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"The Isles Shall Wait for His Law": Isaiah and "The Tempest"Author(s): Anthony M. EsolenReviewed work(s):Source: Studies in Philology, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Spring, 1997), pp. 221-247Published by: University of North Carolina PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4174576 .

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"The isles shall wait for His law":

Isaiah and The Tempest

by Anthony M. Esolen

I N 1972 Ann P. Slater wrote that "one of the sources for The Tem- pest is, very probably, Isaiah xxix." According to Slater, the chapter had a "yeast-like influence" upon the semiconscious mind of Shake-

speare, who heard it during the morning service of 8 December 16io, shortly after he had read the tracts on the recent voyage to Bermuda. The result was a play steeped in the motifs of that chapter, including "the swift and noisy catastrophe of the storm," voices out of the ground, the illusion of food, drunkenness, wonder, sorcery, and the name "Ariel." Nor are the echoes limited to details of plot: "Several verses from Isaiah strike at the heart of the play, presenting in concise form the motto for the play's action and its import." Such, she notes, are the passages on sleep, on useless subterfuge, on the dependence of creatures upon their creator, and on the final gift of understanding.'

Yet in his recent edition David Bevington asserts what is still con- ventional wisdom, that no source for The Tempest has been found. Crit- ics see the play as a decoction of Shakespeare's wide reading, with dashes of Ovid, Virgil, Mandeville, Montaigne, King James's Daemo- nologie, and accounts of voyages to the New World.2 The trouble with these sources is that none touches upon more than a few elements of the play. Montaigne gives us Gonzalo's vision of the peaceable king-

I Ann Pasternak Slater, "Variations within a Source: From Isaiah XXIX to The Tem- pest," ShS 25 (1972): 125-35. My text is The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).

2 David Bevington, 7he Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1526-27. Recent source studies include Robert Wiltenburg, "The Aeneid in The Tempest," ShS 39 (1986): 159-68; Jacqueline E. M. Latham, "The Tempest and King James' Daemonologie," ShS 28 (1975): 117-23; Karen Flagstad argues for Ovidian influence in "'Making this Place Paradise': Prospero and the Problem of Caliban in The Tempest," ShStud 18 (1986): 205-33.

221

? 1997 The University of North Carolina Press



222 Anthony M. Esolen

dom, but does not discuss forgiveness. The sea-tracts suggest the tempest and the encounter with natives, but not Shakespeare's emphasis on self-sacrificing love. Virgil gives us widowhood and the harpy, but not Ariel's name, his assertion in the harpy-speech that the powers delay but do not forget, and his call for repentance. From Ovid we can derive the Medean magician, and, if we stretch, drunkenness, but not providence divine. Yet except for the harpy, all of the motifs I have mentioned and others besides can be found at hand in Isaiah, linked to each other by frequent and thematically crucial repetition. (In the interest of space I shall not repeat the entire Ariel prophecy, almost all of which reveals verbal and thematic parallels in the play; these are so numerous and provocative that a politically incautious critic might conclude that The Tempest is an Isaian play of redemption dressed in the incidentals of a contemporary shipwreck.)

If this source has been ignored, the problem may be Slater's mod- esty. "It seems unlikely," she says, "that such a close relationship between text and play should be consciously intended or undertaken by Shakespeare."3 Why unlikely, she does not tell. Insisting that the influence of Isaiah 29 was unconscious, Slater robs it of significance. It is demoted from an allusion to a neurological curiosity. The Isaian images are burrs caught in the coat of Shakespeare's imagination as he walked home from the obligatory services.

Such demotion is unnecessary. The 1559 Book of Common Prayer shows that from 28 November to the end of December, or in other words during Advent, Christmas, and the few days following, the entire book of Isaiah was read, generally one chapter in the morning service and the next in the evening.4 The Acts of the Apostles was also read, including its accounts of the sea-journeys and shipwreck of the evangelist Paul. Yet Slater's assumption prevents her from asking whether Shakespeare echoes the rest of Isaiah, or whether he lends dra-

3"Variations," 128. 4 Prayerbook citations are from the 1559 edition. This was revised slightly during

Elizabeth's reign, but the schedule of readings remained virtually the same even into the twentieth century. Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge and Use of the Book of Common Prayer (New York: Macmillan, 1935), shows that Shakespeare's biblical allusions derive about equally from the Bishops' Bible and the Geneva Bible, and also occasionally from the translations found in the Book of Common Prayer. I have focused upon Geneva for two reasons: it was more commonly available for private use, and its renderings seem closer to the language of the play. It should be noted that the "Ariel" appears in Geneva as "altar," with a prominent gloss providing the name and its significance, while Bishops' leaves the name in the text as is, "O Ariel, Ariel."



Isaiah and The Tempest 223

matic form to Advent themes. The question should pique those inter- ested in The Tempest and colonialism. For the prophecies of Isaiah are universal: the "isles" are to hear the word of God; all peoples are to be made one. As an informal estimate of the importance of this motif in the Advent readings, one may note that, in the Authorized Version, 26 of the 49 uses of the words "isle(s)" and "island(s)" occur in only two books, Isaiah (19) and Acts (7). (In addition, 8 of 18 uses of "tempest" occur in Advent readings: Isaiah [5], Acts [21, and 2 Peter [1i). A closer look is more suggestive still: "Howl, ye inhabitants of the isle" (Is. 23:6); "The wild beasts of the desert shall meet with the wild beasts of the island" (34:14); "Behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing" (40:15); "The isles saw it, and feared; the ends of the earth were afraid" (41:5); "[The Messiah] shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth: and the isles shall wait for his law" (42:4). As Launcelot Andrewes said in his i6io Christmas sermon before the king at Whitehall, "It is but a small thing (saith He by Esay) to raise the tribes of Jacob, or to restore the decays of Israel; I will give thee a light to the Gentiles, and a salvation to the end of the world."5

The ends of the earth were of course being explored, and they were full of Gentiles too. If Richard Hakluyt is typical, Europeans went down to the sea in ships with all the firmer assurance because they were win- ning souls for God, even as they sent back less spiritual commodities and emptied their jails to establish new outposts. Isaiah is the great prophet of the Messiah, and Advent is the season that stirs hopes for his reign. Donne might well ask, "What if this present were the world's last night?" -the question was on men's minds. The Geneva glossators show in precise antipapist detail how most of the events in the Apoca- lypse have already occurred. Astronomical wonders corroborated the belief that things would soon fall away. In 1611, the year of The Tem- pest's production, one Edward Wightman was tried for preaching that he was Elias, the harbinger of the endtimes, and the Paraclete, too, who would lead all men to the truth. The first decade of the century was graced with the ravings of Henry Nicholas, leader of the Family of Love and self-styled son of God, who preached that with his arrival the Day of Judgment had come. In a truly brave New World, Winthrop com- pared his separatist settlement to the city on a hill which Jesus adjures

5 The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, vol. 1, xvii Sermons on the Nativity (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1870), 71.




his evangelizers to be (Mt. 5:14). Surely the kingdom of righteousness was at hand.6

And so Isaiah can link recent views of The Tempest as colonialist discourse with the older tradition of redemptive thaumaturgy, and thus provide common ground for critics who no longer seem to speak the same language.7 What Shakespeare felt about America cannot be fath- omed from the play. He does, however, use Isaiah to endorse and qualify the conservative view of Hooker, whose idea of natural and political order requires superiors and inferiors; or that of Andrewes, who argues that the commandment "Honor thy father" must be applied also to masters and legitimate rulers. We sinners need the restraints of government to preserve our liberty.8 Yet rulers are sinners, too, often the worst; all are dust before God. Sin necessitates law and mercy. The Advent Shakespeare adumbrates in The Tempest must be prepared for by the pain of humiliation and conversion. It does not wait in Virginia.

My aim, then, is to read The Tempest in light of Isaiah (and especially Isaiah 29), keeping in mind the prophet's eschatological vision. More-

6 For Nicholas and Wightman, see Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters, 1550-1641 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1912), 1:212-13, 218-19. Hakluyt links the Ad- vent of the kingdom with the advent of Englishmen on far shores: "Certes if hetherto in our own discoveries we had not been led with a preposterous desire of seeking rather gain than God's glory, I assure myself that our labors had taken far better effect. But we forgot that godliness is great riches and that if we first seek the kingdom of God all other things will be given unto us, and that as the light accompanieth the sun and the heat the fire, so lasting riches do wait upon them that are zealous for the advancement of the kingdom of Christ and the enlargement of his glorious Gospel." From the dedicatory epistle to Philip Sidney, in Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America (1582); quo- tation taken from The Renaissance in England, ed. Herschel Baker and Hyder E. Rollins (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1954), 888.

7 Examples of New World criticism are myriad. See Richard Marienstras, "Elizabe- than Travel Literature and Shakespeare's The Tempest," in New Perspectives on the Shake- spearean World, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 16o- 85; Charles Frey, "The Tempest and the New World," SQ 30 (1979): 29-41; Trevor R. Griffiths, "'This Island's mine': Caliban and Colonialism," Yearbook of Elizabethan Studies 13 (1983): 159-80; Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, "'Nymphs and Reapers heavily vanish': The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest," in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Dra- kakis (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 191-205; Paul E. Brown, "'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism," in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 48-71; Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit, 1986), chap. 3. For a strong caveat against this line of inquiry, see Meredith Anne Skura, "Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest," SQ 40 (1989): 42-69.

8 Pattern of Catechetical Doctrine (1641), vol. 6 of Works, 175 ff.




over, since The Tempest, observing the temporal unities, is about making the most of what little time one has left, I shall also glance at other Ad- vent readings in the prayerbook (notably Acts and the epistles of Peter) and at apocalyptic passages in the New Testament which are inspired by Isaiah.

If the awaited "day of the Lord wil come as a thief in the night, in the which the heavens shall passe away with a noyce" (2 Peter 3 :10), it behooves men to stay awake, ready for action. To borrow the Master's words aboard the tempest-tossed ship, we must "fall to't yarely" (I.i.4), not just briskly, but betimes, prepared, on the spot. That readiness is one of Prospero's main concerns:

Pros. Ariel, thy charge Exactly is performed; but there's more work. What is the time o' th' day?

Ariel. Past the mid season. Pros. At least two glasses. The time 'twixt six and now

Must by us both be spent most preciously. (I.ii.237-41)

Prospero and Ariel are a Master and Boatswain working to use the time, to make the topsail yare. The interruption of the sailors by the nobles at the start of the play disrupts what Neil Wright calls the "nau- tical hierarchy,"9 and thus wastes that most precious commodity, time. It invites this rebuke from the Boatswain: "make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap. Cheerly, good hearts! Out of our way, I say" (I.i.25-27). The presumptuous courtiers are, he says, louder than the storm or the sailors' "office" (37), a word which suggests both the sailors' labor and devotions set aside for cer- tain hours of the day. The sailors' office is now to work, the courtiers' to pray. Vigilance is of the essence. Says Jesus, "Wake therefore: for ye knowe not what houre your master wil come" (Mt. 24:44).

Jesus' warnings on the hour and the day were not new. "It shalbe in a moment, euen suddenly," says Isaiah of God's fury against the smug rulers of Israel:

9Neil H. Wright, "Reality and Illusion as a Philosophical Pattern in The Tempest," ShStud 10 (1977): 248.




Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hostes with thundre, and shaking, and a great noyce, a whirlwinde, and a tempest, and a flame of a devouring fyre. And the multitude of all the nacions that fight against the altar [Hebrew "Ariel," as is glossed] shalbe as a dream or vision by night. (29:6-7)

As Calvin notes, this "dream" is a threat:

[Isaiah] rebukes [the Jews] for their obstinacy, in boldly despising God and all his threatenings. In short, by a most appropriate metaphor, he reproves them for their false confidence and presumption, when he threatens that the enemies shall arrive suddenly and unexpectedly, while the Jews are imagining that they are enjoying profound peace, and are very far from all danger; and that the event shall be so sudden and unexpected, that it will appear to be "a dream." 10

Those not watching are dangerously unready; there is no alternative. As in Isaiah, in The Tempest vengeance is exacted with the instantaneity of flight: the harpy descends, the dogs are unleashed, or, to the shock of the audience, the play opens with a roar of thunder.

God's catastrophic judgment, though sudden, is not immediate. He allows the wicked time to repent: "The Lord is not slacke concerning his Promes (as some men count slackenes) but is pacient towarde vs, and wolde have no man to perish, but wolde all men to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). Patience is recommended for the godly, "hasting vnto the comming of the day of God" (3:12); repentance, for godly and ungodly alike. Unfortunately, many use the time but to confirm themselves in arrogance: Sebastian, enjoined by the Boatswain to pray, cries, "I am out of patience" (I.i.54). In Isaiah, evildoers bask in the surety of their escape, when all the while, to quote Ariel, "the powers, delay- ing (not forgetting)" (III.iii.73) await their time. Affliction strikes like a thunderbolt only because men's minds are dulled with pride. So says Isaiah about Babylon, in a passage which seems to have inspired The Tempest's motif of broken families:

Therefore now heare, thou that art giuen to pleasures, & dwellest careles, She saith in her heart, I am, and none els. I shal not sit as a widow, nether shal knowe the losse of children. But these two things shal come to thee suddenly on one day, the losse of children and widdowehead ... for the multitude of thy diuinations ... For thou hast trusted in thy wickednes: thou hast said, None

10 I have used Calvin's commentaries not because Shakespeare read them (though he may have; see n. i8 below), but because they were the most complete, readable, and readily available biblical commentaries of the age, providing, except when discussing predestination, a wealth of calmly reasoned explication for preachers needing to work up a sermon. My text is Calvin's Commentaries, trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1948).




seeth me. Thy wisdome & thy knowledge, thei haue caused thee to rebell . . . Therefore shal euil come vpon thee, and thou shalt not know the morning thereof. (47:8-11)

Men try to escape the spying of God: "None seeth us," they crow. But God watches as they attribute their own insensibility to him. The irony is of the classic eavesdropping sort. Sebastian and Antonio spirit Pros- pero away "i' the dead of darkness" (I.ii.130), trusting that they require only the ignorance of the Milanese; the same two plot murder while Ariel stands guard, invisible (II.i). Caliban hopes to lead his new master Stephano to the sleeping Prospero, where the butler may "knock a nail into his head" (III.ii.64; cf. Jg. 5:26); but Ariel, again invisible, overhears, accuses Caliban of lying, and thus precipitates a comedy of auditory errors. "Out o' your wits, and hearing too?" cries Trinculo, who speaks truer than he knows (81-82).

Essential to this arrogance is man's substituting himself for God. In the Isaian verses above, Babylon dares to utter the sacred Hebrew name for God, I am-most especially, I am above the vicissitudes of mere human life. Although Antonio practices a godlike sorcery on Prospero's subjects, changing or new-creating them (I.ii.82-83), it is his brother Prospero who most enjoys playing the creator. D'Orsay Pear- son argues that the prime sin in The Tempest is Prospero's usurpation of godlike powers. The island, he says, is an emblem of the solipsism of the Duke of Milan, shutting himself in his library, unseen by any, care- less of his ducal office, presumptuously devoted to the "betterment" of his mind."' Although I cannot agree that until the very end The Tempest is a play of vengeance, still Prospero is all too human, too prone to the sin of pride. Like Alonso (who now "knows the loss of children"), the old widower must suffer to remember his humanity. Although he can truly say of the other characters, "none seeth me," he cannot say so of God, and by renouncing magic at the end of the play and determining to meditate on his own hastening end (V.i.312), Prospero must divest himself of any essential superiority to those whom he has, providen- tially or no, manipulated.

Isaiah uses four motifs for moral insensibility: sleep, deafness, blindness (including inability to read), and drunkenness. The sleepy, deaf, blind, and drunk either waste time deliberately, or think to use time for evil. "For the Lord hathe couered you with a spirit of slomber," Isaiah says of the Jews, "and hathe shut vp your eyes: the Prophetes

11 D'Orsay W. Pearson, "The Ternpest in Perspective," ShStud 7 (1974): 256.




and your chief Seers hathe he couered" (29: lo). Calvin's comment is apt: "When, therefore, they neither see nor understand anything in the works of God, he shows that this is owing to their own indolence and stupidity." The result is that the blind lead the blind. Ironically, the cunning "watchmen" of Isaiah (55:10), those who "haste to iniquitie" (29:20) and hatch evil deeds in secret, are truly indolent, asleep to the eye of God. Just such irony is highlighted when Antonio and Sebastian plot the murder of the king and Gonzalo, who with their attendants have dropped to sleep "as by a thunderstroke" (II.i.208). The plotters are deaf to the music Ariel plays to lull the others, and are more asleep than those they guard. "I find not Myself disposed to sleep" (205-6), says Sebastian, and Antonio agrees. "Nor I," he boasts, "my spirits are nimble" (206), yare, ready for the main chance. But when Antonio describes his Calibanistic vision-what Marjorie Garber calls "the malig- nant imagination of the conscious mind" 12-of a crown dropping on Sebastian's head, Sebastian doubts whether Antonio is in his proper senses. He cannot believe his ears:

Seb. What? Art thou waking? Ant. Do you not hear me speak? Seb. I do; and surely

It is a sleepy language, and thou speak'st Out of thy sleep. What is it thou didst say? This is a strange repose, to be asleep With eyes wide open; standing, speaking, moving, And yet so fast asleep.

(213-19)

By "sleepy language" the torpid Sebastian means that he fails to see how Antonio's ends can be achieved. Sebastian is "standing water" (225), given to "hereditary sloth" (227), neither hastily opportunistic as is Antonio, nor patiently industrious as is Ariel and as the Geneva Bible's annotators enjoined the faithful awaiting the endtime to be. But Sebastian is deaf to the irony as it applies to himself: it is a strange repose, to be asleep with eyes wide open. The paradox suggests a nadir of blindness and dullness: never so blind as with eyes open, never so drowned in sleep as when wide awake.

But according to Antonio, drowsiness applies only to Sebastian's insufficient cruelty: "Thou . . . winkst" (220). In a parody of man's

12 Marjorie Garber, Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), -199.




inability to fathom the ways of Providence, he counsels him to see beyond hopelessness:

No hope that way is Another way so high a hope that even Ambition cannot pierce a wink beyond, But doubt discovery there.

(244-47)

Ambition is a timid thief who thinks his golden opportunity too good to be true. While Antonio dispatches the king, Sebastian need only put old Gonzalo "to the perpetual wink for aye" (289). Then, since Alonso's daughter Claribel is in far-off Tunis, and is married to a Moor, the good people of Naples will cry, "Let Sebastian wake!" (264). But the under- standings of the two noblemen are as foul and muddy now as when they wake from the trance in Prospero's cell. They cannot hear Ariel's song of warning to Gonzalo, "Awake, awake!" (309). Planning to "be sudden" (310), they are thwarted by a prevenient God. "We heard a hollow burst of bellowing / Like bulls, or rather lions" (315-16), stam- mers Sebastian, and "A whole herd of lions" (320) Antonio adds with a touch of cowardice. Their embarrassed excuse is fitting, for in Hebrew "Ariel" is also glossed as "Lion of God." Indeed, it is a roaring to wake the dead. Or, in malo, Antonio's lions recall the words of Peter, who recommends vigilance as the end draws near: "Be sober and watch: for your aduersarie the deuil as a roaring Lyon walketh about, seking whome he may deuoure" (i Peter 5:8).

Ariel's "Awake, awake" is the cry of Isaiah to rouse the sleepy Jeru- salem (51:17). Isaiah is frustrated by the Jews' failure to see or hear the obvious. They are ignorant readers of their own history. "Knowe ye nothing? haue ye not heard it?" he mocks their obtuseness, "hathe it not bene tolde you from the beginning" (40:21)? "Knowest thou not? or hast thou not heard, that the euerlasting God, the Lorde hathe cre- ated the ends of the earth? he neither fainteth, nor is weary: there is no searching of his vnderstanding" (40:28). The people, he never tires of saying, are deaf, for God's works should be evident to all, stupendous. "Who hath believed our report?" marvels the prophet (53: 1), much as Gonzalo imagines the incredulity they will meet at home when they tell of the strange island and their miraculous recovery (cf. II.i.61, III.iii.27- 29).

Isaiah's insistence on wakefulness is felt throughout The Tempest, and explains some of Prospero's irritability at the start of the play. Prospero




must coax Miranda (who still casts a troubled glance seaward) as he describes the marvelous events culminating in the tempest: "Dost thou attend me? (I.ii.78); "Thou attendst not?" (87); "I pray thee mark me" (88); and, finally, "Dost thou hear?" (io6), to which Miranda replies, with earnestness or pique or good humor, "Your tale, sir, would cure deafness" (io6). That it would: after the hurly-burly of the storm, Shake- speare calls the audience to attend, that they too may remember things told them from the beginning. We are as much the pupils as Miranda.

So it is that strange counterpoints of noise and silence occur in The Tempest, along with a startling inability of characters to understand what they hear and see. Slater points out that those who undergo en- lightenment in this play do so after the imposition of a trance."3 Says Isaiah, "In rest and quietnes shal ye be saved: in quietnes and in confidence shalbe your strength" (30:15)-but he adds, "ye wolde not." The hustle of self-importance, even Prospero's, does not conduce to quiet reflection. Alonso, who wants only to mourn his son in silence, is granted the instructive masque of the banquet: "What harmony is this? My good friends, hark!" he cries (III.iii.18). But with a crack of thunder and lightning Ariel appears, harpy-like, to admonish the evildoers; he disappears, again in thunder, and his kindred spirits remove the table, accompanied by soft music. Oddly, Alonso has heard none of Ariel's words. Instead he hears his chastisement -so wide have his ears been opened-from all of nature, the billows and the winds and the thunder. The "bass" of his trespass is whispered to the ear of his soul, and mad with guilt he threatens to drown himself (95-102). The response of Antonio and Sebastian, meanwhile, is so noisily impudent that we wonder whether they have heard anything at all, or whether despite their hearing they still clutch their petty desires to conquer. They rush off stage, swords drawn, defying hell (102-3). Recall that when the tempest is about to wreck their ship and all seems lost, they cannot pray, they are momentarily struck dumb. "What," jeers the Boatswain at the two who had in more than one way "assisted" the storm, "must our mouths be cold?" (I.i.52).

The Tempest is on many levels a play about being deaf and blind. Pros- pero does not attend to the character of his brother, and would rather bury himself in books than take care of his dukedom. Antonio, ignorant of the knowledge to which Prospero devotes himself, is last to see the hand of nature in his shipwreck and rescue. Ariel's ministers, those

13 "Variations," 132.




urchin avengers, work unseen, so that poor Caliban must cower under his gaberdine and mistake the equally craven tremblings of Trinculo for Prospero's prompting of a spirit. When plotting his master's murder, Caliban urges the butler to "tread softly, that the blind mole may not / Hear a foot fall" (IV.i.194-95). The monster knows that Prospero can be killed only when asleep, for otherwise he would read a spell from his books (III.ii.go-98). As for those books, illiterate Caliban is obsessed with them, mentioning them three times to the inattentive Stephano. To him they are magic utensils. Wisdom they do not confer; power is all. "Without them," he says, "he's but a sot, as I am" (95-96). Yet in Isaiah the shut book is a divine punishment:

And the vision of them all is become vnto you, as the wordes of a boke that is sealed vp, which they deliuer to one that can read, saying, Read this, I pray thee. Then shal he say I can not: for it is sealed. And the boke is giuen vnto him that can not read, saying, Read this, I pray thee. And he shal say, I can not read. (29:11-12)

Calvin links this stultification of the Jews with the prophet's mockery of their willful ignorance: "The Lord will be to them as 'precept upon precept, line upon line'; [28:131 for they will always remain in the first rudiments, and will never arrive at solid doctrine." Caliban, who like a child must be scolded and taught his lessons under the stern tutelage of a stepfather and schoolmaster (cf. I.ii.172), sees clearly only when, at the end of the play, Prospero dons his ducal robes, the physical sign of nobility. Again, however, the allusion cuts both ways, for as Calvin notes, Isaiah aims his criticism at rulers, not servants. Those whose voices come out of the dust (29:4), as the voices of ventriloquist sooth- sayers, are the boasters, men who assume power not rightfully theirs. The connection between this verse and Prospero's use of his familiar, Ariel, is intriguing: the old bibliophile needs instruction in humility.

Drunkenness, a natural enough metaphor for insensibility, is often used by Isaiah to describe the blindly arrogant:

Woe to the crowne of pride, the dronkards of Ephraim: for his whose glorious beautie shalbe a fading floure, which is vpon the head of the valley of them that be fat & ouercome with wine! Beholde, the Lord hathe a mightie and a strong hoste, like a tempest of haile, & a whirlwind that ouerthroweth, like a tempest of mighty waters that overflowe, which throwe to the grounde mightely. (28: 1-3)

The Ephraimites are drunk with pride and glory. They believe that no misfortune can befall them, but the Lord's tempest shows them other-




wise. Immediately preceding the Ariel chapter, this prophecy against the Ephraimites must have suggested to Shakespeare the link between arrogance and drunkenness which his own Tempest reveals. At the height of the storm Antonio curses, "We are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards" (I.i.55), but it is he who, "dry for sway" (I.ii.112), has reached beyond himself for a "crown of pride," the rule of Milan. He and Sebastian scoff when Adrian notes the isle's "temperance" (II.i.45-47), and Sebastian later retorts that the only thing for good king Gonzalo to do in his island realm would be to "'Scape being drunk for want of wine" (151). Again, their cool, petty evil, the presumptu- ousness Isaiah deplored, is given comic play by the rabble. Stephano (from Greek stephanos, crown, and indeed he assumes an absurdly im- perious air) creates Caliban anew by plying him with liquor. "Here is that which will give language to you" (II.ii.84), he jeers, emptying the bottle of sack into Caliban's mouth. Later he calls Caliban to "kiss the book" (142). Like strong drink, Caliban's treachery transforms him into something neither rich nor strange-a sycophant (150). Trinculo sees through the self-abasement: "By this light, a most perfidious and drunken monster! When's god's asleep he'll rob his bottle" (151-53).

That word "perfidious" is noteworthy. His faith twisted, Caliban be- trays Prospero and, says Trinculo, would for a bottle probably betray Stephano too. This perfidy is a denial of any value beyond the self. Like a child, Caliban reduces God to a source of quick gratification. "Thought is free," sing the roysterers (III.ii.124-26), but freedom is more than privacy and escape from detection: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (Gal. 2:4).

Yet, Isaiah laughs, how great will be the stupefaction of sinners when they confront God's vengeance and mercy: "Stay your selues, and wonder: they are blinde, & make you blinde: they are dronken, but not with wine: they stagger, but not by strong drinke" (29:9). Amazement and astonishment recur in The Tempest, climaxing when Prospero reveals the wonder of the found children (V.i.70) and Miranda utters the lovely and naive words, "0, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here!" (181-82)-naive only because men mar and deform themselves with sin. Even Sebastian, who, judging by himself, accuses Prospero of allegiance with Satan (V.i.i45; cf. Mt. 12:24), soon exclaims, "A most high miracle!" (177). Caliban sees the finery and fears that he shall be "pinched to death" (276). All should heed Isaiah's song of forgiveness:




For my thoghts are not your thoghts, nether are your waies my waies, saith the Lord. For as the heauens are hier than the earth, so are my ways hier than your ways, and my thoghts aboue your thoughts. (55:8-9)

II

Power is a fading dream, more show than substance. It must re- side somewhere, cannot be eliminated; but in The Tempest Shakespeare shows that the tantalizing desire for power must disappoint. Consider, in this regard, the verses which inspired the play's vanishing banquet:

And it shalbe like as an hungrie man dreameth, and beholde, he eateth: and when he awaketh, his soule is emptie: or like as a thirstie man dreameth, and lo, he is drinking, and when he awaketh, beholde, he is fainte, and his soule longeth: so shal the multitude of all nacions be that fight against mount Zion. (Is. 29:8)

Calvin's comment, that while the dreamers "quieted their consciences, they imagined that they had abundance of all things, and that they were free from every inconvenience," applies to the "three men of sin," Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio, who dream that their evil can escape punishment but who are about to wake to the truth. As in the plotting between Sebastian and Antonio, sleep and waking are reversed. Physi- cally awake, they dream their surfeiting dreams; with a clap of thunder, the food vanishes and they are cast into a trance by the accusing Ariel; with another clap of thunder they awake again into moral somnolence, which now takes the form of despair, not self-satisfaction.

According to Karol Berger, that banquet is eucharistic. Since the sinners are unworthy of it, Ariel must enact what his name means, God's lion or the "altar which seemed to devour the sacrifice." 14 Pros- pero punningly applauds his performance: "A grace it had, devouring" (III.iii.84). Berger's point is supported by the Prayerbook's exhortation that one repent before Communion, "so that in no wise you come but in the marriage garment" (cf. Mt. 22:1-14). The courtiers have just left a grim wedding in Tunis; they will soon enjoy an unexpected nuptial feast in Naples; here they are invited to eat, but are prevented by Ariel who delivers the commination. There can be no communion, no friend- ship, no marriage (which is but a sign of the kingdom of God), without repentance.

14 Karol Berger, "Prospero's Art," ShStud 10 (1977): 226-27.




But repentance of what? Here it is more than the specific crimes that have preceded the play. The dream in Isaiah is delusory because of the presumption of the dreamer, whose vision of glory is shown to be empty. Just so, it is instructive to regard the banquet at which Alonso and his men try to eat as a symbol of their past, their dreams of suf- ficiency. Having spent themselves on what is not bread (Is. 55:2), they are weary now, famished. Their dreams have bred disappointment. "I am," says Alonso, "attached with weariness / To th' dulling of my spirits" (III.iii.5-6). He will eat, though with little desire, for "the best is past" (51). He abused the time before, and now despairs of the time to come. Alonso's soul is at least half waking; but when Francisco, in awe, notes the disappearance of the catering spirits, Sebastian replies, "No matter, since / They have left their viands behind; for we have stomachs" (40-41). This peptic confidence Ariel mocks by referring to Sebastian and the others as what even "the never-surfeited sea" must vomit out (55). Their silly shows of bravery, drawing swords against him, may as easily wound the air. They, not the elements, are as nothing.

But the most powerful statement on human illusions is made by Prospero in the next scene, after dismissing the nuptial revels he has orchestrated for Ferdinand and Miranda. We are, as he says, "such stuff / As dreams are made on" (IV.i.156-57). To be the stuff of dreams is, in a sense, to be even less substantial than they. We erect monuments to our glory, "the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces" (152),

but instead we ourselves are the linsey-woolsey from which the garb of a brief comedy is woven. Prospero's metaphors, suggests Peter Mil- ward, are indebted to the apocalyptic vision of 2 Peter 3:7-13: "The day of the Lord wil come as a thief in the night, in the which the heauens shal passe away with a noyse, and the elements shal melt with heate, and the earth with the workes, that are therein, shalbe burnt vp" (lo)."5 This transience should encourage us to be the more patient and holy as we haste unto "the comming of the day of God" (12). Seen in this context, Prospero's sudden passion is born of the problems of time and mortality: he has been master of the isle for many years, and Miranda's sole object of love, but with the storm that must all change, and he must bear the loss patiently. If Advent is a season of hope, it is also a season of endings, a time to awake from illusions. "Our little life / Is rounded with a sleep" (157-58)-not the sleep of death, but the sleep of the dreamer, the one who would take an "insubstantial pageant" (155) for

15 Peter Milward, Shakespeare's Religious Background (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 213.




life indeed. But, says Paul in the epistle for the first Sunday of Advent, "it is now time that we should arise from sleepe: for now is our salvation neerer, then when we beleeued it" (Rom. 13: 1i). The despair attrib- uted to Prospero's speech is but the dark side of hope: the admission that one cannot come to fulfillment without the loss of many dreams.

Those include sweet dreams of vengeance. Unjust in his estimate of Caliban's capacity to learn, smug in pursuing evildoers, Prospero is caught in a dream of power and nearly forgets the plot to kill him. His famous speech is humbling: he must admit his frailty, his dependence on heaven. He should also recall the shipwreck he has engineered. The mariners cry, "All lost!" (I.i.5-), but as Ariel says, in response to Prospero's question, "Are they safe?" -"Not a hair perished" (I.ii.217).

Richmond Noble notes that this reply echoes two passages in the New Testament; both are Advent readings, and both are relevant.'6 In one, Paul advises the sailors of his battered ship to end their long fast and take some meat as a "sauegarde," "for there shal not an heere fall from the head of anie of you" (Acts 27:34). In the other (from the gospel of the second Sunday of Advent), Jesus reveals to his disciples the trials they will undergo as the day of the Lord draws near: "And ye shal be hated of all men for my Names sake. Yet there shal not one heere of your heades perish. By your pacience possesse your soules" (Luke 21:17-19). In suffering there is hope; be patient, "be cheerful / And think of each thing well" (V.i.25o-51). Though "the sea and the waters shall roare, and mens hearts shall faile them for feare" (Luke 21:25-

26), God is at work, and asks for confidence and community of spirit: "The God of patience and consolation, giue you that yee be likeminded one towards another, according to Christ Jesus" (Rom. 15:5, from the epistle, second Sunday of Advent). Thus it is wrong for Prospero to as- sert that with time Caliban grows uglier and wickeder, and that all of his pains to teach him have been "lost, quite lost" (IV.i.1go). He has sold God short, forgetting why the great Day seems long in coming: the Lord "is pacient towarde vs, and wolde haue no man to perish, but wolde all men to come to repentance" (2 Pet. 3:9).

For another source of the motifs in Prospero's dream-speech, R. M. Frye cites Calvin's comment on Psalm 103 that the world is a passing dream, with all its "tapestries and costly hangings," empty shows of glory,17 but we need only look to the prophet:

16 Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge, 249. 17 Roland M. Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1963), 54-55.




All flesh is grasse, and all the grace thereof is as the floure of the field. The grass withereth, the floure fadeth, because the Spirit of the Lord bloweth vpon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the floure fadeth: but the word of our God shal stand for euer. (Is. 40:6-8)

"The nations are as a droppe of a bucket" (40:15); God "bringeth the princes to nothing, and maketh the iudges of the earth, as vanitie" (40:23). Yet God reduces glory to dust not just to punish, but to establish in the desert a new reign (40:3). In preparation for this reign, says Peter, we should be "as obedient children" (1 Pet. 1:14), patient and sober, loving our brothers, "for all flesh is as grasse, and all the glorie of man is as the flower of grasse. The grasse withereth, and the flower falleth away. But the worde of the Lord endureth for euer: and this is the worde which is preached among you" (1:24-25).

In Isaiah, as in The Tempest, glory is often symbolized by fine garments. Sometimes the garments are trumpery which must be stripped from Jerusalem and even made to stink (3:18-24); sometimes a frayed garment describes the futility of evil, for the wicked "shal waxe olde as a garment: the mothe shal eat them vp" (50:9); sometimes the very earth must die so that the kingdom of righteousness may come to be, "For the heauens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shal waxe olde like a garment, and thei that dwell therein, shal perish in like maner" (51:6). By contrast, the prophet lends God a bloodstained robe of power as he treads out the grapes of wrath, making men drunk in his fury on the day of vengeance (63: i-6); the Messiah has "put on righteousnes, as an habergeon, and an helmet of salvacion vpon his head, and he put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, & was clad with zeale as a cloke" (59:17).

If we are the "stuff" that dreams are made on, we should note with Isaiah what sort of textile that is: dreams of power, of independence from God. Or, as Peter puts it, sinners use "libertie for a cloke of ma- liciousnes" (i Pet. 2:16). When Antonio suggests the murder of the king, Sebastian, reminding Antonio that Alonso would yet have an heir, scoffs, "What stuff is this?" (II.i.258). But Antonio justifies his own murder of his brother and niece by referring to his tailor:

And look how well my garments sit upon me, Much feater than before. My brother's servants Were then my fellows; now they are my men.

(276-78)

For Antonio, an attack of conscience would only make him reach for his slippers (280-81)!




The vanity of his confidence is clear when we compare his theft of a dukedom with Stephano's theft of Prospero's "trumpery," "glistening apparel" which Prospero and Ariel hang on the line as bait. Led into the mire by Ariel, Trinculo and Stephano grumble at the soiling of their clothes. "Monster," says Trinculo, "I do smell all horse piss, at which my nose is in great indignation" (IV.i.199-200). The thoughtless con- spirators wish to change their clothes while keeping the soiled selves beneath. Their garments are "spotted with flesh" (Jude 23). The laundry reveals their foolishness. "0 King Stephano," blusters Trinculo, and the ambitious butler replies, "Put off that gown, Trinculo! By this hand, I'll have that gown!" (227-28). If Trinculo had a dram of bravery they might have come to civil war on the spot. Caliban rightly calls them fools, for they cannot afford to waste precious minutes doting on "luggage":

Let't alone, And do the murder first. If he awake, From toe to crown he'll fill our skins with pinches, Make us strange stuff.

(231-34)

All in the devil's good time. Caliban does not see that he and they are already "strange stuff"; they would don the robes of freedom, yet remain slaves. Thus Stephano replies with a crude joke identifying his penis with a jerkin (235-38)-not exactly propitious for peopling the isle. "Here's a garment for't," he says, rewarding Trinculo for a paltry piece of wit, and again 'there's another garment for't" (IV.i.241, 244). Poor Caliban, who would not bring wood quick enough for Prospero, is now heaped with trash to lug about. He and Trinculo-Italian for "bauble"-once cowered under the same gaberdine, each vainly terri- fied of the other. Now he must watch as Trinculo and Stephano divide mere clothes, capering in their glee.

And yet, as in Isaiah, there are times in The Tempest when clothing is a sign of legitimacy. Antonio's remarks about the fit of his garments recall Gonzalo's amazement that their "garments, being, as they were, drenched in the sea, hold, notwithstanding, their freshness and gloss, being rather new-dyed than stained with salt water" (II.i.64-67). Gonzalo's point is so important and odd that he repeats it three times (71, 99, io6), while Antonio and Sebastian sneer. The rejuvenation of their clothing -that the garments do not after all "wax old" - foreshad- ows a finer rejuvenation to come, when the wicked will wake from their false dreams and Prospero will doff his magic robes, reinvesting himself in his power as duke of Milan. In the meantime, children, servants,




loyal subjects should heed Peter's advice for the last days: "Ye yonger, submit your selues vnto the elders, & submit your selues euerie man, one to another: decke your selues inwardely in lowlines of minde, for God resisteth the proude and giueth grace to the humble" (1 Pet. 5:5). In the sufferings of Christ they will be exalted: "These are they, which came out of great tribulacion, & haue washed their long robes, and haue made their long robes white in the blood of the Lambe" (Rev. 7:14). Humble yourselves while there is yet time, for the glorious day of the Lord approaches; so advises the collect for the first Sunday of Advent: "Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life (in the which thy son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility); that in the last day, when he shall come again in glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal."

III

One of the ironies of pride is that kings need to eat and drink. Unac- commodated man is a body equipped with the rudiments of a soul; and bodies need food. As we have seen, those who trust that the Lord will sleep while they sin are for Isaiah like those who dream of eating and drinking, but who wake to find themselves empty. They are punished by a self-cannibalism: "[I] wil fede them that spoile thee, with their owne flesh, and they shalbe drunken with their owne blood, as with swete wine" (49:26). But all who trust in the Lord will be fed. They can "come to the waters," "buy wine and milke without siluer" (cf. II.ii.30), eat what is good, and let their souls delight in fatness (55:1-2).

In Isaiah we move from self-satisfaction to divine vengeance to forgiveness: first comes futile consumption, then desolation of the land, and finally restoration of plenty. Hunger and thirst characterize evil and attend it as a punishment. Isaiah describes how God will turn Zion into a wilderness, a barren mother, a ruined city: "And it shal bring forthe thornes in the palaces thereof, nettles and thistles in the strong holdes" (34:13). The threat of lean fare is everywhere, both in the prophet and in the play; see for example Prospero's threat that Ferdi- nand will have to make do with sea water and withered roots (I.ii.465- 67). Yet Isaiah remains true to his Messianic hope. God's mercy will make Jerusalem much feater than before: "The desert and the wilderness shal rejoyce: and the waste grounde shall be glad and florish as the rose" (35: 1).




It would be hard to stage a similar rejuvenation of Prospero's island, let alone of Milan or Naples. Instead Shakespeare shows us as it were two islands: one desolate, one fertile. Wright suggests that the barren- ness and the fertility of the isle reflect the duality of human nature.18 And more, I think: they reflect the history of God's response to that sinning and repenting nature, a history repeated many times in Isaiah. Even so, what looks like punishment now may be but the prologue to joy. Adrian addresses the problem: "Though this island seem to be desert," he begins, interrupted by the puerile murmurs of Antonio and Sebastian, "it must needs be of a subtle, tender, and delicate temperance" (II.i.37-45). His choice of adjectives is ironic, as Isaiah uses them to prophesy Babylon's irrevocable destruction: "Come downe and sit in the dust: o virgine, daughter of Babel, sit on the grounde: there is no throne, o daughter of the Chaldeans: for thou shalt no more be called, Tendre and delicate" (47: ). Nothing we see suggests that Adrian is right; we must trust in a fertility so subtle as to be invisible. By all appearances the men get what Gonzalo prayed for, "an acre of barren ground-long heath, brown furze, anything" (I.i.63-65). Putting the best face on things, Gonzalo exclaims, "Here is everything advan- tageous to life" and "How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green!" (II.i.52, 55), yet the men wander the isle half-starved. Sebastian and Antonio may have it right, superficially:

Ant. The ground indeed is tawny. Seb. With an eye of green in't. Ant. He misses not much. Seb. No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.

(57-60)

Only in the pastoral interlude do we hear of grain, flowers, meadows. The isle seems a region of bogs and fens, where wood is scarce; a "sea marge," as Iris suggests, "sterile and rocky-hard" (IV.i.69).

But like the rough sea and the terrible anger of God, the island shows men a subtle kindness. Fertility appears in unexpected places. In his love for the island which both deludes and satisfies him, Caliban is, like Prospero, an offerer of food and abundance. Caliban thus describes Prospero's arrival:

18 "Reality and Illusion," 246-47. Flagstad, "'Making this Place Paradise,' "222, argues that the ambivalence of the island also characterized accounts of plenty and poverty in Virginia.




Thou strokedst me and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in't; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day, and night; and then I loved thee And showed thee all the qualities of the isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.

(I.ii.335-40)

Note the exchange of sustenance and love: the teaching of language is food for Caliban's soul, such as Adam enjoyed as he named the abun- dant creatures of Eden. This knowledge had been hidden from Caliban, just as Prospero had not known where the fresh water lay. Yet when Caliban falls from grace by trying to rape Miranda, Prospero chains him to a rock (cf. Is. 7:19) and coerces him to do the household chores, for, as Caliban grumbles, he must eat his dinner (I.ii.332). And, as we have seen, when Stephano gives Caliban the bottle of sack, conferring "language" upon him, Caliban vows loyalty with absolute abjection: "I'll show thee every fertile inch o' th' island; and I will kiss thy foot. I prithee be my god" (II.ii.149-5o). On an isle of fertile inches, Cali- ban's expertise in procuring food would be valuable. He repeats the offer twice (II.ii.i63-66, 169-74), and throws in the plenty of Miranda's womb to sweeten the deal (III.ii.1o7-8). Keen-eyed Caliban can find the "clustering filberts," and the "pignuts" hidden in the tawny grass. But now, blinded by vengeance, he mistakes the truth totally. His touching desire for abundance, for a god to love, is reduced to prostration before a drunkard.

We are not all soul; without food we grow faint. In Isaiah, weariness is a consequence of misplaced trust. Men betray their Maker and are repaid with drought, hunger, weakness: "Who wil lament thee? desolation and destruction, and famine, and the sworde: by whome shal I comforte thee? Thy sonnes haue fainted, and lie at the head of all the stretes as a wilde bulle in a net" (51:19-20); "Euen the yong men shal faint, and be wearie, and the yong men shal stumble and fall" (40:30). The answer, for the prophet, is patience and humility before God: "But they that waite vpon the Lord, shal renue their strength: they shal lift vp the wings as the egles; they shal runne, & not be wearie, & they shal walke and not faint" (40:31).

So it is no surprise that in The Tempest humility and service are rewarded with strength; arrogance, selfishness, and self-pity, with weakness. As punishment for supposedly spying to usurp Prospero's isle, Ferdinand is made too weak to lift his sword. Sebastian and the




"nimble" Antonio are also forced to drop their swords before the invul- nerable Ariel (III.iii.6o-68). Yet when Ferdinand submits to the music on the waters, he gains the strength to swim. And when Prospero orders him to pile up a thousand logs, his love for the mistress he serves "quickens what's dead" and makes his labors pleasures (III.i.6-8).

What really moves him is Miranda's selfless example:

My sweet mistress Weeps when she sees me work, and says such baseness Had never like executor. I forget; But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labors.

(11-14)

Miranda even encourages disobedience (yet in doing so she unwittingly obeys Prospero's prompting). The old man is "hard at study" (20), she says. Ferdinand, however, does not disobey. Rather, he and Miranda engage in a lover's quarrel over who should do more work:

Mir. If you'll sit down, I'll bear your logs the while. Pray give me that; I'll carry it to the pile.

Fer. No, precious creature, I had rather crack my sinews, break my back, Than you should such dishonor undergo While I sit lazy by.

Mir. It would become me As well as it does you; and I should do it With much more ease; for my good will is to it, And yours it is against.

(23-31) The young people's generosity lends us a new definition of free-

dom: the humble disposal of oneself for another-"voluntary service," as Herbert Courson says."9 Not all bonds are of iron. Ferdinand and Miranda undo the arrogant rank-pulling of the courtiers aboard the troubled ship, who with their useless curses finally cause the good Boatswain to issue the challenge, "Work you, then" (I.i.42). Sebastian is "standing water," Caliban is indolent, Stephano is easily buoyed by a butt of sack or a catchy drinking song, and even Ariel is tempted to leave his master at just the wrong moment. Ferdinand, however, seizes the time: "The very instant that I saw you, did / My heart fly to your service" (III.i.64-65). He is "slave" to Miranda's service, a "patient

19 Herbert R. Courson, Jr., "Prospero and the Drama of the Soul," ShStud 4 (1969): 322.




log-man," recalling Paul's paean to the endurance of love (I Cor. 13). Miranda is not to be outdone:

Mir. To be your fellow You may deny me; but I'll be your servant, Whether you will or no.

Fer. My mistress, dearest, And I thus humble ever.

Mir. My husband then? Fer. Ay, with a heart as willing

As bondage e'er of freedom. Here's my hand. (84-89)

The lovers enact Peter's reminder that for true Christians, liberty is the opportunity to show the mercies of God (1 Pet. 2:9). Their duty requires patience in the face of wrongs: "Seruants, be subiect to your masters with all feare, not onely to the good and courteous, but also to the frowarde" (2:18). That is not because servants are destined to be so, but because the Christ who suffered patiently is coming soon, and he, as the 1602 Geneva glossators say, "will iustly reuenge their in- iuries that are done to seruants, without any respect of persons." What is won too swiftly and easily is less esteemed, says Prospero (I.ii.453- 55); patience, waiting for the proper time, is all.

Time is its own theodicy, the hand of God working through the sea- sons. Sex especially is an act of time, linking the generations physi- cally and spiritually. In keeping with his constant time-telling, it is not Miranda's sexuality Prospero fears, but her and Ferdinand's too- human impatience. For Prospero, to forerun the marriage bed would be to sow corn in January: it will bring no rain "to make this contract grow"; "barren hate" will strew their bed with weeds (IV.i.18-21); they would be rewarded as those who Isaiah says mock the slowness of the Lord's work, crying, "Let him make spede" (5:19): "Therefore as the flame of fyre devoureth the stubble, and as the chaffe is consumed of the flame: so their roote shalbe as rottennes, and their budde shal rise vp like dust" (24). Ferdinand agrees, genially expressing the relationship between holiness, time, and fruition, and admitting that when the right time comes he will rightly want to speed the clock:

As I hope For quiet days, fair issue, and long life, With such love as 'tis now, the murkiest den, The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion Our worser genius can, shall never melt Mine honor into lust, to take away




The edge of that day's celebration When I shall think or Phoebus' steeds are foundered Or Night kept chained below.

(23-31)

The children pass through their brief trial with their love confirmed. As a reward, they may watch the masque of the spirits-holiday nymphs and reapers -as Prospero asks for them the blessings of abundance and fecundity ("Then shall the earth bring forth her increase," Psalm 61, read during Anglican marriage ceremonies). Summoning those spirits, our thaumaturge Iris echoes the play's themes of expectancy and fulfillment:

Come, temperate nymphs, and help to celebrate A contract of true love; be not too late. You sunburned sicklemen, of August weary, Come hither from the furrow and be merry. Make holiday; your rye-straw hats put on, And these fresh nymphs encounter everyone In country footing.

(132-38)

IV

A voyce cryeth in the wildernes, Prepare ye the way of the Lord: make streight in the desert a path for our God. (Is. 40:3)

When the King of Glory comes, says Isaiah, there shall be such abundance that what had been called a fruitful field shall seem no better than a forest (29:17, 32:15). The nation, once "widowed," "tossed with tempest" (54:11), shall be set upon sapphires and established in righteousness (54:14).

The Jewish longing for the Messiah was a projection into the future of ardent hopes for justice, wisdom, peace, prosperity. On the day of the Lord men and society will undergo a sea-change: the exalted shall be humbled, the meek shall be vindicated. So the Messiah sings:

The Spirit of the Lord God is vpon me, therefore hathe the Lord anointed me: to preache good tidings to the poore, to binde vp the broken hearted, to preache libertie to captiues, and to them that are bounde, the opening of the prison, to preache the acceptable yere of the Lord. (61:1-2)

This is the passage Jesus boldly read in the synagogue, applying it to himself. It expresses the desire of the Jews, and of all mankind, for freedom-freedom from oppressors, freedom from sorrow, from grief,




from all things physical and spiritual that shackle the heart. In many ways no one on the island is free. Prospero promises to grant Ariel his liberty, but only after Ariel's expression of pity for the courtiers does Prospero finally seize his own liberty from vindictiveness. "The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance" (V.i.27-28), he says, and then ad- mits that for him freedom will require relinquishing his powers: "Why that's my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee, / But yet thou shalt have freedom" (95-96).

Is freedom then inconsistent with government? Shakespeare seems to have eyed the letter of Jude, who compares seditious men to Sodom- ites having "followed strange flesh" (7), for "these sleepers also defile the flesh, and despise gouernement, and speake euill of them that are in authoritie" (8). To reject earthly government, deluded by a utopian dream, is to give free rein to sin. When Gonzalo echoes Montaigne's primitivist view of native American life, Antonio and Sebastian laugh, as their imaginations are too narrow for innocence:

Seb. No marrying 'mongst his subjects? Ant. None, man, all idle-whores and knaves.

(IIi. 170-71)

Yet the very presence of the scoffers undermines Gonzalo's vision. What would the laissez-faire king do with Antonio? When those in authority abdicate their responsibility, they awake in their subjects, as Prospero awoke in his brother, a dormant predisposition to sin.

If authority often means oppression, and abandonment of authority, anarchy, what is to be done? The earthly order must be patterned after the divine, whose ruler, Christ, uplifts the downtrodden and restores justice: "For vnto us a Childe is borne, & vnto vs a sonne is giuen: & the gouernement is vpon his shulder, & he shal call his name Wonder- ful, Counseller, The mightie God, The everlasting Father, The prince of peace" (9:6). God rules man as a wise king rules his subjects, as a loving father rules his children. To throw away legitimate order is not to free oneself, but to chain oneself to another, more brutal order. Thus in Caliban's little rebel nation there is still hierarchy: Stephano, the lord of misrule, the pettiest and least perceptive of the three, assumes command, while Caliban and Trinculo fight for the lieutenancy. Law is Stephano's arbitrary whim, enforced by threats of hanging, beating, and biting. Honest Trinculo sums it up: "They say there's but five upon this isle; we are three of them. If th' other two be brained like us, the state totters" (III.ii.5-7). Caliban believes that when he was alone on




the isle he was his own king (1.ii.344), but he is mistaken. He is a "natural," not, as Trinculo believes, because his mind is weak, but because he confuses the spiritual and the carnal (cf. Jude 19). This confusion causes him to enslave himself body and soul to Stephano, one of those dissolute souls "promising vnto them libertie, and are them selues the seruants of corruption: for of whomesoeuer a man is ouercome, euen vnto the same is he in bondage" (2 Pet. 2:19). As Hooker taught, order and hierarchy-not utopian license-reflect the reign of God.20

They may be poor reflections, exculpating colonialism and other forms of oppression. Yet I think Shakespeare was wary of attaching theology to free-wheeling colonialism. He sympathizes with Caliban's grievance, giving him flights of poetry to which Prospero himself is deaf, and seems to scorn the idea that he ought to be hauled off for show (II.ii.32-33). The characters leave the island and express no desire to return.

A Christian government needs what accompanies the reign of God in Isaiah: humility in the ruler, contrition in all. The model is Christ, who comes as a child, with government on his shoulders (Is. 9:6). In his 16o6 Christmas sermon, Andrewes describes the patience and paternal care of this governor: "He bare his government as a 'nurse doth her child,' as he saith; that is, full tenderly. But when they fell a murmuring, as they did often, he bare them upon his shoulders, in great patience and long-suffering." He is the "Princeps oneratus," says Andrewes, "verbum infans, tonans vagiens, immensus parvulus."'2 Measured against such a standard all men must fail, even men less crabbed than Prospero. But the old man gives up his magic, and only after he has done so and can no longer compel obedience is he recognized by Caliban as his legitimate master. Alonso's is the most moving example of humility and contri-

20 Discussing the excesses of Anabaptists, Hooker shows what mischief anarchic millenarianism can do: "They which at the first thought judgment and justice itself to be merciless cruelty, accounted at the length their own hands sanctified with being imbrued in Christian blood; they who at the first were wont to beat down all dominion, and to urge against poor constables, 'Kings of nations'; had at length consuls and kings of their own erection amongst themselves; finally, they which could not brook at the first that any man should seek, no not by law, the recovery of goods injuriously taken or withheld from him, were grown at the last to think they could not offer to God more acceptable sacrifice, than by turning their adversaries clean out of house and home, and by enriching themselves with all kind of spoil and pillage; which thing being laid to their charge, they had in a readiness their answer, that now the time was come, when according to our Saviour's promise, 'the meek ones must inherit the earth.'" From the preface to Of the Laws of Eccle- siastical Polity, ed. A. S. McGrade and Brian Vickers (New York: St. Martin's, 1975), ioo.

21 Works, 1:25, 29.




tion. As a king he sins, but as a beggar he repents, weeping before the woman whom he had long ago tried to murder: "But, 0, how oddly will it sound that I / Must ask my child forgiveness!" (V.i.197-98). Prospero, forgoing his advantage, comforts the king: "There, sir, stop. / Let us not burden our remembrance with / A heaviness that's gone" (198-200).

Even Caliban is brought round. Mike Frank's comment that "Pros- pero knows that his attempts to give reason to Caliban were not only futile but meaningless and silly as well" (echoed by critics who assume that Prospero fails in his project), and Bevington's suggestion that Prospero has attempted to harmonize the "natural human" with reason, are odd misreadings.Y As to the silliness of the project, we should note Andrewes' claim that in the duty of fathers to children "non tam generatio spectanda est quam regeneratio."23 It is Prospero's duty as fos- ter father to help in this spiritual rebirth; to fail here is to break the fifth commandment. The law by which a son must obey his father requires the father to care for the spirit of his son. Thus if Caliban sins by indolence and disobedience Prospero sins by acerbity and impatience. Prospero's duty is difficult, certainly opposite to his temperament, but clear anyway. To what extent does he manage to reform the monster? Although Caliban rejects the teaching of language, "My profit on't / Is, I know how to curse" (I.ii.365-66), that is more defiance than truth, for he is capable of poetry suffuse with human longing, with the same disappointing, vanishing dreams that trouble the other characters (e.g., III.ii.138-46). He has music in his soul, and is already a creature of reason, though corrupt. Insisting that only "stripes" can move Caliban, not kindness (I.ii.347), Prospero follows the advice of the apocalyptic Jude (read on New Year's Eve), who exhorted the early Christians to use different means to bring different souls to salvation as the end drew near: "Haue compassion of some, in putting difference: and other saue with feare, pulling them out of the fire, and hate euen that garment which is spotted by the flesh" (22-23). Eventually, Prospero's patience and floggings pay off. Caliban does in time repent, although reason has little to do with it. Suddenly convicted of his own smallness and forced to admit his master's nobility, he vows to sue for grace (V.i.296).

In forgiving Antonio his sins long past, hiding his and Sebastian's recent sins, and offering pardon on easy terms to the would-be murderer Caliban, Prospero is only following the command of Christ. Prospero's

22 Bevington, Complete Works, 1529; Mike Frank, "Shakespeare's Existential Comedy," in Shakespeare's Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), 165n.

23 Works, 6:i86.




stepson and brother must be forgiven, else his final prayer for forgiveness will be a curse upon his own head. At the end of the play, as Ariel is set free, Prospero remains imprisoned on his lonely isle, pleading with us the audience to take his suffering to heart and forgive him. It is a remarkable reversal: Prospero stands to us as Caliban stood to him, in need of deliverance. Andrewes, in a 16ii sermon on the Lord's Prayer, seems almost to gloss the servant-master relationships of the play: "Deliver us, for we are Thy children, those whom Thou hast taught to call Thee Father; therefore though we be Mephibosheths for our deformity, and Absaloms for our ungraciousness, yet show Thyself a Father to us; and of servants, though we be not only 'unprofitable,' but evil and wasteful, yet because we are Thy servants, 'deliver us.' 24

So the former illusionist prays:

Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.

(Epi. 13-20)

The tempest, rough agent of a benign Providence steering the ship to the island, must now become a loving burst of applause to swell the sails for home. "Indulgence" Prospero craves for his own faults and those of the play, and we will grant it if we remember the words of Christ, teaching his disciples how to pray for the coming of the kingdom: "Forgiue us our dettes, as we also forgiue our detters" (Mt. 6:12).

Shakespeare reminds us of the Advent that must occur in the heart, now, while there is still time. Power in The Tempest is fraught with Chris- tian paradox: true power is service; the Ruler commands us to break the bonds of law by mercy and love; only by being reduced to ashes, by dying in the flesh, do men rise. Perhaps, as cynics say, such para- doxes aid those already in power. But perhaps, too, they are our best hope for shaking the dust of political arenas from our own garments, so that we might be fittingly attired when the feast at last begins.

Providence College

24 Works, 5:438.



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