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by Roman Sympos

 

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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 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.

 

(To be continued.)

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