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.