Chapter - 14

"The Tempest"

-William Shakespeare

Question- Comment upon the symbolism in "The Tempest'.

Or
Write an essay on symbolism in 'The Tempest'.

Answer -

The Tempest seems to be a counterpart to the Midsummer Night's Dream of his lyric youth. It is also a dream, or say, a fairy land, in which the protagonists are not men and women but imagined beings taken partly from folk-belief and partly from literature, to be the symbols of forces climly perceived by the poet as ruling that life, which is itself, after all, in another degree, but such stuff as dreams are made on. The play may be classed as dramatic spectacle rather than as drama proper.

F. K. Chambers points out, "If The Tempest is not exactly a slice cut straight from the red heart of humanity, still less can it be reasonably interpreted as a deliberate and consistent allegory..... The dream-formula is the true one. The play is no more than a dream, and such dispensed from any obligation to logical completeness or continuity: an iridescent bubble, shot across by divers threads of symbolism and suggestion, independent of one other, but all reflecting tendencies of thought and feeling which were dominant in the mind of the poet at the time of its composition."

Prospero :

(i) The invincible Prospero, biding his time to charm good out of ill and to make the odds all even, according to some critics, is in particular a kind of concrete embodiment of providence.

(ii) It is also thought that the play was written for the occasion of a Jacobean wedding in 1613, but the evidence of its earlier performance in 1611 shears off this view; and Prospero cannot stand for James I. The dignified and patient Prospero is no more likely than Hamlet and cannot stand as 'a full length portrait of the meanest and least picturesque of all the Stuarts'.

(iii) If there is any personal reference in Prospero, it cannot be James but William Shakespeare himself, who finally abjures his rough magic, breaks his staff, and drowns his book, Shakespeare is really making his own farewell to the stage and to the arts by which he has exercised a dominion even more elemental than that of the enchanter. As Prospero is to start for Milan for good, so is Shakespeare to Startford. Ferdinand- It is supposed that as Ferdinand was drowned survived and later on wedded to Miranda; so Fredrick the Elector Palatine was to be married to princess Elizabeth coming a new from the seclusion of Combe Abbey. But, the marriage was celebrated on 14th of February, 1613, when the play is proved to have been staged in 1616, this assumption is baseless.

Further "the escape of Ferdinand from drowning is interpreted as a reference to the untimely end of Henry, prince of Wales, who clied, not by drowning, but from typhoid fever, shortly before his sister's marriage," cannot stand symbolic to Henry. So, Ferdinand cannot stand both for Henry and for Ferdinand.

Ariel: is a spirit, through whose power, Prospero has Bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And twist the green sea and the azured vault

Set roaring war and in the like manner. Shakespeare could do the same with his poetic power. Thus 'Ariel, who from another point of view is the agent and minister of an inscrutable providence, becomes from this a symbol of the spirit of poetry found pegged in the cloven-pine of the pre-Shakespearean drama, brought into the service of the fashioning of illusions to delight the eyes and move the hearts of men.”

Caliban:

(i) Some critics suggest that as Ariel is the spirit of poetry, so Caliban is the spirit of prose. E.K. Chambers refutes this saying, 'I have rejected the temptation to suggest that just as Ariel symbolizes the spirit of poetry brought by Shakespeare into the service of the creative imagination. Caliban signifies the spirit of prose, born of Sycorax who is controversial theology, and imperfectly subdued by Shakespeare to the same service."

(ii) Some who follow Renan consider Caliban for a type of Demos, and regard his desire to 'nor scrape trenchering nor wash dish' as eminently characteristic of political ideals which aim at nothing higher the escape from reasonable labour.

(iii) Browning based on Caliban a semi-ironical disquisition on the genesis of natural religious and their anthropomorphism.

(iv) Some again see in him an anticipation of Darwinian theories as to the development of man.

(v) To E. K. Chambers, Caliban is an earthly creature. He has the morals and the Maliciousness of a troglodyte, and must principles of articulate speech.

Some opinions of other critics about Caliban are worth recording.

(a) Caliban, says Kreyssig, is the people.
(b) He is understanding apart from imagination, declares Professor Lowell.
(c) He is the primitive man abandoned to himself, declares M. Mezieres.
(d) That Caliban is the missing link between men and brute, has been elaborately demonstrated by Daniel Wilson,
(e) Caliban is one of the powers of nature over which the scientific intellect obtains command and Prospero is the founder of the Inductive philosophe.
(f) Caliban is the colony of Virginia (g) Caliban is the untutored early drama of Marlowe.

Such allegorical interpretations are good-for-nothing Shakespeare's world was romantic. Caliban is nothing but the imagination creation of Shakespeare, or if I am made to remark, he is suppressed freedom incarnate, trying to gain his lost right by fair or foul meAnswer - 

Miranda is innocence incarnate and Ferdinand the youth. The following passage from Professor Lowell will compensate all. "In the Tempest the scene is laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map. No where then? At once nowhere and anywhere,- for it is in the soul of man that still vexed island hung between the upper and the nether world, and liable to in cursions from both.... consider for a moment if ever the imagination has been so embodied as in Prospero, the fancy as in Aeriel, the brute understanding as in Caliban, who, the moment his poor wits are warmed with the glorious liquor of Stepheno, Plots rebellion against his natural lord, the higher reason. Miranda is mere abstract womanhood, as truly as before she sees Ferdinand as Eve before she was awakened to consciousness by the echo of her own nature coming back to her, the same, and yet not the same, from that of Adam. Ferdinand again is nothing more than youth, compelled to drudge at something he despises, till the sacrifice of the will, and abnegation of self, his ideal in Miranda. The subordinate personages are simply types. Sebastian and Antonio are of weak character and evil ambition; Gonzalo, of average sense and honesty; Adrin and Francisco, of the walking gentlemen, who serve to fill up world. They are not characters in the same sense with I ago, Falstaff, Shallow, or Leontius, and it is curious everyone of them loses his way in this enchanted island of life, all the victims of one illusion after another except Prospero, whose ministers are purely ideal. The whole play, indeed, is a succession of illusions, winding up with those solemn words of the great enchanter, who had summoned to his service every shape of merriment or passion, every figure in the great tragi-comedy of life and who was not bidding farewell to the scene of his triumph. For in Prospero shall we not recognise himself."

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