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King James is associated with the sun, his rays break "the Night's black charms". In Ben Jonson's
Hymenaei, the "four humours and affection" are scared away by the presence of Reason and make way for
the eight "nuptial powers" of Juno: "These, these are they / Whom humour and affection must obey".[4] In
the same masque, a debate between Truth and Opinion (Truth's false counterfeit) is resolved in favour of
the former. Truth, here, embodies the virtues of marriage, while Opinion glorifies the benefits of
spinsterhood. Eventually, Truth addresses the king:
This royal judge of our contention
Will prop, I know, what I have undergone;
To whose right sacred highness I resign
Low, at his feet, this starry crown of mine,
To show his rule and judgement is divine.[5]
In The Masque of Queens twelve hags, embodying Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity and other vices, vanish
at the dazzling appearance of Heroic Virtue, accompanied by eleven mythical queens.
In other masques, the king is often represented as the controller and tamer of nature. The royal will creates
order and sophistication in "the wildness and untutored innocence of nature".[6] At the climax of each
masque, the masquers descended from the stage and chose a dancing partner from the audience, merging
the worlds of the masque and the court into the ideal royal universe.
The court masque, then, manifested an important theatrical image of kingship; royalty's prime mode of
expression was fundamentally histrionic, as is also confirmed by James I's personal treatise on royalty
entitled Basilikon Doron (1599) and Elizabeth's assertion that "We princes, I tell you are set on stages, in
the sight and view of all the world duly observed."[7] The theatre served as an extension of the royal mind.
Even watching a masque was a histrionic activity: the king's box was placed at the centre of the hall, for all
the other spectators to see. The king had to be seen seeing. Inigo Jones' stage-effects were also designed
in such a way as to give the king the best view of the stage only from his seat could the action be seen
properly.
Prospero's Masque
The wedding masque in The Tempest is a materialisation of Prospero's will and power. Like the court
masque, it is a visual spectacle: "No tongue! All eyes! Be silent!" (4.1.59). Whereas in the second scene of
The Tempest, Prospero wanted his daughter to listen, and drink in his tale, this time he wants visual
attention. The masque celebrates Prospero's paternal magnanimity and his ability to defy the laws of time
and nature "Spring come to you at the farthest, / In the very end of harvest!" (4.1.114-15): winter has
been excluded from Prospero's seasonal cycle. Abundance emanates spontaneously from Nature's
inexhaustible resources; the masque is a departure from the real world of The Tempest, in which Ferdinand
has to labour for his wedding, Ariel for his freedom, Caliban for the liberation from bodily pain. These harsh,
rigid transactions are replaced by a vision of unconditional plenty. It is, however, worth noting that Venus
and her "waspish-headed son" have been safely excluded from the party; unbridled erotic lust so much
feared by Prospero has been warded off.
In the court masque, when the masquers reveal their true identities (i.e. as persons of nobility, people of the
court), the audience was meant to look through the image, at the ideals of kingship and courtly life it
represented. "In such representations", Orgel and Strong write, "the court saw not an imitation of itself, but
its true self." [8] Likewise, the wedding masque in The Tempest offers Miranda and Ferdinand an image of
their ideal, virtuous selves. It points to the ideals forged by Prospero's royal mind and stands for his project
in general:
In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle, and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.
(5.1.208-13, my italics)
Prospero's noble, rational magic is contrasted to the black sorcery practised by Sycorax, Caliban's mother,
and this, again, links him to the images of royal power we encounter in the court masque. In Jonson's
Hymenaei, for example, "anti-royal" forces are said to be concocted by "the black sorceress Night." Frank
Kermode, in his New Arden Edition of The Tempest, writes that Prospero's art is
the disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge it is a technique for liberating the soul from the passions,
from nature; the practical application of a discipline of which the primary requirements are learning and
temperance, and of which the mode is contemplation it is the ordination of civility, the control of appetite,
the transformations of nature by breeding and learning.[9]
Just how strongly Prospero fashions his world and his image of himself the way a king does in a court
masque, becomes clear if we connect Kermode's observations to a comment on the Caroline masque
but also applicable to masques in general by Kevin Sharpe, quoted in Jerzy Limon's The Masque of
Stuart Culture:
Neoplatonic philosophy postulates an ascent of cognition from the plane of senses and material objects to
a loftier stratum of knowledge of forms and ideas, of which objects were but an imperfect material
expression. The Caroline masque enacted that philosophy in the transition from antimasque to masque.
The world of sense and appetite was represented in the masque by images of nature as an ungoverned
wilderness, threatening, violent, ignorant and anarchic; the sphere of soul was depicted as nature ordered
and governed by the patterns of the forms. So in the Caroline masque the transcendence is most often a
transformation of nature from chaos to order and from disjunction to harmony.[10]
If The Tempest can be related to a direct political context, it can also be related to the genre of the court
masque on a structural level. In a sense, the play may be said to consist of a series of antimasques,
resolved in the final act by Prospero's regenerative powers. In the very first scene, social hierarchy is
subverted by the forces of nature "What cares these roarers for the name of king!" ; a little later the
courtiers plot the assassination of Alonso; Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo conspire against Prospero, and
there is also the past usurpation of Prospero which the latter seeks to undo. In The Tempest, the full gamut
of Shakespeare's tragic material is played out in three hours. Hamlet, King Lear and the history plays are
reenacted on a desert island, this time with the desire to resolve the tragedy and restore harmony and
forgiveness. The dramatic form of the play is similar to that of the court masque Prospero's (royal)
powers are called upon to resolve and undo the antimasques acted out by the sailor, the courtiers, Caliban
and his inebriated companions and Prospero's brother. In much traditional Tempest criticism, it has been
taken for granted that Prospero successfully completes his royal task, that in The Tempest the world of the
antimasque is unambiguously defeated and replaced by Prospero's "brave new world". Enid Welsford, for
instance, writes that "the only potent will is the will of Prospero. So far from being founded upon a conflict,
the play does not even contain a debate." [11]
However, there is a discrepancy between Prospero's magic on the one hand and the political realities it is
designed to undo on the other. The sea captain's command over his ship, and the authority he derives from
this, and Caliban's organic knowledge of and sensuous bond with the island are palpable political facts to
reckon with. Prospero is even dependent on Caliban for basic physical sustenance: "We cannot miss him.
He does make our fire, / Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices / That profit us" (1.2.311-13). Likewise,
the conspiracy against Prospero is tangible in its carnivalesque physicality, the conspirators' excessive
drinking and their preoccupation with the body, rather than the mind.
Prospero's magic, by contrast, is abstract, and it operates in the realm of ideas, even though the opening
scene of The Tempest might at first seem to contradict this. Prospero conjures up an immaterial banquet
(producing real food is beyond his capabilities), and evokes a masque that, for all its splendour, is primarily
an abstract ideal, disconnected from concrete realities. In fact, the entire scope of Prospero's project is
abstract: Prospero seeks to effect a type of religious conversion in his brother, tries to inscribe "nurture" on
Caliban's "nature", he is his daughter's schoolmaster, the forger of her mind. The physically real effects of
his magic (Ferdinand's paralysis, the pack of hounds that chase the conspirators) spring from an anxiety at
his own lack of control over others his inability to control their minds, which is what he most desperately
wants.
Characters whose minds Prospero seems unable to control, include Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban. All
three figure at the interruption of the wedding masque as Prospero remembers their "foul conspiracy"
against his life:
Enter certain reapers, properly habited. They join with the nymphs in a graceful dance, towards the end
whereof Prospero starts suddenly and speaks, after which, to a strange hollow and confused noise they
heavily vanish.
The interrupted ceremony in Shakespeare often marks a dramatic turning point. In Hamlet, the interruption
of 'The Mouse-Trap' by Claudius' sudden angry departure is particularly ominous. By restaging his father's
assassination, Hamlet has revealed his suspicions concerning Claudius' crime. He is now openly
dangerous and has, in fact jeopardised his life. In Richard II, the interruption of the duel between
Bullingbrook and Mowbray marks a crucial political mistake on Richard's part and heralds his downfall and
eventual death. Here, what was intended as the benevolent apotheosis and climactic celebration of
Prospero's powers, is suddenly undercut by a conspiracy he himself has instigated. Prospero's anxiety
seems out of proportion with reality. Perhaps it is the unmistakable political will behind the conspiracy that
disturbs him so much; the mere fact of resistance and of carnivalesque irreverence signifies a limit to his
powers. He cannot alter people's minds "Thought is free" (3.2.121) as Caliban and the clowns have it.
The masque is followed immediately by Prospero's famous speech on the evanescence of life:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(4.1.148-58)
Prospero's vision of proliferation, abundance, inexhaustible plenty is overthrown by a declaration of
finiteness, of transience. What was imagined to be permanent, an exchange without diminution "nothing
of him that doth fade" turns out to be ephemeral, proves subject to loss. This is the culmination of one
important 'deep structure' of the play as a whole. In Milan, Prospero devoted himself to the study of magic
and, as a result, lost his throne; Caliban, in a dream, sees "riches ready to drop upon [him]" and wakes up
to reality; a banquet appears in front of the courtiers but when they fall to, it vanishes. The Tempest
rehearses this pattern of frustration over and over again and eventually leads up to the interrupted
masque.[12] Prospero's vision is emptied out, drained. He is thrown back upon himself, upon the naked fact
of his old age: "Be not disturbed with my infirmity" (4.1.160). The speech refers most strongly to himself
he is old, weak and to his splendid magical powers they are merely "insubstantial", a histrionic fiction.
One is all the more forcefully reminded of the substantial realities of the sailor, Caliban, Stephano, Trinculo,
of the palpability of storms, but also of the erotic tension between Miranda and Ferdinand at best
repressed but by no means effaced by Prospero of food and drink, of forms of physical excess as
opposed to Prospero's abstract abundance. The conflict between Prospero's esoteric project and the
realities it is designed to undo remains unresolved the former's powers, at least, are insufficient,
precisely because they are intangible idealisations; they are only a dream of absolute power.
All this has political implications beyond the play itself. As a structural allusion to the genre of the court
masque, it is an evocation of royal power and splendour. It offers a series of antimasques, promises their
undoing by Prospero's royal magic, yet, at crucial moments, withholds it, frustrates the very expectations it
first creates. As such, it subverts the ideology of the court masque by resisting the easy solutions this genre
offers. Prospero / the king is powerful, but only up to a point. Prospero's project is a royal desire whose
realisation is ambivalent.
By staging the wedding masque as a piece of drama-within-drama, The Tempest also highlights the
theatricality of kingship, marks it out as a histrionic construct. Royalty expresses itself by means of a
theatrical fiction and in The Tempest it is represented as such. The court masque, as an expression of royal
power, is appropriated for the stage, employed to create in the audience a desire for resolution. At
crucial moments, however, this resolution is not achieved. Rather, it remains confined to Prospero's
theatrical fantasy. What prevails, then, is an image of political struggle. The 'counter-voices' in the play
remain alive, are not exorcised totally by the appearance of Prospero / the king, even if they do not triumph
either.
This is Prospero's tragedy. He learns that there are limits to his power. Crucially, his brother, the usurper,
remains unregenerate, never asks for forgiveness. In the great reconciliation-scene, Prospero addresses
Antonio in a disturbingly ambiguous fashion, which indicates the unresolved emotional struggle within
himself:
For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest faultall of themand require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know
Thou must restore.
(5.1.130-34)
In one and the same breath, Prospero expresses both forgiveness and a deeply rooted hatred. Antonio
does not reply, and from his silence we may deduce his unwillingness to repent.
Prospero also loses his daughter and, crucially, his dukedom to Ferdinand. The two lovers are
"discovered playing at chess." Their somewhat cynical exchange seems to mirror the harsh Realpolitik
characteristic of the world of Milan, and of which Prospero became the ironic victim. Yet it may also be
seen as an image of erotic courtship, as a series of playful moves in which power-games are only
symbolically played out. As Leslie Fiedler brilliantly points out, the chess-game also indicates Prospero's
loss of power over his daughter: "the strongest piece is the queen; and the combat always ends with the
cry, 'Checkmate!', meaning 'The king is dead!', the old man left without a move." [13]
Of his two servants Ariel, the creature of air and Caliban, the creature of earth it is Ariel whom
Prospero has to let go and give freedom, and Caliban with whom in a famously enigmatic line he
eventually expresses an ambiguous bond: "This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine" (5.1.275-76).
Although these words firmly claim Caliban as Prospero's colonised property, there is more at stake.
"Acknowledge" has a positive ring and may mean "to accept", or "to recognise". Caliban, initially branded
as the ultimate, evil Other, is acknowledged as a part of Prospero's own identity. This is also suggested by
the line "This thing of darkness I", which, because of its ambiguous line ending, could be read as apposition
"This thing of darkness; I" and hence an equation, of Prospero and Caliban.
Commenting on these lines, Leslie Fiedler has observed that Prospero "speaks on a psychological level,
too, as indeed he must, since, in general the oppression of minorities always implies the repression of
certain elements in the psyche of the oppressors with which those minorities are identified." [14] Prospero
identifies Caliban with impending death, and the infirmity of old age: "And with age his body uglier grows, /
So his mind cankers" (4.1.191-92). It refers back to Prospero's realisation of his advancing age:
Sir, I am vexed
Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
(4.1.158-60)
At the close of the play, he announces his return to Milan "where / Every third thought shall be [his] grave"
(5.1.311). Caliban serves as a substitute for Prospero himself. His fears concerning his age are transferred
on to Caliban. Likewise, Caliban may be said to embody Prospero's own repressed desires for Miranda.
She is the only woman on the island and Prospero imagines his relationship with her as a kind of obsessive
symbiosis:
I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art; naught knowing
Of whence I am, nor that I am more better
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,
And thy no greater father
.
(1.2.16-21, my italics)
These desires are externalised and inscribed on Caliban, who is endowed by Prospero with an unbridled,
rapacious sexuality "thou didst seek to violate / The honour of my child" (1.2.347-48). The Tempest,
then, resists the ideology of a court masque like The Masque of Blackness, in which the king reigns over
and transforms 'blackness', and, instead, hints at the blackness within Prospero/the king himself.
This is an ironic reversal of the initial situation Caliban served as the embodiment of otherness: low
physicality, dangerous sexuality, unregenerate nature while Ariel was safely sexless, bodiless, the
materialisation-cum-enactment of Prospero's language, the extension of his mind. Like his drunken fellowconspirators, Caliban in his "deformity" is a creature of the antimasque, to be evicted from Prospero's
courtly world, or at least 'whitewashed', deprived of his "nature" and inscribed with "nurture". [15] Ironically,
Prospero finds himself unable to 'educate' Caliban and it even seems, once again, as if Prospero, in the
last few scenes of the play, is thrown back more and more upon his own physical vulnerability, is brought
down to a level of existence which he initially displaced on to Caliban.
In a sense, Prospero and Caliban come to occupy similar positions towards the end of the play. Caliban
gets his island back Prospero will return to Milan and he is, once more, "his own king". As the sole
inhabitant of the island, he is alone, like Prospero after everyone has left the stage the other characters
are all part of a company (the lovers, the courtiers, the clowns), while Prospero is essentially isolated
and the Duke-magician pronounces his epilogue:
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint. No 'tis true
I must be here confined by you,
(5.1.319-38)
While at the end of a court masque the king is addressed and his power glorified, here a duke addresses
the audience to confess his powerlessness. Having relinquished his magical powers, Prospero is reduced
to his own limited bodily strength. The Tempest, as a dramatic fiction, has now become Prospero's prison
and Prospero his own prisoner. He has survived his own fantasy, his dream of power. Prospero's
confinement echoes that of Ariel and Caliban, and his call for liberation similarly recalls their desire for
freedom. His demand for mercy and forgiveness brings to mind Caliban's words just a few lines earlier: "I'll
be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace" (5.1.294-95). "Grace", or Christian forgiveness, favour, here
invests Prospero's power with religious dimensions the languages of religion and power are conflated. In
the Epilogue, religious favour becomes the very icon of Prospero's powerlessness and dependence.
Finally, Prospero finds himself in a position he had hitherto reserved for his subjects. He expresses a sense
of guilt: "As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free" (5.1.337-38).
Prospero's theatrical project, initially the sign of his power, now becomes his crime. In the world Prospero
had created for himself, crimes were only committed by others Antonio, Caliban, Stephano, Trinculo. His
final confession of guilt mirrors the general reversal of his situation. As Edmund puts it in King Lear: "The
wheel has come full circle, I am here." [16]
Prospero appeals to the audience for mercy, but also for their imaginative collaboration. The metadramatic
undercurrent present throughout the play culminates here in an explicit elision of the borderline between
play and world. It is the task of the audience to finish The Tempest; the struggle for power it presents is
transferred to them, its energies infused into the extra-theatrical world.
NOTES
1 The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1.2.5-10. All subsequent quotations
are taken from this edition.
2 Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power, p. 87. Orgel's book is a classic introduction to the study of the court
masque in its historical context. Much of the material in this section was inspired by it. Other seminal works
are Enid Welsford's The Court Masque, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), Jerzy Limon's
The Masque of Stuart Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), Stephen Orgel and Roy
Strong's Inigo Jones: The Theatre at the Stuart Court (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications Limited,
1973), and The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), a collection of essays
edited by David Lindley.
3 The Masque of Blackness, in Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre at the Stuart
Court, p. 92, ll. 229-33.
4 Hymenaei,lines 240-41, in Inigo Jones, p. 108.
5 Hymenaei, lines 883-87, in Inigo Jones, p. 113.
6 The Illusion of Power, p. 49.
7 Quoted in The Illusion of Power, p. 42.
8 Inigo Jones, p. 2.
9 Frank Kermode (ed.), The Tempest, New Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1954), pp. x1vii-x1viii.
10 The Masque of Stuart Culture, p. 67.
11 The Court Masque, p. 340.
12 See also David Lindley's essay "Music, Masque and Meaning in The Tempest", The Court Masque, ed.
David Lindley, 47-60.
13 The Stranger in Shakespeare (Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1974), p. 206.
14 The Stranger in Shakespeare, p. 209.
15 Limon's The Masque of Stuart Culture contains a brilliantly suggestive drawing by Andrzej Markowicz,
showing an assortment of typical 'antimasque characters' beer-bellied drunkards, long-haired, grotesque
clowns and a type of human bottles, embodying, of course, the evils of dipsomania. They show a decided
resemblance to Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo.
16 King Lear, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974),
5.3.175.