A Note from La Tempestad‘s Dramaturg
written by Dante Flores
Prospero was once duke of Milan, but neglected his duties, instead immersing himself in his studies of magic. Ousted by his own brother, Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, are now living in exile on a remote island. But Prospero found he could practice al the magic he wanted in seclusion, and learn from the island’s inhabitants: Ariel, a spirit of air, and Caliban, the child of the witch Sycorax.
So goeth William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
In its own way, the island seems a perfect place to study, where a bookish political exile may find refuge from the chaos of the early modern world. It isn’t difficult to imagine that among the volumes Prospero brought with him, stowed in between the lunar charts and the arcane spellbooks, were the Essays of Michel de Montaigne; nor is it difficult to imagine the old duke turning to the 38th chapter, “Of Solitude,” and underlining, in an emphatic hand, where the French philosopher had written that “we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our solitude and retreat.”
But we can only speculate on Prospero’s reading habits to the degree that we understand those of his author. Shakespeare, it is believed, was a close reader of Montaigne, close enough that no discussion of The Tempest is complete without noting that the commonwealth envisioned by Gonzalo in Act II, Scene 1, which features “riches, poverty, and use of service, none,” sounds a great deal like Montaigne’s secondhand description of the Tupinambá people of Brazil – whose society, per Montaigne, featured “no use of service, of riches, or of poverty.”
This is to say that there are kindred spirits to be found in the written word. But we ought to be careful that we don’t commit the same error as Prospero: that of a hypnotizing, self-isolating immersion. In writing of the Renaissance study, the scholar Andrew Hui warns us that “the studiolo, so certain of its universalism, may promise a false abundance, becoming a closed system that seals itself up into a mirror-house of solipsism.”
Indeed, let us remember that Shakespeare, more than just a particularly talented poet, was a playwright; and The Tempest is one of his finest lessons in the power of spoken (and sung) language above all. Prospero announces the spells he casts, the illusions he delegates to Ariel, and the curses he levies upon an unruly Caliban. Ariel sings sweet madrigals to lure characters from one place to another. Caliban attempts, unsuccessfully, to place a curse on Prospero. Miranda realizes that in speaking her name to Prince Ferdinand, she codifies a romance that, as far as she knows, her father took great pains to warn her against. Prospero’s wicked brother Antonio weaves a political intrigue as seductive as a whisper. The drunken butler Stephano calls a bottle of sherry “the book,” highlighting the intoxicating effect of the word. And finally Gonzalo, so moved by the landscape he now sees before him, can do nothing less than articulate a utopian vision for European society, where “all things in common nature should produce without sweat or endeavor.” We may permit ourselves the luxury of stating the obvious just this once: the power of language lies not just in the eyes or the ears that perceive it, but the hearts and minds it affects in real time.
How must it have felt to be a groundling, a member of England’s emerging proletarian class, and to hear Gonzalo speak of a leisurely, egalitarian way of living, which lay necessarily beyond the imagination of European capitalism? Could Montaigne have had any notion of this groundling of ours when, in the seclusion of his family estate, he set down that first que sais-je? – “what do I know?” Or John Florio, Montaigne’s first English translator (and Shakespeare’s contemporary)?
To the latter two, at least, we might prudently say not. And yet the centuries that followed have proven that The Tempest is a truly global work, worthy at once of the poetic ecstasy of Rilke and the rigorous, critical eye of Cesaire. It is worthy too of the vitality of the Spanish language, rendered here at Trinity Rep so deftly by Orlando Hernández, Tatyana-Marie Carlo, and Leandro “Kufa” Castro.
For when the word is really alive, it can’t help but make itself heard. Old ideas can’t help but be wrestled with, because to speak them out loud, even casually, is to give ourselves a certain responsibility, as if we were practitioners of our own magic: as artists and lovers of art, we move toward a language that is adequate for containing all that we think and all that we feel and all that we know, a language that notices and collects everything, and that encompasses “the great globe itself.”
