The Tempest (3 page)

The play moves toward forgiveness, but also renunciation. The book of art is drowned. The masque and its players dissolve into vacancy:

What endures is the power of the poetry. This passage, especially its last sentence, has become one of the great Shakespearean quotations: it is the kind of passage that a Renaissance reader, scanning a book for “sentences” of deep wisdom about life, would have underlined or marked in the margin.

Stylistically, the speech is typical of the fluid verse of late Shakespeare. Crudely speaking, early Shakespearean verse is characterized by a preponderance of end-stopped verse lines, frequent use of rhyme and a wide array of highly visible rhetorical figures—repetitions, variations, balanced pairs—that impart shape and symmetry to the poetry, assisting the actor in remembering his part and the spectator in perceiving the play’s language as memorable. Late Shakespearean verse, by contrast, is more flexible. There is a preponderance of run-on or enjambed lines, thoughts that spill over the line-ending and set up a tension between the movement of the meter and that of the grammar. The meter itself is also more varied: although the five beats of the iambic pentameter remain the underlying pulse or heartbeat, the rhythm measured to match the breath and pitch of English speech, irregularities are frequent. Subject and verb may be split across the line-ending. Half lines, incomplete lines, feminine endings (an extra offbeat syllable), bold variations in the position of the caesura or midline pause, elaborations of simile and metaphor that snake across a whole speech: such arts serve to create the illusion of a character thinking in the moment and turning the thought to words, as opposed to an actor reciting a rhetorically finished prepared speech.

Thus: “These our actors” (sentence beginning in the middle of a verse line), pause, “As I foretold you” (parenthetic reference back to earlier dialogue), pause, “were all spirits and” (verse line ends with a forward-thrusting “and” instead of the customary pausal punctuation mark) “Are melted into air,” pause for elaboration, “into thin air,” take breath before launching into elaborated simile, then the towers, the palaces, the temples, the globe (each with its adjective and for the globe a special gesture or intonation in recognition that the theater-home of “these our actors” was “the great globe itself”), pause again, to gather and strengthen the strands of the thought with “Yea,” then through an asymmetrical parallelism of short and long, little function words and large-meaning verbs (“all which it” played off against “shall” and “inherit” against “dissolve”), then a repetition of the structure established four lines before (“And, like”), but with an upping of the ante (“baseless fabric” inflated to “insubstantial pageant”), and finally fade after “faded” to the completion of the sentence in the half line “Leave not a rack behind,” the key word being “rack,” which primarily means a wisp of cloud, thus clinching the sustained comparison of actors, theater, and life itself to
weather
—English weather, evanescent, always changeable—but also, by means of the play on “wreck” (which in Shakespearean English was pronounced and sometimes spelled “wrack”), evoking the particular form of extreme weather, namely tempest, that Prospero has conjured up at the beginning of the play. The subtlety of the verse movement matches the complexity of the thought. Through the vocal art of a skilled actor, the “beating mind” and the beats of the verse are as one.

Prospero’s renunciations suggest that the play itself is profoundly skeptical of the power of the book and even of the theater. The closing sections of the dialogue focus on traditional religious themes such as the search for grace and the preparation of the soul for death. Prospero’s Christian language reaches its most sustained pitch in the epilogue, but his final request is for the indulgence not of God but of the audience. At the last moment, humanist learning is replaced not by Christian but by theatrical faith. Because of this it has been possible for the play to be read, as it so often has been since the Romantic period, as a credo, an
apologia pro vita sua
(a justification of his own life), on the part of Shakespeare the dramatist. The drama’s own afterlife folds back its interior movement from secular to sacred:
The Tempest
has become a work of secular scripture. When art took over some of the functions of religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Matthew Arnold predicted it would, Shakespeare became a kind of God, and the role
The Tempest
performed became analogous to that which classical texts such as Virgil’s
Aeneid
performed for humanism. Humanism became the humanities and Shakespeare became the classic text at the center of the literary curriculum, where he still remains. This edition feeds that process, but with its particular emphasis on the play in performance—explored in the essays on Shakespeare’s career in the theater and on the play’s stage history, and above all through the inclusion of the voices of distinguished directors—it also seeks to return
The Tempest
to the theater.

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else.
The Tempest
, however, exists only in a Folio text that is extremely well printed. Save for a handful of possible misprints, the Folio is highly trustworthy and unusually easy to edit.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts
are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, of which
The Tempest
is one. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “PROSPERO, the right Duke of Milan”).

Locations
are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which
The Tempest
, set on “an uninhabited Island,” is one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“another part of the island”). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. We have emphasized broad geographical settings rather than specifics of the kind that suggest anachronistically realistic staging.

Act and Scene Divisions
were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a
running scene
count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention
running scene continues
. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.

Speakers’ Names
are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio.

Verse
is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction (“turnd” rather than “turned”) to indicate whether or not the final “-ed” of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus “turnèd” would be two syllables) but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, and nor did actors’ cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker’s sentence.

Spelling
is modernized, but older forms are very occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.

Punctuation
in Shakespeare’s time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. “Colon” was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semicolons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare’s time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly only used them where they occur in our copy texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a full stop (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.

Entrances and Exits
are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. “[
and Attendants
]”).
Exit
is sometimes silently normalized to
Exeunt
and
Manet
anglicized to “remains.” We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.

Editorial Stage Directions
such as stage business, asides, indications of addressee and of characters’ position on the gallery stage are only used sparingly in Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as
directorial
interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing them in the right margin in a smaller typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an
Aside?
(often a line may be equally effective as an aside or a direct address—it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a
may exit
or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.