In Our Time - The Tempest

Episode Date: November 14, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Written in around 1610, it is thought to be one of the playwright's final works and contains some of the most poetic and memorable passages in all his output. It was influenced by accounts of distant lands written by contemporary explorers, and by the complex international politics of the early Jacobean age.The Tempest is set entirely on an unnamed island inhabited by the magician Prospero, his daughter Miranda and the monstrous Caliban, one of the most intriguing characters in Shakespeare's output. Its themes include magic and the nature of theatre itself - and some modern critics have seen it as an early meditation on the ethics of colonialism.With:Jonathan Bate Provost of Worcester College, OxfordErin Sullivan Lecturer and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, University of BirminghamKatherine Duncan-Jones Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College, OxfordProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, as I came through the front doors of Broadcasting House this morning, I walked under a famous statue by Eric Gill. The BBC's founders wanted an image that symbolised the act of broadcasting.

And so they commissioned a statue of two figures from Shakespeare, the bearded magician Prospero sending the spirit Ariel out into the world. Prospero and Ariel are two of the central characters of the tempest, generally believed to be Shakespeare's last play. It begins with a spectacular shipwreck and is set on a remote island which Prospero and his daughter Miranda share with a mysterious creature called Caliban. Written in an age of exploration, it was heavily influenced by contemporary politics

and contains some of Shakespeare's most celebrated verse. It's been seen by some as a commentary on colonialism and by others as a meditation on the nature of theatre itself. With me to discuss the tempest are Jonathan Bait, provost of Worcester College, Oxford, Erin Sullivan, lecturer and fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and Catherine Duncan Jones,

Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Jonathan Bate, I gave a brief summary of the plot of the tempest. Can you just flush it out a bit? Yes, certainly, Melvin. Very unusually for a Shakespeare play. When it was printed, it says at the beginning, seen an uninhabited island.

So the whole play takes place on a mysterious island, except for the very first scene, which is the tempest, the storm, the opening stage direction, a tempestuous sound of thunder and lightning. So some royal characters on a ship,

a wreck, they're washed ashore on an island. Who's there? What's going on? We learn in the first scene that Prospero on the island is the exiled Duke of Milan The play is written at a time when Italy is not unified as a nation,

its different city states. Prospero Duke of Milan has been exiled. He's essentially had his position usurped by his wicked younger brother called Antonio. And the people in the shipwreck are Antonio and various other characters from the kingdom of Naples. And we learn in the first scene, Prospero has conjured up the storm to bring his enemies to the island in order to confront them. after many years. As you say, with him on the island, there's his daughter, Miranda, who's never really seen a human being before. There's this strange creature called Caliban and an airy spirit

called Ariel. What happens in the course of the play is that the different groups of characters are brought together and eventually there's a confrontation, perhaps an element of reconciliation and a reflection at the end as to what they're going to do next as they're they leave the island. Yes, and it is Rift with Magic, and there are only three plots really, and there's a small plots followed through, and there's a great mask at the end, which has been taken out on certain productions, and not much missed, really.

So it's a very short, very short play, powerful, and with an enormous legacy. It was written about 1611. It's his last solo written play. He co-wrote plays afterwards. You more than anybody else know, Jonathan. It was eight years after the death of Elizabeth and into the reign of James I first,

so you had a family on the throne. What did that political change matter to Shakespeare and does it matter for this play? That's a really good question and a very interesting point because although Shakespeare wrote for the public theatre, everybody could go and see the plays in the public playhouses in London, he and his acting company also knew that at any point their plays could be put on for command performances at court,

so they would always need to think carefully about A, not offending the monarch, and B, putting on plays about things that the monarch was interested in. What's very striking about the plays Shakespeare wrote after 1603 when Queen Elizabeth died, and King James, formerly King of Scotland, also became King of England, is that those later plays are always very interested in questions of family in a way that some of the earlier plays weren't.

Now, that's not surprising because, of course, Queen Elizabeth was unmarried, whereas King James was very conscious that he had a son, a daughter, and the question of who they married, the question of royal marriages, was of great political importance. James was also very interested in magic, the idea that there might be such a thing as good magic. He was interested in bad magic. He had written a treatise on witchcraft.

So there's all sorts of ways in which the main concerns of the play, whether it's magic or the sort of political liaisons in the play between Milan and Naples that can be achieved through royal marriages. Catherine Duncan Jones, can you bring into the discussion other features of the period in which it was written that you think might have had an influence on this play?

Well, I suppose one other feature of the period that is relevant to this play is the increasing use of indoor theatres with special effects that are possible indoors with artificial light and candles and bright costumes that will gleam in candlelight, dancing and singing. Theatre is becoming closer to court masks, as Jonathan was saying. Plays are increasingly being written by Shakespeare

with a view to possible performance before a very grand courtly audience, possibly including the monarch and or his wife as leading audience members, which leads to a much more spectacular. kind of theatre, more dependent on visual spectacle, possibly with some rough edges in the writing. It also begins to be the age of exploration looking back.

I think it was John D, you're going to correct me, in about 1600 who coined the phrase of British Empire. He presented this to Elizabeth, people like to present things to that queens. Anyway, never mind, he coined that. It was an age of exploration. What bearing did that have? It meant that this setting lots of,

Shakespeare's earlier plays have they almost all apart from history plays have non-English settings. This has a setting that isn't in any recognisable European country. It's on an island that may be in the Mediterranean and maybe in the Atlantic. It often feels rather Atlantic as if it's a long way away from European civilization. And this is very, very new, the sense of looking out to the unknown, discovering unknown forms of life that maybe we might think that, ethnically different, but Jacobians might think these creatures of whom Caliban is the sole exemplar, whom we see in the play, is perhaps not even quite human. This is a period when there's a possibility of both non-human nature, plants and animals and trees being absolutely unfamiliar to Europeans, and even human or humanoid creatures being completely unknown, hitherto unencountered.

he's roped that in, as he roped everything in, he didn't miss anything, did he? I mean, what he missed, he imagined. And he's roping that into this play, the idea of what we would now call colonisation. And in fact, great speech by Gonzalo about plantation and the idea of colonisation. This is a chance finding these new semi-inhabited countries offers an opportunity to found a good civilization, a good state that is well run. And outside the cultures that Shakespeare had been talking about, which, which had been the political cultures of Europe, really, what we now call Europe, with different sets of values. And that's what he's looking at here too. Yes, and yet one of the many kind of counter-stresses within Shakespeare's play is that Prosper is very authoritarian

and has a very fixed idea of how human beings should behave. And while he is very happy to be told which are the poisonous plants and which are the nutritious plants and berries, Caliban can help Prospero and his daughter to survive in this new environment. Caliban is the inhabitant he finds when he comes to the island. Yes, Caliban is the sole inhabitant of the island when Prospero lands there and then this 12 years later all these other people land there. But Prospero's values are very much authoritarian European values

which don't see much inherent value in a non-European humanoid. being. And then just talking about sources almost finally, not finally, but another point Catherine, the idea of the shipwreck, the idea of going out there in small ships, in tempestuous seas and going that was very strongly around at that time. It was very strongly around. At that particular time, yeah. Because of a real life adventure, which was chronicled by several

people who were actually part of this Bermuda voyage, they were going to Virginia to take supplies to Virginia, the mainland of America, as we now call it, but they were shipwrecked on what they called the Bermuda, as we would now call it Bermuda, and were there for nearly a year, and were delighted to find

that although there were no human inhabitants, there was good fruit, fresh water, and it was actually rather a lovely time on Bermuda, though they were glad to get away again eventually. And that was reported on, and we know Shakespeare had access to that. That was reported on in great detail by several chroniclers, some of whom were actually on that ship,

and part of that take expedition. Continuing with the sources, Aaron Sullivan, another important influence seems to have been one of the essays, particularly by the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, who Shakespeare got hold of a translation by Florio, and can you take us from there? Absolutely. One of the many things

that have really interested people about this play is that it doesn't have a sort of set main source in the way that some of Shakespeare's other plays do. So there's not a clear place where we can find him taking the plot, but we do find source that he's drawing on, like accounts of the shipwreck and also parts of Montaines of the cannibals, this essay in particular. And Montaigne's essays in general are interested in thinking about

what's human experiences, what knowledge is, and how it's bounded by one's own sense of culture and existence. So he's really introducing ideas about skepticism, the relativity of knowledge, which is quite unusual at the time. And Shakespeare seems to have been influenced by, these essays in various ways in his work, but certainly in The Tempest, we see the clearest drawing on, particularly of the cannibals. And in this essay... An essay, Montaigne's essay called On the Cannibal's. Of the cannibals. Yes. Exactly. And in this essay, Montaigne is thinking very much about the new world, which we've been talking about, about exploration, accounts of new peoples, and the customs that European explorers are finding there,

and perhaps customs that they're finding very distasteful. even barbarous, specifically cannibalism. But what the essay is doing is talking about how what we find, quote unquote, barbarous is very much about what we're used to and what we're not used to. And so in a way, he's thinking about how there might be this aspect of cannibalism that might seem very shocking to people, but also that in these reports, there are lots of interesting other ways of living that perhaps Europeans could learn from. So he talks about almost a kind of utopian vision of the untarnished new world,

of innocence, of a lack of lying, a lack of commerce and trade. And that goes directly into Shakespeare's play in the third scene when all of these Italians wash up on the island and they're looking at it and thinking, what are we going to do here, wondering if it's hospitable or if it's dangerous?

And Gonzalo speaks basically the lines of Montaigne, saying that this is a place where if he were to rule, he could rule without commerce, without traffic. He says that in this utopian society, people wouldn't have to labor for the fruits of the earth. So he says it's a place in common nature which would produce without sweat or endeavor. So it's a very utopian vision. And Florio's translation spells cannibal with one end and without the S at the end,

and Caliban's a direct anagram of that. Absolutely. So it's one of the interesting things always with Shakespeare is the way in which he's interpolating an idea in many different moments in the play. So you've got the set speech by Gonzalo, which is, like I said, perhaps overly optimistic. about the potential of this island. At the same time, you have the other Italians he's talking with, kind of cynically sending up what he's saying. So Gonzalo says that he would rule without,

there would be no sovereignty, and they say, and yet you would be king on it. And Caliban himself, in his depiction, is also engaging with some of these ideas about rule. And as Catherine said, so is prosperous. So you have a ruler in a place which needs rule and might set up from the beginning. So in a short play, which it is,

there's an awful lot going on. As you said, it's one of the Shakespeare's plays, I don't know if it's a shorter play, but he did take his plots from Hollandshire, took line after line after line from Hollandshire and various events, not from this. So is this structure different

because he himself seems to put it together? That's an interesting question. I mean, most of Shakespeare's plays have maybe somewhere around 15, 20 scenes, and some of the later plays even more, something like Anthony and Cleopathe. into 30 scenes, whereas The Tempest has these very nine carefully crafted scenes. It's a short play, like you said, I think, after the Comedy of Errors at Shakespeare's shortest.

It follows the Unities, more or less, after the Tempest, we're on the island, so we're in one place for a fixed amount of time. We're told that more or less it's going to take the course of four hours over an afternoon. So its specificity is unusual. And I think that in its structure, this is a play that thematically is very much about theatre and art. And the structure itself brings attention to that and the way that the scenes kind of pair with each other. You sort of have a set of nesting eggs where the outer scenes go together and inward to the central scene, scene five, which is the courtship of Miranda and Ferdinand.

And the idea of creating is theatre. Prospero creates the storm and you can see him conducting the storm, can you? And he creates his own ending. And there's the idea of a theatre being made by the man in the play about whom the play is. Absolutely. And Prospero is in a sense. scripting, directing the performance we see in front of us, including the mask, as you mentioned. Jonathan May, let's talk more about Caliban, who has become, for many, the most interesting person in the play. How did he start off and how has he ended up

in the view of critics and audiences? Well, that's a very big and very interesting question. It's, of course, hard to know how the original audiences would have reacted to Caliban, because unfortunately we haven't got the diaries of people who went to see the plays at the time. But in the later history, we have a very interesting development

in attitudes to him. I mean, we could spend a lot of time going through the different metamorphoses of the play. Can I just interrupt one second with... We have a sort of idea how ordinary people, because Trinculo and Stefano, the fool and the drunken steward, are ordinary as ordinary.

he goes in Shakespeare. And they call him a monster, half man, half fish, stinking. They treat him of different kind. And we even thought maybe something wrong with his head. He's in the wrong place or his eyes are in the wrong place. And so on. So they find him monstrous. And I presume, therefore, that he was dressed up, played as monstrous.

Well, that's a really interesting point, Melvin. And, you know, a point that can only be made by someone who had really thought about the character of Trinkilo. because Trinculo and Stefano are the two sort of ordinary people, the working class characters, if you like, the jester and the butler, who have been in this group of courtiers wrecked on the island. Most of the play is in verse

because they're aristocratic character speaking, they speak in prose. And they get together with Caliban and think about having a rebellion. They are, in a sense, the representatives of the ordinary theatregoers. So, as you say, the first impression of Calabas, is that which we get from Trinculo and Stephano. And the kind of thing they say about him is this,

hang on, let's take him to England and exhibit him as a fairground attraction. We could make some money out of that. The monster could make a man. The monster could make a man. Make a man, mean give him a living. Exactly, exactly. And what that seems to refer to is that some years before,

one of the explorers called Martin Frobyshire had gone in pursuit of the Northwest Passage and had brought back an Inuit, an Eskimo, and done exactly that, exhibited this poor chap as a fairground attraction, and then he had very quickly died. So there is that real sense. This is something, as Catherine was saying earlier,

something exotic, almost subhuman. Is he a man? Is he a fish? Is he a monster? And then can we cut to almost, well, let's say late 19th century. The interpretation of him has changed radically. It does change radically. There's a very important moment at the end of the 19th century

when the great actor-manager, Beerbome Tree, put on a production around about 1900, that is much, much more sympathetic to Caliban. But Caliban suddenly becomes this figure of great sadness, great passion, and great soul.

Although he's, at times seems like a monster, there's even an allegation that he's threatened to rape the daughter of Prosperi Miranda, he also speaks the most beautiful poetry in the play. Fantastic. So Shakespeare allows him to speak poetry as well as prose.

Exactly, and it's the most beautiful speech. They hear music in the air. Be not afeard, he says, the aisle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments, he says, would sound in my end. He said, it's like a wonderful dream, and that when he awakes, he cries to dream against.

One of those beautiful speeches Shakespeare wrote. And Beabham-Tree sort of picked up on that and made him a lyrical character. And can we just stay with Caliban, but also talk about his mother, the witch, Sycorax, who he's dead when we get there, but still her evil, wicked influences seen in locking up aerial inside a tree for 10 years, for instance. But all of this is from, of course, Prospero's point of view. Yes. The magician who is a European, brings with him certain values of social hierarchies

that he imposes on Sykirac's and Caliban and indeed on his daughter, But Sycorax definitely directly brings in the idea of magic. And we've told that Shakespeare found that in his constant reading of Ovid, which accompanied all his players. And the idea of magic is very, very powerful indeed. It's very, very powerful. And I think there, there is another topical reference that Shakespeare's early Jacobian audiences will have been aware of,

that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, known as the wizard emperor, had his reign usurped by his younger brother, he buried himself in magic books and seems to be fairly happy to give up being emperor in favour of a younger brother. Shakespeare's play offers a different take on this scenario in which Prospero, whose younger brother usurps the throne of Milan,

it sees this usurpation as absolutely wicked. and an overturning of a lawful authority, even though Prospero has neglected his dukedom, as he himself admits. I'm sorry, I'm straying from magic. No, no, it's great, great. But that Sycorax has been there, that she was there before Prospera,

and that he was her son, he had been exiled from Algeria and for being a witch and so forth, that you meant that when he says, this was mine before you came. Exactly. He has inherited. That's right. To be born in a country, even now,

is a crucial feature in qualifying as a citizen of a country, Caliban has apparently constitutional right on his side as Sycorax's child who has been born on the island who knows the island has a natural sympathy with the animals and plants

And when these people arrived This four-year-old girl and this father He likes Squinto When the English settlers British settlers arrived on the East Coast The Presbyterians in 16th He showed them the food they could eat He introduced them

On the indigenous inhabitants And actually, oddly enough, Caliban says exactly that. What's going to happen in the future? He showed them the fresh streams, didn't he? He showed them where they could not starve, really. There were two characters to whom prosper and Miranda owe their lives. The first is Gonzalo, who never gets adequately thanked.

Who gave them the books and the supplies. And the second is Caliban. Yeah, I just thought it's worth clarifying attitudes to magic in the period, that there was a very strong sense that there was such a thing as black magic, which is like witches being in league with the devil. But there was also this idea of white magic. of the magician harnessing the forces of nature to good effect for good purpose. Prospero sees himself as a white magician and Sycorax, Caliban's mother, as the black magician.

But one of the things the play does, and this in a way makes it like Montaigne's essays, which are constantly asking questions about the opposites of custom at the time. One of the things the plays does is say, well, is Prospero's white magic so very different from Sycorax's black? Maybe in some sense they're the same kind of magic. Aaron, you began to develop this idea in your previous answer, but the idea of government being an art was accepted then, I mean, Machiavelli's all that. And we have Gonzalo, who is the good man,

the good old man, who enabled Prospero and his daughter to get out with some chance of survival when they'd been exiled, gave them food, gave them fresh water, gave them robes, and gave him his books, most of all, his big magic books. Gonzalo's made fun of by the young. go wits and so on, you know, very much like Polonius. There's that sort of character. However, he does give, almost out of the blue, which you began to talk about, this great

speech about how I would govern. And it's radical. It's sort of John Ball time speech, isn't it? Except there would be a king, but John Ball believed in a king anyway. Yes, absolutely. Well, I think throughout the whole play, there's questions about the relationship between natural existence and artful or

would say sophisticated or cultivated human made existence and certainly the idea of government falls within this because with Prospero although he says in his talk with Miranda that he essentially deputized his brother to rule in his stead while he was able to

closer himself off and wrap himself in secret studies he still suggests that he had a natural right to rule and that he was unnaturally usurped so there is a sense of the natural order. However, then when he comes to the island, he doesn't seem to recognize that in Caliban.

He says, this island's mind by my mother, Sycorax, thou takest from me. He, because he has this very potent art, and also perhaps because he comes from what is seen as a more cultivated society, he assumes the right to rule. And he rules, as we've already heard, in a very authoritarian way.

He rules through physical force. He's always torturing Calabin. Yes, he's threatening them with pinches all the time. Yes. Describes cramps very well. Absolutely. And Caliban says, begrudgingly, I must obey. Because his art is so powerful. So he's very much saying that he is obeying because he has to.

Whereas Gonzalo is offering a different vision of how government might work, kind of if you were able to start over in a sense, or perhaps to reclaim another Eden. He's envisioning perhaps what might be thought of as a more natural kind of existence, I mean, which there isn't such a strong sense of hierarchy, of possession, of ownership. But it is, as we've already said as well. That ideal is also a question throughout the play. Jonathan, Prospero has often been associated with Shakespeare himself.

It's very tempting to do that. How tempted are you? I'm very tempted, Melvin, because I sort of began my sort of work as a Shakespeare scholar, thinking about the way that the romantic poets of the early 19th century were obsessed with Shakespeare. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, at that time, great, great critic as well as poet, he said that Prospero was the very Shakespeare, as it were, of The Tempest. And what Coleridge had noticed there was that this word art that is frequently used in the play to refer to Prospero's magic is also a word that refers to both the art of theatre, the illusion, the magical-like illusions of theatre,

and of course the art of poetry. And then Coleridge also thought, well, this is interesting. At this time, people had just begun to work out the chronology of Shakespeare's plays and realised it came at the very end of Shakespeare's career. And Coedridge looks at the final speech where Prospero, having renounced his art, then says he's going to retire. He's going to retire to Milan and think on his grave. The biographical evidence that had emerged in Coelridge's time

suggests Shakespeare retired after this. So Prospero's epilogue is Shakespeare's farewell to the stage. It's a very tempting reading. As you said in passing earlier, I have some reservations about that because actually Shakespeare only semi-retired. He seems to have partially hung around in London to train up the next generation of writers, particularly a young playwright called John Fletcher,

who took over from him as the company dramatist, and they co-wrote some plays together. But it still remains the case that it does seem to be a play that reflects and gathers together so many aspects of Shakespeare's own art. Catherine, would you go along with her? Absolutely. I mean, I would go the whole way to saying

that the bare island symbolises the bare stage that is then magically peopled by the actor, playwright, stage manager who was Shakespeare, who was, like Roslowe, managing everything, writing the words, inventing the spectacle, putting, making it sighting things happen on this bear island. Making money at the box office?

Yes, yes, that as well Probably also making money, yes. Can I stay with you? Can you say something that's only time to say about the language in the tempest? I think you've said you think it's some of the best verse.

Can you just give us your view of some of the language? I don't think I have said it's some of the best verse. I think it's got some very... I think you say some of the best verses given to Calibanian. Some of the best speeches are undoubted, The most original, exciting, memorable speeches to an audience 400 years onwards are Galabine speeches. Yes, I correct myself, that's what I said. I think it's got a lot of very ambitious speeches like the farewell to his art

that actually sort of peter out and it's as if both Prospero and Shakespeare have suddenly lost track of the syntax and he's got to a sort of jerk and start again. There were sort of imperfections and fault lines in many of Prospero's speeches that suggest that his bullying Hectoring, overbearing manner even with his terribly gentle and obedient little daughter, who we see in scene too, is the hectoring of a very powerful

figure who feels his power is now fragile. Nevertheless, they're hugely memorable. Jonathan's trying to get in, with pinching his index finger and son to say this will be a small interjection and I'm taking him at his mime.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with his sleep. Come on, Catherine, you can't say all prosperous language is clumsy. I wasn't saying it was all clumsy, but that some of the more ambitious speeches seem to crumble with their own ambitiousness. He has a lot of very long speeches and even in that crucial

scene too in which he is saying to poor little Miranda, who seems to be a little milk and water, a very obedient girl, he's actually saying to the audience, does thou mark me, he keeps trying to hammer home, you must listen to what I'm saying, it's terribly important to what's going to follow. I think you're a bit harder on that, because I think, you know,

he was telling us something that mattered, and it Maybe she's going, and he's just saying, listen, you've got to listen. This is your life. And she was perhaps not as attentive as a 16-year-old should be to her father telling her all this stuff. But I don't think he was being authoritarian. He was saying, come on. My tutor, he's pretty rude to her. I mean, he's as control freaky with her, and she is so sweet and obedient as he is with Canapan, almost.

Would you say that the language... I can't bear bullies, and I find him to be a bully in some scenes. Well, he's fair, I mean, he's fierce with everybody. I'm a brilliant bully. Fascinating. Well, I'm done with him, he's brilliant, he's fierce with Ferdinand. He sets him carrying what he called thousands of logs. He's fierce with Caliban, he's fierce with Ariel, and so on.

That's not quite... Anyway, never mind. Is the language different from the language of the earlier place? Do you find a difference? I think it's different and it's adventurous in ways that sometimes are brilliant and sometimes slightly crumble. Yes, much of it is brilliant and different. Different, can you give us an example?

Well, above all the speeches of Caliban, in which he seems to reinvented a new vocabulary almost for this borderline, recognisably human character who seems to have more in common with animals and plants and the environment than he does. And after all, he has been Lord of the Island that's only inhabitant. Is this sometimes in the prose as well as in the verse? I think most of all in the prose. I think it's richly inventive prose. He's amazing. Yes. Can I turn to you, Erin.

Can we just touch once more before we go into the next lap, the idea of it being a meditation on the nature of theatre itself? Absolutely. I mean, I think for me, one of the things is really interesting about the play is it's about exploration in so many different ways. So it's about the exploration of the geographic world. It's also about the exploration of metaphysics, of nature, of art. And also exploration of what you can do with artful language.

artful theater. One of the words that comes up quite a lot in the play is the word brave. So one of the most famous lines is Miranda saying, oh, Brave New World has such people in it. But we get brave a lot. Miranda initially describes Ferdinand as a brave form. Ariel is commended for bravely acting as a harpy. I think that bravery, it's also noticeable because it's not a play in which we have lots of battle scenes where Brave would be a kind of the courageous man going to battle. It's brave in the sense of spectacular, of wonderful. and of fearless.

And I think that in that way, it kind of brings together these different kinds of exploration and theatre as an exploration of human experience and also human potential is very much part of this play. When you're talking about that, it's just a p.S. to what you were saying,

Catherine, is it a bit, is perhaps prosper a bit more like God than Shakespeare? Yes, I suppose he behaves as if he has a god-like power, and while he has... But a bit of an Old Testament God? of an Old Testament God, very, very authoritarian and no real questions

or whiffs and butts, no challenges to his point of view, are going to be tolerated. Jonathan, can you give listeners some idea of, well, we had a bit of this from Catherine, I don't know whether there's much more to be said. Is there anything more to be said about the circumstances in which this play was performed?

Yes, there is. I mean, two key aspects to this. One, in about 1608, Shakespeare's acting company, which had hitherto performed in the outdoor big globe theatre on the South Bank, obtained an indoor theatre in the Blackfraise District of London. And Shakespeare's last plays are written very much

with an awareness of the technological possibilities of an indoor theatre, which simultaneously allows for more special effects, but is also more intimate because there's a much smaller size of audience. Well, would we get a ship into that theatre? I mean, do you mean special effects, like, would they have a simulacrum of a ship? No, no. not that, but they would be able to do much more

with sound effects and elementary lighting changes and in particular in terms of Prospero's magic, it was much easier to fly in an indoor theatre because, obviously just from a technical point of view, you could use hoists and so on. The other aspect that I think is very relevant to the period is one of the features of the Court of King James and his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark,

is they were very keen actually on spectacular theatrical performances at court, this new genre, a little bit like early opera, called the court mask. Shakespeare incorporates a mask within the play. Also, we know that this play was performed at court for command performances, in particular on the occasion of a royal wedding in 1613. So that's happening there. The strange thing is we've been talking, you've been talking passionately and eruditely about this play, it. The play itself dropped out of fashion for about a couple of hundred years and was replaced

as a play by a play written on top of it, Dryden and Davenant, called the Enchanted Island. Could you tell us why a bit about that and why for a couple of hundred years it was the preferred version of the Tempals, although it took a lot of liberties with it? Sure. Well, the theatre's close in the middle of the 17th century because of the politics, the Civil War, but they reopened in 1660 with the restoration of the monarch, or shortly thereafter. But there's this issue of wanting to put on plays quite quickly and needing some material. So the two men, the two theatrical figures who are charged with, they get licenses to have theatres. One of them is a man named William Davenant. And he gets the rights to perform

a certain number of plays, several of which are by Shakespeare, and one of them is The Tempest. But as is very typical at this time, they describe these plays as ancient plays. And they think, we might think of, you know, oh, it's all 17th century, so it's all sort of of a time. But actually it's, you know, about 50 years old, and they think this is quite outdated. We need to live and adapt make it relevant now.

Well, the big thing is there has been a civil war. Of course. Which actually has been really topsy-turved, that kingdom. And it does look a long time ago. Absolutely. And so for something like the politics of the tempest, that really needs to get changed.

for political reasons. So all of the plots to usurp Prospero, to usurp Alonzo on the island, those really need to be watered down. They become much funnier in the Enchanted Island, this new version, which uses about a third of the material in the Enchanted Island is from Shakespeare's The Tempest. So it sends up a lot of the political machinations, and it really focuses on the kind of rom-com romance of The Tempest and in some way sort of makes it into a more playful, of sex farce, where you add in these other female characters, women are now allowed on the stage. So this is a huge opportunity. In addition to the other kinds of stage spectacle, you've got moving scenery, different kinds of theaters. You can also have ladies. So Miranda gets a sister, Dorinda.

We also get Hippolyto, who is, just as Miranda is the girl who's never seen man, they decided it would be quite funny to add in the man who's never seen woman. But they say in the introduction and scholars have debated if this is truthful or disingenuous, they say, oh, we couldn't find another male actor, so Hippolyto is going to have to be played by a woman dressed as a man, but it's another opportunity to have a nice woman on the stage saying quite funny lines, because whereas Miranda, when she first sees a man, it leads to romance, a kind of virtuous union and marriage. With Hippolito, it's quite different. He's very excited by these women he sees on the island, and he wants them all. I think we'll move on now.

Ponder that for a while. Ponder that, we're pondering that. Catherine, um, Catherine Duncan Jones, this play, as has been said, had an enormous influence. The legacy was, can you give us some idea of when the legacy gathered momentum and in what direction it has gone? Yes, I think it gathered momentum in the 19th century of which Jonathan has already spoken. And above all, it generated a wonderful poem by Shelley about Ariel and Miranda and the natural wood of the guitar. that contains music and harmony. And then in a magnificent poem by Robert Browning, Caliban upon Setabos, which seems to be a kind of outgrowth from Caliban speeches in the play,

and which is a dramatic monologue, and which is entirely from Caliban's point of view. Caliban is trying to work out his theology, the two gods, the lesser god Settibos, and then the god beyond Settibos, who is the great creator of the universe. And Browning suggests Calabans, he's lying on his front in the mud surrounded by newts and insects and plants, and he's almost becoming part of the non-human world. And there are hints of this. I mean, I see Shakespeare's Tempest as a brilliant work of art

whose sort of rough edges generate further brilliant works of art. Poems, plays, films, prosperous books. And I see Browning's poem, particularly. is the first in a whole succession of brilliantly original creative works that have grown from the little edges of Shakespeare's play. And then, Jonathan, by what we might call the political legacy kicks in, the colonial political legacy. It is seen by many writers from outside or inside the empire, but outside this country, as a chance to see the whole colonial empire building thing from a completely different angle using Caliban as the forefront figure. Exactly. I mean, this is really interesting. It all begins in 1950 when a French intellectual called Octave Manoni writes a book called The Psychology of Colonization and uses the figures of Prospero and Caliban as metaphors for the colonial process. He wrote it in the wake of a rebellion against French rule in Africa. And it set the pattern for writers in the colonial, post-colonial period, as it were writing back. against Empire from Caliban's point of view.

So, for example, in 1969, a French Caribbean writer called Amos Sésaire in Martinique wrote a version of the play called A Tempist, in which Prospero is clearly the oppressive white man, and Caliban is the rebel, clearly represented as Malcolm X, and Ariel is the person who wants to create freedom and civil rights more gently. He's Martin Luther King. But also inside this country, productions here took the Caliban position. Well, that's right. I mean, again, the key there was this Manoni book. Jonathan Miller, the great polymath intellectual, read it in the late 1960s

and did a production at the Mermaid Theatre in 1970 based on that psychology of colonisation reading of the play. And that originated a tradition of productions of the play very much using it to discuss colonialism. Catherine, Catherine, Uncle Jones, I have to, we haven't got much time, but the play's being criticised on grounds of the treatment of women, particularly Miranda,

and the absolute insistence on chastity. Can you just say a bit more than I have about that? Yes, I was interested, Jonathan used the word rape about Caliban's attempt to have sex with Miranda. I mean, one might say that was of an accident waiting to happen. and Caliban's aim is to people the island with Calabans and this, as we've already mentioned, he is in some senses the legitimate lord of the island

he was born on the island and that gives him some status as somebody who can say this is my island, it belongs to me. But this slightly explains Prospero's fury with him. Well, on two grounds, one that he doesn't want his daughter's chastity violated but the other that he doesn't want the island full of children who have been begotten

not on terms devised by Prospero. Miranda must be preserved for a royal marriage and as Jonathan has already said, the play was only a couple of years after its first written to be associated with a genuine court royal marriage in the family of James I. So that issue is very important

and I can't help thinking from a purely modern point of view why didn't Prospero protect his daughter better. That is, was it his fault that he, Miranda nearly lost her chastity to Caliban, who was bound to want to produce more human beings for the island? We'll end on that tantalizing thought, Catherine. Thank you very much. Catherine Duncan Jones, Aaron Sullivan and Jonathan Bait next week, next week.

We're going to talk about Pocahontas. Thank you very much for listening. There are many more Radio 4 Arts and Discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at Beatty. c.co.uk slash radio four.