Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakewell, Sarah, How to Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. Other Press, New York, 2010

Bosman, Anston, "Shakespeare and Globalization." The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Margreta de Grazia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010

Horvath, Gabriela Dragnea. Theatre, Magic, and Philosophy: William Shakespeare, John Dee, and the Italian Legacy. Routledge, 2017

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Verso, London, 1998

Nuttall, A.D., Shakespeare the Thinker. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008

O'Connell, Michael, "The Experiment of Romance." The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Comedies, edited by Alexander Leggatt. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001

Shakespeare, William, "The Tempest." The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2016

Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England. Penguin UK, London, 2003

Yates, Frances, The Art of Memory. The Bodley Head, London, 1966

Works Cited

WORKS CITED

Bakewell, Sarah, How to Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. Other Press, New York, 2010

Bosman, Anston, "Shakespeare and Globalization." The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Margreta de Grazia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010

Horvath, Gabriela Dragnea. Theatre, Magic, and Philosophy: William Shakespeare, John Dee, and the Italian Legacy. Routledge, 2017

O'Connell, Michael, "The Experiment of Romance." The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Comedies, edited by Alexander Leggatt. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001

Shakespeare, William, "The Tempest." The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2016

Yates, Frances, The Art of Memory. The Bodley Head, London, 1966

Sea-Changes (Production Concept)

Power can be real and imaginary. An Island can be in the Mediterranean and everywhere. But can you be forgiven, and not forgiven? Our production of The Tempest will feature characters who are all trying to come out on top of a history that has just started picking up. Some wield weapons, some wield influence, and some wield otherworldly forces. For a moment, thanks to a storm, they find themselves stranded on an island that beguiles them with its simplicity. The weight of their power, and the choices they’ve made to keep it, becomes more clear the longer they stay. Do we believe they’ll be any different when they leave - if they leave? Do we think history will be any different because of the time we’ve spent in the theater, watching them reconsider? This is what we hope our production of The Tempest is going to be, and the questions it’s going to prompt our audiences to ask of themselves.

Magic, Aether, and the Cost of Power

One of John Dee's magic sigils

Our Production of The Tempest features magic that may take many forms, but still comes down to the power to make ‘something’ out of ‘nothing.’ Even when it is violent or destructive, it is still essentially creative, and is primarily influenced by the neoplatonic magic of John Dee, a philosopher and magical practitioner who was close to Queen Elizabeth, and a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. (Horvath 33) This kind of magic was thought of as an imaginative window into Abrahamic religions, and practitioners imagined themselves imitating, taking part in, or directing God’s power. (Horvath 31) For simplicity’s sake, we refer to this as quality “Aethereal,” a sense that ‘something’ has come from ‘nothing,’ perhaps due to the boundary between idea and material getting blurred, allowing some new bit of Aether to come from nowhere. Ariel is Aethereal, in all his forms. The Tempest itself is Aetherial. The disappearing banquet is Aetherial. Caliban is not.

While Prospero is the most powerful force on the island, the Neapolitans have plenty of experience with Aether too, even if they don’t have experience with magic. Antonio and Sebastian pull a plot to kill Alonso out of air (out of thin air), and, even when they are discovered, those lions they claim they heard certainly come from nowhere. Trinculo and Stephano’s dreams for ruling the island have enough weight to move Caliban, even though he’s seen this happen before (the booze, of course, helps). And then there’s Prospero, who, in our production, will be entirely reliant on Ariel for all of his magic, and it should feel as though he’s caught an angel in a bottle, clipped its wings, and put it on a leash. In an inverse of Dr. Faustus’s “deal with the devil” style of magic, it’s actually the magical being, not the magus, who has to barter and bargain for their freedom, even when they have less power in the negotiation. This will become particularly profane when Prospero punishes Ariel for trying to get his freedom “early,” and uses his magic to hurt Ariel, but, since Ariel is all of Prospero’s magic, Prospero will make Ariel hurt himself.

By the end of the play, each of the characters will have trafficked with a power that may have been too much for them, except maybe for Ferdinand and Miranda. Maybe. The play is unclear about whether they are more guileful than we think. At the very least, they don’t pay a cost for the power they’ve used in the course of the play, though they may eventually after it ends.

An Island That is the Great Globe Itself

Some of GiordanoBruno's "MemorySeals"

The island is beguiling in its simplicity - magic comes from nowhere, spirits are trapped in the landscape, and while it’s not a den of lies or iniquity, things are never exactly as they seem. The world of The Tempest is allegorical, which fits the play’s categorization as a Romance, but an allegory for what? What is it trying to get us to see in a new light?

If magic is a metaphor for power in our production, and the Island as written is somehow pulsing or teaming with magic in its own right, then our Island is filled with memories of previous conflicts. If Prospero has had 15 years on the Island to study magic, and has bargained Ariel into whatever tremendous godlike feats he wishes, why not assume that Prospero could look into the future? Brush up against the past? Conjure his wishes from near and far? He may not ever be able to get Antonio to admit he’s wrong, but if he wants to summon a convertible from the 60s, what’s stopping him? And why, say, is it at one point an overgrown and rusted set piece where Miranda and Ferdinand curl up together, and at another point suddenly summoned back to life by Ariel to be the “hounds” that chase Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban away? The world of our production of The Tempest is filled with Aether, but Aether with a history. Instead of a “timeless” setting, it’s a setting that’s beside several different times. And the reason all these elements from different time periods are beside each other is to examine how the Aether gives way, with a little bit of inquiry.

‘Something’ only seems to come from ‘nothing.’ In reality, something always comes from something, through work. Prospero’s magic is all done by Ariel. The strange circles and sigils left over from fights between Caliban and Prospero (really, fights between Caliban, and Prospero and Ariel) only seem like God’s power, but they aren’t, they’re an incredibly lopsided collaboration between Ariel and Prospero. Ariel’s subjugation is a way for Prospero to claim the fruits of Ariel’s labor. It begs the question, if Ariel and Prospero are both so powerful, and can make so many things together between the two of them, why can’t they cooperate as equals? Our Island is filled with relics of their failure to achieve a liberated relationship that speak to our failure across histories to be able to step out of our violent hierarchies and build a better world. (Prospero could travel on a dragon, but apparently he chose a convertible.) The hope is, perhaps, that these relics have gone through a natural ‘sea-change.’ No matter how long these class conflicts have waged, between Prospero and Ariel, or between the Haves and the Have Nots, the natural world still makes a little bit of progress on its own, ‘into something rich and strange.’

Prospero’s Apology

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bruno_De_Umbris_ombre.JPG

If magic is a metaphor for power, and our Island is filled with evidence of all the ways power has been pettily misused throughout history, it’s important to focus the climax of our play on the limits of power. Even Aether, which seems to come from nowhere, and seems to stolen (or at least borrowed) from God, cannot force someone to apologize they did. You, however, can will yourself to apologize for the things that you’ve done wrong, and maybe, in so doing, find a way to move on from the way you’ve been wronged in turn. But it has to be honest. You have to put yourself at the mercy of the party you are apologizing to. You cannot manipulate them. This is the way we are playing Prospero’s apology.

And, in fairness, we, as artists, do have something to apologize for. We have been manipulating the audience - to question the power hierarchies that control their lives, to believe in magic, to shake their emotions out of dormancy and see what we can find. We may not be able to change the outside world with a play, but we can try to change ourselves and show you that change is possible. And so, with that in mind, the apology is a moment when the lights come up. The cast changes onstage, and walks out through the house when they’re done, as Prospero gives his speech. The set is struck, the sound blares on then off at one point. If Prospero can get the audience to applaud, music seems to come from nowhere, and he is allowed to leave. If not, ushers will open the doors, and he has to watch the audience go.

Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On (Notable Productions)

While many Shakespearean productions are measured by the star actor (in our case, who played Prospero), we were more interested in focusing on productions that engaged with the script in a new or interesting way. While we couldn't find reviews or videos of the production, a Montreal theater company called 4D staged a bilingual mixed-media adaptation in 2005 called La Tempête, "whose cast was divided between islanders, who were played by normal actors, and shipwrecked Italians, who appeared on stage as ingenious holograms. These ‘virtual characters’ appeared sometimes as life-sized images, sometimes as towering close-ups, their taped voices perfectly synchronized with the live action. The staging presented the wayfarers as mere projections of Prospero’s imagination, with one exception: when the virtual Ferdinand touched the hand of Miranda, he miraculously assumed corporeal form. Swirling light and sound effects (including chanting in indecipherable languages) permeated the auditorium, and above the French dialogue an edited version of Shakespeare’s script appeared as supertitles. Lost in an electronic cloud of text, video, music and theatre, the audience at La Tempête experienced the post-digital condition that performance theorists have termed ‘intermediality.’" (Bosman, 296)

Pictures found at: http://4dart.com/en/creation/2005/the-tempest/

The most important thing about this production is that it, also, presented Aether self-reflexively, using not just the stage magic, but also the cognitive dissonance of multiple languages at once, and the audience's upbringing with virtual reality, all in coordination to comment on the text. Our production is less interested in technology (or in the 'post-digital condition'), but it is interested in building an active relationship with its audience, in the way that La Tempête asks its audience to be active meaning-makers instead of passive receivers. Of particular interest to us is the way Ferdinand was able to move from Aethereal to real. We are definitely interested in exploring the boundaries between Aether and reality by transgressing them where we can.

Melting Into Air (Historical Context)

The Tempest was written in 1610, as England was becoming a global empire, and the world was beginning to pick up a velocity it had never seen before. "The time witnessed mobility in many domains: sailors crossed the oceans in search of new lands, laying the foundation of the colonial empires and the first global trade networks; technical inventions accelerated production; the printing press enabled the rapid spread of information; it was easier for people to change their social status and make a career based on ability or education; Western Christianity was deeply transformed after the Reformation, and with the Copernican revolution, the Earth itself was set in motion." (Horvath 43) The most important emotional aspect of its historical moment that we will focus on in this production is the sense that 'something' was being made out of 'nothing.' While The Tempest was being written, the plunder of empire would have collected in London, hinting at the start of a global market, built on exploitation, as opposed to a regional market where peasants worked on aristocrats’ land and aristocrats kept a portion of their surplus for themselves. New products from this market would have been available to touch and smell, and so the idea of a colonial experiment would have been alive and well in the mind of a Shakespearean playgoer, with all its wonderful opportunities and possible disasters. In the New World, everything was suddenly up in the air.

This 'something' made from 'nothing' - what we in our production are calling Aether - would have produced a host of hopes and anxieties in Elizabethans. As opposed to the aristocratic world, where power was a virtue of your birth, an Elizabethan could theoretically learn the skills it would take to come to power in the developing global market. The ability to seem to bring things into the world out of nothing was almost like an imitation of God's power, but without God's approval, and so magic becomes a perfect metaphor for the hopes and anxieties of the time. "Conceiving man as a decayed copy of the divine, devoid of creative power, turned the human pursuit to replicate creation into idolatry or a sinful, abortive attempt to ape God. Yet, imitatio had had its place in the medieval culture, but it applied to imitatio Christi , understood either as following the teachings of the Gospels, or as seeking suffering to be able to identify with Christ’s martyrdom on the cross." (Horvath 46) The Tempest revels in the stakes and ambiguities of this split, but without making Prospero's magical skill a 'devil's bargain.' It's something anyone can do, if they put their mind to it, and that dissolution of the boundary between who 'should' have power, and who can, is half of what's haunting about it. What happens if the 'wrong' people can learn to make something out of nothing?

Ultimately, Elizabethans would have been at least subconsciously aware that the Aether they were encountering in the world - whether strange new goods from far off lands, or tales of countries being brought to heel under the British crown by providence - was not actually made from nothing. The goods were taken from somewhere, the countries were conquered. Michel de Montaigne's Essays would have been published in English and circulated in the early 1600s, and one of those essays, On Cannibalism (heavily paraphrased in one of Gonzalo's speeches), investigated the ambiguous moral value of the European culture that colonizers were foisting on Indigenous peoples. (Bakewell 266-269) We can see evidence of this awareness of wrongdoing in Prospero's arc. Prospero's powers are presented as wonderful throughout the play, but as a character his primary concern is forgiveness: whether he can give it, and whether he can receive it. "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" (Shakespeare, 3264) he says, showing Caliban to the Neapolitans. Prospero ends the play asking the audience for forgiveness, even though we haven't seen him do too much wrong. That's because his sins are implied, and because they are implied, they are obscured, in the same way that the real cost of a developing global market was obscured for the Elizabethans by the fruits of an empire that seemed to arise out of nowhere.

A Round Art? The Aether and the Imaginary (Literary Context)

This production hinges on the nature and meaning of Prospero’s magic, specifically how it relies entirely on Ariel, and how Ariel’s labor is regularly obscured, with the credit is given to Prospero. The ground for this reading ripe because of The Tempest's label as a “Romance,” and the byzantine language of metaphor woven into Renaissance magic. In order to establish the effect we would like to have with our production of The Tempest, it is worth examining the tools we have available in the form of the Romance genre, and how those tools allow us to expand on the play’s use of magic as a metaphor for power.

The genre of Romance is pliable, adaptable, and it packs a punch. It has creatively tense guidelines, more than rules. While some scholars contend that Shakespeare’s Romances are geared towards the realization of a sublime ideal of storytelling, the likes of which you only encounter in fairy tales or myths, Michael O’Connell, in his essay “The experiment of Romance,” asserts that their one defining characteristic is a self-referentiality that distances them from the myths, fairy tales, and magic that they invoke. (216) We can use this distancing to evade the draining need for the vicissitudes of psychological realism in a play that already includes magic and gods, and we can also use it to pierce any sentimental interpretations of Prospero’s magic, or the spirits of the island. This is not cute magic. "Shakespeare brings together in a Christian framework the literary heritage of classical and English authors, books of magic and the folklore legacy, but also the common philosophical assumptions regarding spiritual entities." (Horvath 163) When our audience sits down to see this production, they will be entering a cultural imaginary, a coalescence of the various stories and ideas that we use to navigate the world today, but those stories all tell a larger story about who we think should get power, and who should be denied it.

Enochian Alphabet

This practice also represents certain magical styles that Shakespeare could have been referencing. Renaissance occultist James I. Robert Fludd differentiates ‘round art,’ which are practices that deal with ideas independent of a connection to the corporeal world, from ‘square art,’ which is entirely corporeal (Yates 315). But, where Fludd prefers to keep his arts delineated, our goal is to show how each penetrates the other in the name of acquisition of power. To keep the magic bound in a realm of pure thought would geld the meaning of the play. Here, criticism of modern interpretations of The Tempest is useful. Reviewing experimental contemporary productions, Anston Bosman goes so far as to describe elements of the play as ‘Aethers,’ though he uses the term as a catch-all for the ephemerality of Prospero’s magic, and how its volatility is a metaphor for the digital world and its borderless, globalizing expansion. (295-296) Aether, for our production, will refer to 'something,' which seems to have been made from 'nothing.' It will demonstrate the way that power moves from thought to the world and back again, its borders disintegrating and then re-establishing themselves around one who can wield it. Ariel is Aethereal, Caliban is not. Whatever moments of Aethereality Prospero has are directly connected to Ariel. Aether, in our play, will be the subject of that romantic self-referentiality, because we want to examine power, not be seduced by it.

This way, we can allow the Aethereal to swell to its most spectacular capacity, and then sidestep the theatricality of power to get at the heart of who has control of each scene, and why, in order to see the story of the play in a new light.

The Tempest: A Political Fable

This production of The Tempest is a political fable that begins with a cataclysm, and a split between nobles and workers about what should be done. The nobles, who are Neapolitans, on their way back from a royal wedding, and they insist on trying to manage the situation, while the ship's crew split their efforts between trying to get their "betters" below deck for their own safety, and keeping the ship afloat. Ultimately, they fail, and the ship is split. Or so we think.

The tempest they've been struggling through turns out to be an intricate spell woven by Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, who took to studying magic so intensely that he didn't notice his brother Antonio plotting a coups to usurp his Dukedom. Prospero and his daughter Miranda are marooned on an island, thought dead, and Prospero has been working tirelessly to trap the Neapolitans on the island with him. These Neapolitans include Antonio, but also Alonso, the King of Naples, and Alonso's son Ferdinand, among others. Prospero coerces his spirit Ariel, who has caused the tempest, to continuing to work for him until his plan is complete by promising Ariel his freedom. Prospero also dispatches Caliban, an inhabitant of the island who is now Prospero's slave, to get firewood, although Caliban protests that he would have his freedom - and Miranda - if it weren't for Prospero's magic. Ferdinand, meanwhile, is lead by Ariel to Miranda, and the two fall in love at first sight. Prospero decides to make Ferdinand work for his daughter’s hand in marriage, and so he uses his magic to overpower Ferdinand and put him to work on the island.

The Neapolitans, thinking Ferdinand dead, attempt to make their way through the island, while Antonio conspires to murder Alonso with his brother Sebastian while everyone else is sleeping, because, due to feudal machinations, Sebastian would be next in line after Alonso dies. Ariel wakes the group up before the murder can take place. Elsewhere on the island, Caliban is found by Stephano and Trinculo, two drunks from the ship, who pry Caliban for aid by giving him liquor. Caliban decides to serve them instead of Prospero, and tries to convince them to help him murder Prospero so they can take back the island. Ferdinand learns to enjoy the work Prospero is forcing him to do, and he and Miranda decide to get married. Prospero, unseen, watches and approves. Meanwhile, Ariel manages to interrupt Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban by tricking them to fight each other. Ariel misleads them by playing music, which they follow, then also foils a plot by the Neapolitans to murder Prospero by transforming into a harpy and announcing that Ferdinand is dead as vengeance for Prospero being usurped. Meanwhile, Prospero summons spirits to preside over Miranda’s wedding, though their ceremony is cut short when Prospero remembers the plots against his life.

Ariel has lead Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban through a mire, and so Prospero and Ariel leave beautiful clothes out nearby to lure them out. Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban attempt to steal the clothes, but are attacked by spirits and flee. Ariel then lures the Neapolitans to Prospero, and goes to get the mariners from the boat, all of whom have been kept safe and hidden, and the boat entact. Prospero reveals himself, confronts the Neapolitans for usurping his Dukedom, but reconciles with all of them, except Antonio. He allies with Alonso by revealing Ferdinand is alive, and married to Miranda. Ariel returns the mariners to the Neapolitans, and brings Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban, all wearing Prospero’s stolen clothes. Prospero and Alonso chastise them for their plot and reclaim the stolen clothes, before making plans to return to Milan. His final command to Ariel is to ensure the seas are calm for the voyage, and - when that is done - he promises he will set Ariel free. He makes a similar request of the audience, asking them to free him from the consequences of any of his wrongdoing.

The audience is invited not to clap if they so choose.

Introduction

This is less an introduction and more of a prologue, and I've tried to make sure that it's towards the end of my writing process. I love The Tempest because it confuses me, frustrates me, and still somehow inspires me. Coming back to it this semester, I was struck by the unspoken cost of Prospero's power, and what exactly it was that we, the audience, had to forgive him for. Also, in fairness, I missed my goth phase in high school, and I've been making up for it ever since through a love of esoterica, and so the chance to explore both lead me to the thesis that Prospero's magic is a metaphor for the nascent global market of the Renaissance, with all its awe-ful, awful, wonders.

Esoterica is well-named, though, and while I find it fascinating to learn secret names for God, or try to distinguish a pantheist from a panentheist, it was easy to get distracted trying to puzzle my way through research into magic that was secondary to my concept. I had to focus my research around essential goals, quickly, and that ended up leading me to a term of art that gets used throughout my production concept:

Aether (or, the Aethereal) - 'something' which seems to be made from 'nothing.' Power, by another name.

This has ended up being what magic means to be in this production, and so you'll see it used throughout this production concept as a term that can mean "something magical," but it also can include something as material as the characters' costumes. Because so much of this concept involves taking the inherent self-referentiality of The Tempest and using it to unpack the metaphor of Prospero's magic, I needed something big enough, and brazen enough, to prompt critical reflection from an audience. Prospero's magic is never blasphemous, but it should look and feel almost holy, until suddenly it's so holy it becomes profane. It goes from imitating God's creative power to aping or misusing God's creative power, and we need to practice telling the difference between the two. Especially because our judgement is the climactic act of the play: at the end, Prospero asks us for our forgiveness. What did he do?

Once I'd established that I wanted to focus on the audience's relationship to the play, and specifically how magic is actively used as a metaphor for power, I had my concept. I imagined myself a theater company, and tried to write from the group's perspective, and I think I found out a little more about why this play keeps fascinating me.