply with the loss of freedom he found Ariel imprisoned and freed him and Ariel is like a dog through Babak beast he's loyal to Prospero the way a dog is loyal to his master and he kind of behaves like a dog he runs up that Prospero and he wants to be hugged and have Prospero say nice things about him and indeed Prospero understands that aspect he praises Ariel he never praised his Caliban his little reason to praise Caliban has lots of reasons to praise Ariel but what we see between Prospero and Ariel is the relationship between master and servant such as we saw between Lear and Kent there's this kind of loyalty that Ariel develops to Prospero it has a basis because eventually he'll be set free but what do you do how do you rule someone whose only impulse is not to be ruled again is what the most dozen people do they don't want to be second they don't want to have anyone tell them what to do well it's very complicated and we see here in prosperous relations with our Ariel that you have to keep him in line but keep up the promise of freedom and eventually you'll deliver it in the meantime you get his loyalty now I'll offer tentatively this reading of the play I back it up by showing how Prospero works with the human beings in the play that is what he's given in Ariane Caliban is these beings that embody abstract principles and in a one-sided way how would you deal with pure heroes where there's no shame to restraint it how would you deal with pure thumos where there's no way burning with it was some kind of deal with offerings some compromise of offering something that area wants now in dealing with the human beings in a play Prospero finds a mixture of Eros and thumos as you would in any human beings and his plan of dealing with them exploits that fact just roughly in the case of Ferdinand this young man it was a lot of thumos Prospero was going to use eros to tame him in the case of Stefano and Trinculo where they've got a lot of eros he's gonna make them ashamed of themselves and get them in line we'll talk about the court party a little more next time so let's look at Ferb man and see how this works out in other words I'm saying that Ariel and Caliban teach Prospero what you need to rule and you have to balance off the two sides of the soul as Plato understands them and again I think we've seen enough in the other plays of a important you know some thermo some Shakespeare to see how it works out in this play okay let's look at Ferdinand Ferdinand is a very spirited young man when we first see him page 24 act 1 scene 2 line 430 when he hears these people speaking Italian my language heavens I am the best of them that speak the speech were I but where to smoke in he's the best it's Hotspur again not second but I mean as he his father is not in a half hour of course his father's not even dead but but Ferdinand has already jumped ahead I am the best line 4:35 myself at Naples he's already the king King of Naples and lions for 48 to Miranda over version and your affection I can feel I'll make you the queen of Naples that's a great line they'll always work you know this young man it was such a high opinion so I'm the King of Naples I'll make you Queen and indeed when Prospero seems to intervene against a blind 465 he says I will resist such entertainment till my enemy has more power he draws his weapon on some harmless old man so this is Mercutio this is typical Thibault this is the typical hot-blooded young Italian man that Shakespeare portrays again and again and and we got all this - mustn't just imagine if Prospero meets Ferdinand and prosperous first words are your father helped depose me from milind I'm going back to millon and by the way you're gonna marry my daughter and we're gonna unite Naples a villain you know Ferdinand would draw his sword immediately on that it's not what he wants to hear so how do you tame the spirit young Ferdinand with beauteous from Miranda you get him to fall in love with this beautiful woman and want to marry her and that will tame his Lumos and indeed that's what we see very shortly thereafter indeed already on page 26 so act 1 scene 2 he's willing to accept prison for the sake of Miranda this is everyone seeing two-line 490 the rack and all my friends know this man nor this man's threats to whom I am subdued our but light to me might I but through my prison once a day behold is made all corners else of the earth let Liberty make use of space enough have I in such a prison we saw that leaders noble anger was dead when he said let's away to prison when he was willing to accept imprisonment and here the spirited young man who draws his weapon at the slightest provocation now is willing to go to prison if he can just behold Miranda and notice he's willing to give up his Liberty now again REO represents two months cuz he represents the spirit of liberty of not submitting herself to anybody else's rule but Ferdinand's willing to do so here and he's it's even willing to accept baseless what looks like basis is the page 47 so actually seen one line one ferdinand says he enters bearing a log that's Caliban job bearing logs this is the work of Caliban and yet Ferdinand's doing activity some sports are painful and their labor delight themselves off some kinds of baseness are nobly undergone his eros has forced them to redefine nobility so their nobility is now slavish this it's being a servant and most poor manners point to rich ends this might mean task would be as heavy to be as odious but the mistress which I serve quickens what's dead and makes my Labor's pleasure pleasures and then skipping the line 11 my sweet mistress weeps when she sees me work and says such baseness had never like executor I forget so he's even willing to do if you things that a slave would do here he'll carry would look at page 50 so act 3 scene one line 63 I do think a king I would not so and would no more endure this wooden slavery than to suffer the flesh fly blow my mouth hear my soul speak the very instant that I saw your there it is Romeo and Juliet love at first sight did my heart fly dear service there resides to make me slave to it and for your sake I am this patient long man he thinks he's king of Naples but accept the role of patient long hand here for the sake of Miranda so again this is likes prosperous understanding of human nature now how you play off one side of it against another this spirited young Ferdinand is perhaps potentially his worst enemy to found this new regime that Prospero has in mind especially this incredible goal of uniting Naples in the land but through his love for his daughter Ferdinand will become part of Prospero's master plan now this other side these these clowns in the play Stefano and Trinculo who linked up with Caliban this is the sort of thing we've seen several times in Shakespeare stefano in particular is our new version of Nick bottom Shakespeare suits been fascinated by this idea that a tyrant lurks in the heart of the ordinary Englishman maybe that's why they liked Richard the third so much that is here's one of these people and opportunity and it'll try to become a ruler they'll try in fact become some kind of oriental potentate this is like an echo at the end of Plato's Republic when chase was shows in a world in which people would get to choose their soul in the next incarnation a very ordinary moral man chooses to be a tyrant Plato shows in book 10 the Republic and give Nick bottom a chance what do you want to be a lover or a tyrant and we saw how he adopted to the having the fairies at his beck and call and how suddenly he was behaving like some kind of oriental potentate here we're gonna see something similar to that in that Caliban will puff up the spirits of Stefano because Caliban treats him like a god this is on page 45 so act 2 scene 2 about line 122 that's a brave God and bear celestial liquor I will kneel to him this is very entrancing to Stefano who can resist this Caliban taste this alcohol and it tastes really good damn it's celestial liquor he's never experienced anything like this and so immediately he says I'll kneel tip line 130 I'll swear upon that bottle to be thy true subject for the liquor is not earthly and we can we see how quickly and ordinary man's spirits can be puffed up the thermos now can awaken in in Stefano when someone starts treating him as a great man indeed as a God now this is what happens when when society dissolves and in particular when the conventional rulers have well this good the point of these counters have disappeared but in any case they have failed they couldn't stop the storm they were kings and Dukes and they couldn't order nature they couldn't order the storm to stop and in a way it's a disillusioning experience for an ordinary man like Stefano he had no pretensions to being a Duke or a king at the beginning of the play is just a serving man on the boat or in court but when he sees quite frankly a political vacuum and also in a way has seen the forceless of the claims to rule of the conventional rulers it's easy for him to get ambitious and Caliban this is still on page 45 so still act 2 scene 2 about line 142 Catherine says hast thou not dropped from heaven out of the moon I do assure thee I was the man in the moon when I was so here he claims even to me a cosmic God here and it can it awakens stefanos ambitions to see someone worshipping him this way and again page 46 line 156 in the scene I will kiss thy foot i prithee be my god I'll kiss thy foot I swear myself by subject and he offers to show him everything on the island and really is Caliban enslaving himself here we see two sides again human nature against a little heart Caliban lease represents a element in human nature even if he isn't fully human himself but we see here human beings want to rule given the opportunity even a Stefano will try to do it and there's something in human beings that leads them to enslave themselves and indeed that's the problem with Caliban for Caliban freedom is simply slavery it's getting a new master this is the end of act 3 act act act 2 scene 2 show page 47 about line 192 ban ban cat Caliban has a new master get a new man freedom hide a hide a freedom freedom hide a freedom away Caliban thinks of freedom is it's the freedom of his desires the problem with Prospero was a ruler is he stood in a way of Caliban indulging his desires especially his sexual desires Prospero was preventing Caliban from raping Miranda and so his notion of freedom is just get a new master a master who allows you to indulge your desires a master who brings celestial liquor with him it's a very different notion of freedom that than arrows arrows freedom is freedom it is independence it's not having a master but for Caliban it's simply having a new master which means an indulgent master and it's a very bastardized version of freedom then now we see a Stefano developing his ambition same page still 47 so Act two scene two about line 81 I pretty now lead the way without any more talking Trinculo the king and all our company else being drowned we will inherit here amazing he's not on the I if you actually seal I love this play about human ambition Ferdinand's not Honor Island 1/2 an hour and he's always thinking the king is dead long live the king I'm king and April's now Stefano is not on the island a half an hour and he's gonna take it over I was a Shakespeare seems to have a sense of the fragility of political and social order we tend to have a lot of faith in the stability of political order despite all the troubles we see you can see from King Lear in this play you know one storm and the political order dissolves this is sense there's something fragile on it in part because for Shakespeare it rests on illusions that it rests on people suppressing their normal eager than eager egoism nothing I love more than myself and embracing this let every man take care everyone else Shakespeare really worries and he lived at a time when he you know there had been four or five regime changes in England in just the sixteenth century Catholic the Protestant the Catholic the Protestant back and then he would have experienced the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 when Parliament was always blown up with the king of it he really has a sense that we're all standing on chaos here one thing goes wrong and the whole political order dissolve and in 1642 that happened the beginning of the english civil wars in england and you see here just they had a in a political vacuum everybody starts moving for power here now there's something you know there's something a little noble about stefano and his willingness to live up to this role if you look at page 53 so after he's seen to about long at 9:37 stefano is willing to stand up for his new subject Trinko keep a good tongue in your head if you prove a mutineer the next tree the poor monsters my subject and he shall not suffer indignity Caliban says I thank my noble Lord I just know it's very interesting that he says in dignity there stefano his own experience of dignity here i'm now the ruler here i have to take care of my subject so Trinculo get in line now Trinculo looks at this he thinks pure stupidity this is back on page 52 so act 3 scene tune line 5 Trinculo says they say there's but 5 upon this aisle we're three of them if the other two be brained like us the state totters and that is Shakespeare's image there the problem politics most of the time we're ruled by fools and indeed what we see here is an image of the foolishness of rulers now again this standing behind this play is the conventional hierarchy in which people like Alonso and Antonio and Sebastian are conventionally Nobles and supposedly great men and Stefano and Trinculo are at the bottom of the social order they're just servants and yet in a political vacuum they're gonna try to become the rulers and Shakespeare doesn't think they'd make good rulers but he's not sure they're much worse than the actual rulers of the world remember what we saw in Midsummer Night's Dream in a way it draws a very sharp distinction between Duke Theseus and bottom ones at the top and ones at the bottom and yet in a weird way as said if fairies and exchange them at Birth we could have been talking about Duke bottom and theses the Weaver Shakespeare is not so sure that these two men Theseus and Nick bottom have such different souls you know given the opportunity bottom seems to rise the occasion he's the ruler of his little roost and the same thing here and with Stefan our page 55 he again tries to stand up for Caliban and line 110 on page 55 act 3 scene 2 line 110 he pledges himself to the political plan monster I shall kill this man his daughter and I will be king and queen save our graces and treacle and I self shall be viceroys dust I'll like the plot wrinkle oh it's amazing Prospero has been plotting he's a great plan to come back to power well Stefano has a plan here and he's good he's he's gonna marry Miranda not gonna let Ferdinand do it and you see even the guy at the bottom of the social ladder given the opportunity we'll think big and is already planning on viceroys for Trinculo here incidentally I keep making parallels between Shakespeare and Cervantes and again Shakespeare and Cervantes died on April 23rd 1616 it was not the same day because Spain and England were on two different calendars but still this is this is actually a day of mourning for literature Cervantes and Shakespeare died on this day on the state but it's very similar to Sancho Panza if you know Don Quixote Sancho Panza wants to be governor of an ion and Cervantes uses the figure of Sancho Panza very similar ways to expose the foolishness of Sancho Panza and how ridiculous it is for an ordinary person to think he can rule at the same time Cervantes uses Sancho Panza to make fun of actual rulers that really Sancho Panza is a kind of peasant wisdom of solomon and often able to solve cases that the great aristocrats wouldn't be able to and so shakespeare's suggests a little dimension of heroism here when they're worried when they encounter problems on page 56 so actually seen to line 136 Stefano is not afraid he that dies pays all debts I defy thee and he stand-up he has some courage now by the way that's an echo of a very famous line of Julius Caesar cowards die many times before their deaths the valiant taste of death but once that's the same sentiment as the he that dies pays all debts its Shakespeare's way of showing there's a bit of Julius Caesar in this in this stefano so again this same effect that we saw with the parallel between the tavern world and Henry the fourth and the world of the nobles the way they were so different and yet they were all thieves and the same thing we saw with bottom and Theseus I'm in sauna Shakespeare is creating a similar effect here that yes we're where the difference between the Stefano and a Trinculo on the one hand and the nobles like Antonio and Sebastian on the other hand Shakespeare is suggesting a kind of parallel here a real similarity that the difference isn't so much won a soul it's one of a bring in place and in this case you can say that these characters given the chance they would try to do the same thing that the nobles do and the main thing that chase burr emphasizes is here and this is what will stress next time is not so much the difference in soul as the stupidity you know the state dollars if they all be brained like us the state totters what Shakespeare shows in this play is the problem with so many rulers is their brain lessness and it is reflected in just their choice of objects they go after base things like they're said to be Nobles but they can't be noble when their desires are not noble when and this is what Shakespeare does with the court party that he's excuse me Prospero does for the court party he sets up this banquet for that he shows them that what they're really doing is grasping after food that's not really there he's teaching them a lesson in the futility of their desires so this is what these are all the ways in which Prospero manifests the understanding of human nature that is gained on this island again I say the magic of the island is it offered him in Prospero in the area and Caliban kind of distillation of the two elements in human beings that make them recalcitrant to political order eros of the walls and we see in prosper or dealing with the other characters of the play the fool you would beans that is able to create this kind of balance use one force against the other and above all to get these people to experience the futility of their desires again this is that Fantasy Island principle I talked about connection with mr. Wright's dream a guy like like Stefano was just sitting there waiting to be a tyrant we solved with Malvolio ordinary people they can have such exaggerated versions of their own reports so in a way you gotta give them an opportunity in a safe environment to try out this rise to power and then to learn how incapable they are of ruling okay enough for today on Tuesday we'll finish up and particular talk more about the nature of tragic comedy and its relation to tragedy and comedy and what Shakespeare is doing in this play trying to portray a philosophical spirit on the stage you

Channel: Shakespeare and Politics

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Length: 84min 28sec (5068 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2017