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.