​

by Roman Sympos

 

 

Part 1

 

One of the college courses I most enjoyed teaching before I retired from university life was EN 220, the gateway proseminar for English majors. In it students became acquainted with some of the essential features of the three major genres of literature—poetry, fiction, and drama—as well as the kinds of questions one could legitimately ask about them and the kinds of answers one could legitimately expect. Also, what counted as evidence.

 

The course was text-centered and writing intensive. Since every good essay needs a good thesis statement around which to organize itself, and every good thesis statement is the answer to a good question, discussion focused mainly on formulating good questions.

 

The question I posed whenever we moved from one genre to the next was “How is this kind of imaginative writing different from the other two?” It led to other questions, like “What is its history?” and “What is, or was, its intended audience?” Inevitably the question of medium came up. All three genres were made of words, yes, but were the words meant to be read or heard?  The most obvious answer was “read”— we were reading them in printed editions (not always the cheapest!) and, after all, the Latin root of “literature” itself was litera or “letter.”

 

Drama refused to fit the letter.

 

It was, to continue with the obvious, performative—meant to be embodied in speech and gesture and action before an audience. It was visual and aural and “out there” in the world, not shut up in a solitary reader’s mind.

 

Admittedly, poems, like plays, originated in song and largely retain the features of rhythmic and melodic repetition that helped preliterate societies memorize them at epic length without the aid of a written prompt. Fiction, unrhymed and unmetered, arose in the wake of literacy, and prose poetry, that rare, freakish hybrid, in the wake of print. What distinguished poetry, as conventionally understood, from fiction was its basic unit, its building block. And I don’t mean words, which are common to all three genres.

 

If we think of words as the ubiquitous atoms of literature, then the basic unit or building block of any literary genre would be something like its molecular structure. Sugar, for instance, or salt or rust or water are all composed of such complex but irreducible units. Poetry’s basic molecule is the line, fiction’s the sentence or sentence fragment. That’s why you can tell poetry from fiction just by looking at them.

 

Each line of a poem, right down to the number of spaces between words and phrases and the blank strip separating one line or stanza from the next, is inflexible and rigidly positioned on the page. Mess with the line and you’ve destroyed what makes poetry poetry. In fiction, as in prose generally, line lengths and spacings and breaks depend solely on the width of the page, whether the margins are justified or not. It’s the sentence of a novel or story, the smallest unit capable of describing a completed action, that cannot be dispensed with, regardless of where the lines are wrapped. Some poems have no sentences at all.

 

What is drama’s distinctive molecule? Hard to say. Historically, plays have included music and song and dance, poetry and prose, painting and pantomime, costume and lighting and sound effects. As you can guess, my students and I never arrived at a satisfactory answer to this question. (My cumbersome candidate was “the speech.”) But as we neared the end of the course and turned our attention to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play that has all of the above, they did agree on one thing. In poetry and fiction, they said, you had to imagine what you read. In drama you didn’t. It was all right there in front of you, plainly visible and audible.

 

“Well, let’s find out,” I’d reply, before turning down the lights and turning on the AV projector and showing them a video recording of the opening scene of the play in question.  

 

“Tell me what you see.”

 

Here’s an example of what they saw.

 

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=the+tempest+performed#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:e228c4f5,vid:kz0nCvXkEH8,st:0

 

The first thing some students noticed about this particular performance by the Vermont Repertory Theater is that Prospero, the man with the staff, and Ariel, the woman dressed as a pixie or a fairy, don’t appear in the first scene of the play as written. The director included them to tell us something we’re only supposed to discover in the next scene: that the tempest about to befall the ship carrying Prospero’s enemies was raised by Ariel and the other supernatural beings at Prospero’s command.  One student noticed that the sailor’s song we hear offstage was transposed from its original position in Act II, where it’s sung by the drunkard, Stephano.

 

“But what did you see? What did you hear?”

 

The storm, they said, and the Boatswain trying to steer the ship, and the courtiers and sailors praying and cursing and interfering, just like in the play.

 

“I saw the backs of some people’s heads,” I said, “and a platform with a ship’s wheel suspended from cables and two windows showing the ocean. A woman in a white body stocking with feathers on her head was creeping around and a man in a robe was holding a tree branch and I heard people singing about a woman named Meg. Then the room got dark and another man came out and grabbed the steering wheel and people started yelling and waving bedsheets. . .”

 

Etcetera.

 

In the entire history of Shakespearean drama, I’d wager no two productions of The Tempest were ever identical. Directors redacted or rearranged scripts, cast boys as women and woman as men, dressed them as gangsters, moved the action to the Titanic or Antarctica, and staged the play in churches, barns, and Death Valley. Only one thing remained the same: the audience had to use its imagination.

 

In his Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the father of modern literary criticism, wrote that any imaginative engagement with a work of literature requires “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” He had in mind his own contributions to Lyrical Ballads, the collection of poems that he and his close friend, William Wordsworth, published together in 1798. Coleridge’s contributions were to be poems of the supernatural, like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, containing events ordinarily discredited as implausible or downright impossible.

 

It wasn’t long, however, before critics were using Coleridge’s pithy formulation to describe a reader’s or audience member’s willingness to ignore the existential unreality of what they saw or imagined so they could enjoy it as if it were real. Whether the story is unfolding “in here”—all in your head—or “out there”—in the material world—makes no difference. The as-if of literary experience demands that we try to ignore anything that might reveal the fabricated reality of what we want to enjoy: the room in which we’re reading or watching, the other people around us, the book in front of us, the words on the page, the page itself, the proscenium arch, the illuminated exit signs, the fire truck passing in the street.

 

Our own bodies.

 

The as-if demands, in short, that we make ourselves dream while remaining awake.

 

A tall order.

 

Have you ever tried to fall asleep? How did it go? It’s a little like trying not to think of a rhinoceros, isn’t it?

 

As for dreaming. Well.

 

Beliefs work in much the same way. You can’t just make yourself believe something any more than you can make yourself fall asleep, or dream.

 

I had a student who insisted he could make himself believe anything, just by an act of will.

 

“Really?” I asked. “Can you make yourself believe you can fly?”

 

After a short pause (to perform an act of will, I guess) he said, “I can fly.”

 

“You really believe that.”

 

He nodded.

 

I walked to the casement window and opened it. Our classroom was three floors up from the parking lot.

 

Fortunately for all of us, it turned out that he didn’t really believe he could fly after all.

 

Because a belief cannot be willed, there’s no way to make yourself believe in the reality of a literary representation. Coleridge understood, however, that you can do something with your disbelief.

 

Suspend it.

 

We do it all the time.

 

Perhaps the most obvious example, in the field of entertainment, is a magic show. Does anyone nowadays, aside from a young child, really believe you can pull a rabbit out of an empty hat? Or teletransport a human being from a wardrobe suspended in mid-air to the back of an auditorium without the help of a secret door or “smoke and mirrors”? We adults will gladly suspend our disbelief in supernatural powers and events in order to enjoy the magician’s display of legerdemain.

 

The same psychological dynamic applies to our enjoyment of a work of the imagination.   

 

There is a long philosophical tradition, going back to Plato, that casts suspicion on the representational arts because they tell lies, showing only appearances and the surfaces of things, not things as they really are. “You are right,” the philosophers tell us,“to disbelieve what they say or show.” Sir Philip Sidney wrote the best, and most succinct, rejoinder to this jaundiced view in his An Apology for Poetrie: “Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.”

 

The poet asks only that we suspend our disbelief in his fabrications long enough to enjoy what he has to offer. We are free to stop at any point.

 

And therein lies the difference between dreaming and imagining. Dreams happen to us. Once trapped in them, we can’t fight our way out (although they may scare us awake). In short, we are under their spell. When we read stories, listen to poems or songs, or watch plays in waking life, however, we allow things to happen by willingly suspending our disbelief.  If at any point we don’t like what’s happening, we are free to stop reading, listening, or watching.

 

Each of these activities requires an act of will, or a whole series of them, not just to suspend disbelief, but to resume it. We pick up the book, we screw in the ear buds, we enter the auditorium and take a seat. We prepare ourselves, not to believe in what we know to be unreal, but to suspend our disbelief in its unreality long enough to let it unfold in our imaginations. And we have the power, at any moment, to stop doing so: to put down the book, unplug the ear buds, leave the auditorium.

 

But before we can suspend our disbelief, we must accept the author’s invitation to do so.

​

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Part 2

 

I ended Part 1 of this essay with the opening scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to illustrate the importance of the imagination in bringing a staged drama to life, and the vital part a willing suspension of disbelief plays in imparting the illusion of reality to any dramatic representation, as well as sustaining it.

 

Why The Tempest? you may wonder. And why its opening scene in particular?

 

I’ll answer the two questions in reverse order.

 

The opening scene of The Tempest is the only one in which a storm occurs.

 

The Tempest is all about putting on a play.

 

The storm that opens what’s traditionally been understood to be Shakespeare’s last drama has been conjured up by Prospero, a powerful “magician,” to terrify and chastise the passengers on the ship, including his brother, Antonio, who usurped Prospero’s title as Duke of Milan and forced him to flee with his only daughter, Miranda, to a forsaken island. That was twelve years ago, and Alonso, King of Naples, has since allied his kingdom with the treacherous Antonio’s. Now destiny has put Antonio in Prospero’s hands. He is voyaging home with Alonzo and his court after attending the nuptials of the King’s daughter, Claribel, in far-off Tunis. Traveling with them is Alonso’s son and heir, Prince Ferdinand.

 

Prospero lost his throne, in large part, because he spent too much time in his study, learning the arts of sorcery by which he became adept at commanding the obedience of the invisible spirits in charge of the natural world. In the process, however, he neglected the arts of governance while his brother insinuated himself into positions of power in the court.

 

Prospero’s storm is the first step toward restoring himself to the throne of Milan. But he doesn’t need to wreck Alonso’s ship in order to succeed. Innocent people would die, for one thing, and Prospero has broader ends in view. He needs these men to carry out his orders when he returns to his homeland. Instead of destroying them, he forces Antonio, Alonso, and their men to jump overboard and swim to shore while their ship is conveyed, by Ariel and his subordinates, to a calm anchorage in another part of the island. The traitors must be taught to obey legitimate authority. Prospero’s classroom will be this remote island, and his pedagogy will be, literally, performative.

 

In what follows, the shipwrecked passengers, low as well as high, are afflicted and mortified by Ariel and the other invisible “spirits” under his command in scenes and songs designed to bring the castaways to heel. In one of these, the fairies enact a mummery accompanied by “solemn and strange” music, with the equivalent of stagehands setting out tantalizing delicacies to torment the famished castaways. As the men approach to eat, however, the “banquet vanishes” by a “quaint device”—that is, a cunning stage mechanism—and Ariel, in the character of a Harpy, a mythological monster representing the pangs of conscience, denounces the traitors (Alonso included, for allying himself to the usurper, Antonio) and warns them of worse punishments to come. Adding grief to terror, Ariel tells Alonso that his son Ferdinand has died in the shipwreck.

 

Later, in Act 4, the fairies, at the behest of Prospero and under Ariel’s immediate command, stage a masque of verse, song, and dance extolling the joys of marriage and the rewards of chastity for the benefit of Ferdinand and Miranda, whom the exiled king has decided must marry to unite the kingdoms of Milan and Naples in perpetuity after he resumes his throne. 

 

Elsewhere, Ariel’s disembodied voice saves Alonso from being assassinated by his own brother, Sebastian, who’s been urged to it by Antonio. Nor can the low, comic characters—Stephano the Butler, Trinculo the Jester, and Caliban, Prospero’s resentful slave—escape Prospero’s strong magic. Bent on killing Prospero and crowning Caliban king of the island, the three are lured by Ariel’s sweet song into briers and swamps, where they are set upon by spirits impersonating hunters and dogs, and pinched by invisible goblins.

 

Once they have learned their lesson, the traitors and would-be regicides are ready, even eager, to obey their exiled ruler. They are led to his cave, confronted with the truth, and swear allegiance to Prospero and his successor, Alonso’s son, Ferdinand, whom Properso has deemed a worthy suitor to his daughter.

 

In none of these performances by Ariel and the fairies under his direction are Alonso, Antonio, or their shipwrecked courtiers ever given a chance to willingly suspend their disbelief. Like the five-year-old at a magic show that I mentioned in Part 1, they experience what they see and hear as real supernatural events, not dramatic performances.

 

In this way the playwright makes clear the difference between the castaways and us, his audience. What they behold they are compelled to believe. We are not. They are robbed of their willpower. We are not. At every moment of watching Shakespeare’s play, in fact, we are willingly, and continuously, suspending our disbelief.

 

But why would anyone want to?

 

To enjoy the spectacle of imaginary beings and events becoming real, here and now.

 

Upon our entering the theater, the playwright offers us an opportunity to assist in that realization, and until the house lights go down, we have the choice to accept or reject it, to remain seated and suspend our disbelief or return to the waking world. If you stay, you are agreeing to submit the power of your imagination to the will of the playwright, with no disbelief to inhibit it, in exchange for the delight of seeing and hearing, in real space and time, what the playwright has to this point only imagined. If you leave, you are refusing the offer of this exchange.

 

The exchange I’m talking about is not the same as exchanging cash for a commodity, like a car or a hat, which carries no residual obligation on the part of buyer or seller once the exchange is completed. Once you pay your money, your relationship with the dealership or the haberdasher is at an end. Or at least you hope so. The last thing you want is to have to return what you bought for a refund!

 

Unlike the purchase of a car or a hat, the ticket you pay for at the box office does not grant you ownership of anything but the chance to cooperate in making a play, quite literally, come to life. The play may be good or bad—well-written or not, well-staged or not, well-acted or not. Superior or inferior, the play’s not the thing you paid for. You’ve paid for a chance to help make something beautiful and exciting happen . . . to you.

 

The best analogy I can think of is paying for an education. When I was paid to teach, I never forgot that my students and their parents were, for the most part, footing the bill, whatever the government or the school’s benefactors might have been contributing to keep the university afloat. Many of those students were incurring debts in the tens of thousands of dollars, debts that wouldn’t be paid off for what would come to feel like tens of thousands of years.

 

But I never for a moment credited the idea that an education was something you could buy, like a car or a hat. When you pay for a college education, you aren’t buying a degree, or even a passing grade in Organic Chemistry I. You are buying an opportunity to cooperate in making something beautiful and exciting happen . . . to you.

 

The Tempest has been read—and watched and heard—as a treatise about wise and effective government, a reflection on the power of forgiveness, a love story, a handbook on parenting, and a parable about colonial exploitation and rebellion. It is all of these things, and more, but it is, above all, a play about staging a play, and for that endeavor to succeed, everyone involved must play their part: the playwright, the director, the stage manager, the actors, the lighting director, the prop master, even, I would argue, the ushers in the aisle. 

 

But first, someone has to be in charge.

 

Shakespeare makes this clear in his play’s opening scene, where the Boatswain tries to save his ship while his royal passengers—King Alonso, his brother Sebastian, Prospero’s brother Antonio, and their courtiers—keep interfering with threats and unwelcome advice. Here is a lesson, based on the time-worn metaphor of the “ship of state,” not only in the principles of good government and legitimate authority, i.e., that those in charge should know how to “steer the ship of state,” but also in the stark difference between two forms of governance.

 

In the governance of states and nations, which King Alfonso and his courtiers are used to, inherited titles give one class of person the right to boss around untitled people like the Boatswain and his crew. As the Boatswain struggles to bring his ship to heel, King Alonso reveals the depths of his ignorance regarding how real ships are (or should be) run:

 

 

ALONSO  Good boatswain, have care. Where’s the Master?

Play the men.                                                             10

BOATSWAIN  I pray now, keep below.

ANTONIO  Where is the Master, boatswain?

BOATSWAIN  Do you not hear him? You mar our labor.

Keep your cabins. You do assist the storm.

GONZALO  Nay, good, be patient.                                 15

BOATSWAIN  When the sea is. Hence! What cares these

roarers for the name of king? To cabin! Silence!

Trouble us not.

GONZALO  Good, yet remember whom thou hast

aboard.                                                                      20

BOATSWAIN  None that I more love than myself. You are

a councillor; if you can command these elements

to silence, and work the peace of the present, we

will not hand a rope more. Use your authority. If

you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and          25

make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance

of the hour, if it so hap.—

 

 

The “Master” Alonso asks for repeatedly is the captain of the ship, who’s just gone below after speaking the first line of the play, “Boatswain!” to which the Boatswain replies, “Here Master,” which is to say, “At your service.” After giving the Boatswain his orders, the Master exits, never to be seen again, although he continues blowing his alarm whistle offstage. “Do you not hear him?” the Boatswain asks in reply to Alonso’s question, as if to say, “Where do you think?”

 

Thus, in its first four lines, Shakespeare announces the central theme of his play: the right of legitimate authority to give commands, the obligation of those under legitimate authority to obey them, and the need for illegitimate authority to get the hell out of the way.

 

Having received his orders, the Boatswain immediately starts issuing commands to his crew right and left, until he’s interrupted by Alonso and the others. “You mar our labor,” says the Boatswain, and “assist the storm” by thwarting our efforts to save the ship with your pestering and insults. (Alonso’s “Play the men” means “Act like men, not cowards.”)  “Keep your cabins,” the Boatswain replies.

 

But Alonzo and the others pay him no heed. One of Antonio’s courtiers, Gonzalo, tells him to “be patient,” to show respect for the King’s high position: “remember whom thou hast aboard.” “What cares these roarers for the name of King?” replies the Boatswain, adding, “Use your authority,” an exercise in futility that makes his point and Shakespeare’s crystal clear: that form of governance is best that best knows its place.

 

In the governance of practical affairs, as illustrated by the Boatswain and his crew, rank—and the authority it signifies—corresponds not to bloodline, but to know-how (or should). Kings inherit their authority over metaphorical ships of state, whether they know how best to rule or not. Shipmasters earn by experience their authority over real ships of wood, rope, and sailcloth, as well as the power to delegate that authority to others, like the Boatswain, who is better skilled in sailing ships than the Master. The Boatswain, in turn, delegates authority to the crew, who are in charge of hoisting and furling the sails, or jettisoning ballast, or doing whatever needs doing to keep the ship from sinking.

 

At every level of this nautical hierarchy of command, from CEO down to cabin boy, authority has been delegated to the person or persons who best know what to do and how to do it, then passed on to those at the next level.

 

Now consider that, all around these human characters there are supernatural beings, fairies under the immediate authority of Ariel, all commanding, in turn, lesser beings in charge of the inanimate elements of fire (lightning and St. Elmo’s Fire, the static electrical effects appearing on spars and masts), water (sea and rain), and air (wind) that add up to the tempest of the play’s title. The hierarchy of the ship’s command is mirrored in that of the fairies tormenting it, and at the pinnacle of authority in both cases stands the first in command: the Master of the ship on the one hand, and the Master of the storm on the other, namely, Prospero.

 

And off in the wings there stands still another Master, the playwright, William Shakespeare.

​

 

Part 3

 

In Parts 1 and 2 of this essay I suggested that Shakespeare’s The Tempest is, fundamentally, a play about how to put on a play, and that the three analogous hierarchies of command introduced in the play’s opening scene—nautical, political, and magical—run most smoothly when modeled on how plays are staged and performed.

 

Were we to line up these hierarchies shoulder to shoulder, the result might look like this:

 

NAUTICAL       POLITICAL               MAGICAL            |           DRAMATIC

 

On the Ship     In Milan and Naples   On the Island       |          In the Theater

Master             King                            Prospero             |          Playwright

Boatswain       Courtiers                     Ariel                     |          Director

Sailors             Commoners                Fairies, Sprites    |          Cast and Stage Crew

 

 

Critics have long recognized the importance of the theatrical tropes and analogies embedded in what is assumed to be the Bard’s last drama, his “Farewell!” to the stage, as it were. But I believe the play’s theatrical material is more than just another layer of meaning sandwiched between its political and ideological layers like the third slice of bread in a BLT.  It’s more like the meat of the thing, the key to understanding that, for Shakespeare, legitimate authority—authority based on merit and ability—is integral to the success of any cooperative venture.

 

Putting on a play models this kind of cooperation, where authority is delegated and dispersed to every participant, at every level, in proportion to their proven abilities, from the playwright to the director to the light and sound engineers to the props manager to the prompter and stage hands, right down to the person sweeping up the fake snow between scenes and, for that matter, sweeping up the litter in the aisles between performances.

 

The four hierarchies can be further divided into two pairs: the nautical and political on the one hand, and the magical and dramatic on the other. The difference between them comes down to what these hierarchies are designed to achieve and to whom the person at the top is answerable.

 

On a ship, the goal may be to win a battle at sea or safely deliver passengers or cargo to their destination, and the master of the ship (or admiral of a fleet) is answerable only to the commander in chief—in Shakespeare’s time, the king—or to the ship’s owners and investors. The opening scene of The Tempest, in which King Alonso and his courtiers keep pestering the Boatswain and interfering in the handling of the ship while a perilous storm threatens to send them all to the bottom of the sea, shows us the importance of delegating authority wisely and the dangers of micro-managing.

 

A king’s assignment is not to sail a ship, but to govern the state, where the goal is to make your nation prosperous, peaceful, and secure. In this endeavor, the king is answerable only to God, according to the doctrine of the divine right of kings.

 

Magicians and playwrights are answerable to their audiences.

 

Yes, there are owners and investors to satisfy. In Shakespeare’s day, the theater company and, in ours, studios and streaming services and media conglomerates and, for headline magicians, major casino venues. But as I suggested in Part 2 of this essay, that kind of transactional obligation—paying someone to perform—is quite different from what happens in an auditorium when the house lights go down. That’s when the ticket-holders in the seats, having completed the transactional exchange of money for admission, become part of the cooperative enterprise unfolding on the stage in front of them—in fact, the most important part. Their assignment? To suspend their disbelief. If they won’t or can’t, all hands will perish.

 

The difference between willingly suspending your disbelief and having no disbelief to suspend, which, as we’ve seen in Part 2, is what makes the difference between a dramatic representation and a delusion, is underlined throughout The Tempest, beginning in the second scene of Act I, immediately following the storm at sea.

 

Here we learn that what we’ve just witnessed has had other witnesses: Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, and Prospero himself. Miranda, however, has mistaken the ship’s peril as real and consequential, and suffered terribly as a result.

 

                                    O, I have suffered

With those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel,

Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,

Dashed all to pieces. O, the cry did knock

Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished.

 

Prospero, who knows better because he has staged the whole event, reassures her:

 

The direful spectacle of the wrack, which touched

The very virtue of compassion in thee,

I have with such provision in mine art

So safely ordered that there is no soul—

No, not so much perdition as an hair,

Betid to any creature in the vessel

Which thou heard’st cry, which thou saw’st sink.

 

Prospero’s account is confirmed later in this scene, when he debriefs Ariel on the success of his mission. “But are they, Ariel, safe?” he asks.

 

ARIEL:

                                    Not a hair perished.

On their sustaining garments not a blemish,

But fresher than before; and, as thou bad’st me,

In troops I have dispersed them ’bout the isle.

The King’s son have I landed by himself,

Whom I left cooling of the air with sighs

In an odd angle of the isle, and sitting,

His arms in this sad knot.

 

PROSPERO:

                                                Of the King’s ship,

The mariners say how thou hast disposed,

And all the rest o’ th’ fleet.

 

ARIEL:

                                                Safely in harbor

Is the King’s ship. In the deep nook, where once

Thou called’st me up at midnight to fetch dew

From the still-vexed Bermoothes, there she’s hid;

The mariners all under hatches stowed,

Who, with a charm joined to their suffered labor,

I have left asleep.

 

Ariel’s account is confirmed as the play unfolds, right down to the ‘sustaining garments” the King and his men were wearing when they abandoned ship. As Gonzalo observes, marveling at the miracle in Act II, scene 1, “[O]ur garments, being, as they were,/ drenched in the sea, hold notwithstanding their/ freshness and gloss, being rather new-dyed than/ stained with salt water.”

 

In this otherwise superfluous observation (Antonio and Sebastian, the smart alecks of the play, are forever mocking Gonzalo’s banalities) Shakespeare apprises us, his audience, of how crucial to the success of The Tempest is our ability to suspend our disbelief in such miracles, however helpless an ingénu like Miranda may be under their spell. No theater company would even think of “drench[ing]” the most expensive costumes in its wardrobe with water just to heighten a scenic effect. The cost would be exorbitant.

 

Shakespeare uses Prospero’s magic both to explain away the theatrical incongruity of Gonzalo’s dry and “newly-dyed” garments and to remind us of something we've been told, explicitly, at the beginning of Prospero’s reassurances to Miranda, namely, that we (and she) have been watching a “direful spectacle” of the shipwreck, not the real thing. We, however, have experienced it as a dramatic representation enjoining us to suspend our disbelief , thereby making it appear as if it were real. Miranda, meanwhile, has experienced it as real because, trustful as she is in the power of her father’s “art,” as he calls it, she never had any disbelief to suspend.

 

Were the storm and the “wrack” of the ship real, even within the feigned reality of Shakespeare’s drama, here on Prospero’s enchanted island? Were they any more real than Ariel’s phantasmatic banquet in Act III or the masque of Ceres in Act IV, two other events concocted by Prospero’s imagination and executed by his minions?

 

One test of a real event is that it has real consequences. The storm itself had none. It was Ariel, working through his subordinate agents, who “dispersed” the King and his courtiers “‘bout the isle,” insured the freshness of their garments, “landed” the King’s son, Ferdinand, “in an odd angle,” “hid” the ship in a “deep nook,” “stowed” the mariners “under hatches,” and, apparently, cast a “charm” to put them fast asleep. For all intents and purposes, the play’s tempest might just as well have been a dream or a mass hallucination. This impression is sustained in Act V, when the Boatswain finally rejoins Alonso and his party and the king commands him, “Say, how came you hither?” The Boatswain replies, “If I did think, sir, I were well awake,

I’d strive to tell you.”

 

The ontological ambiguity of Prospero’s “dire spectacle” is reinforced by the curiously indeterminate position from which we are forced to imagine Prospero and Miranda beholding it. The opening scene ends with the ship splitting up and about to sink with all passengers, followed immediately by the stage direction, “Enter Prospero and Miranda.”

 

Where’ve they been?

 

The obvious answer is, “Offstage.” Like the rest of us.

 

Of course, we are free to imagine them watching from a nearby promontory, or in a crystal ball, like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. But that's not what the playwright specified. At any rate, I don’t think the omission of such information from scene 2 is an accident, or at least, that Shakespeare was unaware of how it might impede our ability to tell whether or not the events in scene 1 really happened or just appeared to.

 

In any case, lacking real consequences, the storm and the shipwreck in The Tempest have no more claim to reality than a dream or hallucination.

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