Why "The Tempest"?

Introducing the professional premiere of Ariel's Way (2010)

As a teacher of Shakespeare for more than thirty years, I’ve had the pleasure of studying and discussing dozens of his plays, many of them multiple times. Among the Bard’s greatest works, The Tempest appealed to me for different reasons at different times in my life.

Playing at my ninth grade prom
(1964)

Before I first read Julius Caesar and Macbeth as a ninth grader (and gleaned a suspicion of unbridled ambition as a worthy motive for living), I was already a musician playing ‘50s and ‘60s pop music at teen house parties and high school dances. When I first read The Tempest a few years later, at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey, it appealed to me primarily for its music. I was intrigued to learn that The Tempest is the most musical of all Shakespeare’s plays. Following up on that fact, I discovered that Pete Seeger wrote a setting of the Bard’s “Full Fathom Five” lyrics—in 5/4 time, no less. I used to perform that song, and smiled watching people try to dance to it. It didn’t groove quite like “I Saw Her Standing There”!

My next encounter with The Tempest came in college. I led a busy extra-curricular life as an undergraduate, and at this time The Tempest initially appealed to me as one of Shakespeare’s shortest works. “Why read more than I have to?” I asked myself as I ran my finger down the shelf of his collected plays in the Gettysburg College library, searching for one to research independently. It wasn’t quite as short as The Comedy of Errors, but it seemed to have a deeper bottom—plus I had already read it! So I chose The Tempest for a seminar presentation.

This time through, Prospero as a scholar with a vengeance—who perversely “drowns” his books in the end—spoke clearly to my condition. I was emerging as a campus activist who urged others to place politics before scholarship (or, at least, to examine the ends of scholarship in a political context). Plotting the downfall of evil, and book drowning, held great appeal for me, in that epoch!

Playing at an anti-nuclear rally (1979)

Furthermore, although I always detested Prospero’s enslavement of Caliban, Shakespeare’s use of magic and wonder in The Tempest also struck a chord for me now. I was also re-reading The Great Gatsby in another college class, and I recall being stirred by the sense of wonder in confronting the New World’s possibilities—a theme in both texts.

Ten years later, as a Ph.D. student in Religion and Culture at Duke University, I retraced this theme in greater depth. I came to grips with The Tempest again, this time as a commentary on colonialism. I learned that Shakespeare himself had been an investor in an all-fated voyage of discovery and “plantation.” He was interested in both the economic and the imaginative potential of the New World—my world.

As I delved further into the history of the play, I learned that The Tempest had been written late in Shakespeare’s career and that it had its inception in connection with festivities surrounding the marriage of King James’s eldest daughter. James I (the king who also commissioned the best known English translation of the Bible) was a patron of Shakespeare’s acting troupe, but he was known to the Bard (and everybody else in England?) as a notorious persecutor of witches—indeed, as a masochist who enjoyed watching the tortured confessions of accused heretics. In the way he structured his Tempest materials, was Shakespeare trying to show his liege a better set of religious principles and practices to live by? I, for one, came to think so.

Pursuing commentaries and interpretations (as graduate students are wont to do in defense of their pet critical notions), I noticed that while The Tempest begins as a revenge tragedy, it ends with reconciliation. No dead bodies litter its stage as the curtain rings down. Marriage is in the air as the play ends. Love triumphs. As The Tempest winds down, comedy is wrought from the stuff of tragedy. I was never satisfied, however, with the most common interpretation given for Prospero’s change of heart; i.e., that it is more “seemly” for a king to pardon than to exact revenge. Shakespeare had more to say than that—or would have had, I like to think, if the leading member of his target audience had not been a degraded, sadistic bastard! "Seemliness" was as far as poor King James could get along the path to wisdom.

Victor (Prospero) and Carib (Caliban) reconcile; Ariel, Sebastian and Toni (Antonio) look on. 

More recently, as I watched the cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution during Ramadan, I wondered again why interpreters of The Tempest have not focused more sophisticated attention on the forgiveness theme. Certainly President Bush would not have been moved by an argument for the “seemliness” of forgiveness. A more compelling case needed to be made for forgiveness, at least in our time. I came to believe that The Tempest provides an excellent foundation for supporting such an argument.

Reviewing sad and tragic circumstances in my own life—and in the lives of my loved ones—led me to value, greatly, the power of forgiveness. Medical doctors and psychologists (such as Edward Hallowell and Gerald Jampolsky), spiritual writers (such as Jack Kornfield), and black journalists (such as Ellis Cose and Patricia Raybon) all have argued, convincingly, for the central importance of forgiveness as a psychological, religious, and political act. My life and teaching has washed me up, again and again, on the shores of Shakespeare’s “New World” text. As I continue examining contemporary American life with critical eyes, I still find forgiveness to be a topic worthy of not just exploration but even devotion.

Thus, understanding the life-affirming process of forgiveness became a central concern of my most recent Tempest research. And dramatizing the power of forgiveness in a compelling way emerged as a major theme of Ariel’s Way.