The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Shakespeare · a play in five acts · nine scenes and an epilogue · written about 1610 to 1611 · scored on the First Folio of 1623, its only text; read from knowledge, no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Romance and comedy of reconciliation; masque, revenge play withheld and play of magic in one action
Mythos
Death and return by water; the magus with his book and staff; the spirit of air bound to service; the earth-born claimant of the land; the daughter who has seen no man but her father
Phase
One afternoon, from about two to six, roughly the time of its playing, with twelve years of exile told as past in the second scene
Presentation
Drama; five acts, nine scenes and an epilogue spoken by Prospero, read in the First Folio, where the play stands first in the volume
Register
From the seamen’s prose of the storm and the clowns’ prose to Ariel’s songs, Caliban’s physical verse, the masque’s couplets and the Epilogue’s short lines of supplication
Scale
A dukedom and a kingdom seen through a handful of nobles on a beach; a father and a daughter; an island and its first inhabitant
Governing Proposition
A duke of Milan, put out to sea with his infant daughter by his brother and the King of Naples, has lived twelve years on an island by the power of his books, with a spirit of the air in his service and the son of a witch as his slave; when his enemies sail past he wrecks them on his shore, divides them, frightens them, betroths his daughter to the king’s son, and then, with all of them in his power, forgives them, frees his spirit, breaks his staff and drowns his book. The wager of the play is that a romance of loss and recovery can be played in one afternoon by a hero who cannot lose, and that the drama of such a play is whether he will give up his power.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play opens on a ship in a storm. The boatswain and the seamen work the sails in prose, and the King of Naples and his court come up on deck and get in the way. The boatswain tells them that the waves care nothing for the name of king, and sends them below. The ship splits. It is the only scene of the play not set on the island, and it is played on a bare stage in the language of the men who work the ship: terror carried by the plainest speech in the play.
On the island, Miranda has watched the wreck and begs her father to calm the sea. Prospero tells her that no one has been harmed, and that it is time she knew who she is. He asks her what she remembers from before they came to the island: “What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” (1.2). Then he tells her. He was Duke of Milan, and gave his time to his books and the government to his brother Antonio; Antonio, with the help of Alonso, King of Naples, took the dukedom and put father and child out to sea in a rotten boat. They came to this island, and have lived here twelve years. Now fortune has brought his enemies to his shore.
The exposition is long and static, and the play knows it: Prospero keeps checking that his daughter is listening. But it does what romance before it had done across years. In The Winter’s Tale sixteen years pass in the middle of the play; here the wandering is told as past, in one scene, and everything after it happens in a single afternoon on one island. Asked the time, Ariel answers “Past the mid season”, and Prospero sets the clock: “At least two glasses. The time ’twixt six and now / Must by us both be spent most preciously” (1.2). The play is one of only two in the canon, with The Comedy of Errors, that keeps the unities of time and place.
Movement II
Ariel, the spirit who raised the storm at Prospero’s command, reports how it was done: the ship is safe in harbour, the sailors asleep below, and the court scattered about the island in groups, the king’s son Ferdinand alone. Ariel asks for the freedom he has been promised, and Prospero answers by reminding him of what he owes: the witch Sycorax, who once ruled the island, had shut him in a cloven pine, and it was Prospero’s art that let him out. A few more hours of service, and he will be free. Ariel goes about his work.
Then Prospero calls Caliban, the witch’s son, who carries his wood. Caliban comes cursing, and makes his claim: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me” (1.2). When Prospero came, Caliban says, he was kind, and Caliban showed him all the qualities of the isle, the fresh springs and the brine pits, the barren place and the fertile. Now he is penned in a rock. Prospero answers that he was lodged in their own cell until he tried to violate Miranda, and Miranda reminds him that she taught him to speak. “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse” (1.2). The play gives no answer to his claim, and it never will.
Ariel, invisible, leads Ferdinand in with music. The prince believes his father drowned, and Ariel sings to him of the drowned man: “Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes” (1.2), nothing of him that does fade but suffers “a sea-change / Into something rich and strange”. Ferdinand sees Miranda, who has seen no man but her father and Caliban, and the two fall in love at first sight, as Prospero intends. To make the prize less easily won, he accuses Ferdinand of being a spy, charms his sword from moving, and takes him prisoner.
Movement III
Elsewhere on the island the court party has come ashore. Alonso grieves for his son. The old counsellor Gonzalo, who once furnished Prospero’s boat with food and books, tries to comfort him, and Antonio and Sebastian, the king’s brother, mock Gonzalo for it at length. Gonzalo imagines how he would govern the island: a commonwealth with no trade, no magistrate, no letters, no labour and no sovereignty, which follows closely Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals in Florio’s English. Ariel’s music puts the king and Gonzalo to sleep, and Antonio, awake with Sebastian, begins to tempt him to kill his brother and take the crown of Naples. “What’s past is prologue” (2.1), he says: the usurpation of Milan is to be played again in the present tense. Ariel wakes Gonzalo in time.
Caliban, carrying wood and cursing, hides under his cloak from the jester Trinculo, who takes shelter under it from the coming storm. Stephano, the king’s butler, comes ashore drunk on a butt of sack, singing, and finds the four-legged monster. He gives Caliban wine, and Caliban kneels to him as a god from the moon and offers him the island, promising to show him the best springs and to pluck him berries. He sings his song of freedom, “’Ban, ’Ban, Ca-Caliban”, having traded one master for another. The clowns speak prose; Caliban, alone among the low characters, speaks verse.
Ferdinand, now Prospero’s prisoner, carries logs, the work Caliban was cursing. He bears it gladly, because Miranda watches him. She offers to carry them for him; he will not let her. Unseen, Prospero watches the two of them pledge themselves to each other in marriage. The scene answers Caliban’s: the same logs, carried by the same command, but one service is forced and the other freely taken.
Movement IV
Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo, all drunk, make their own plot. Caliban will lead them to Prospero asleep in the afternoon: “Remember / First to possess his books” (3.2), for without them he is a fool. Stephano will be king of the isle, with Miranda for his queen. Invisible, Ariel interrupts the quarrel and plays the tune they cannot place, and Caliban comforts the frightened men: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not” (3.2). When he sleeps, he says, the clouds seem to open and show riches ready to drop on him, so that when he wakes, “I cried to dream again” (3.2). The highest lyric in the play is given to the monster, at the moment he plots murder.
The court party, worn out, are offered a banquet by strange shapes. As they reach for it, Ariel appears in the form of a harpy, the banquet vanishes, and he names Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian as the three who drove Prospero from Milan, and tells Alonso that the sea has taken his son for it. Alonso, struck, goes to seek his son in the deep. Prospero then gives Ferdinand his daughter, and, to celebrate the betrothal, has his spirits play a masque in rhymed couplets: Iris, Ceres and Juno, goddesses of the rainbow, the harvest and marriage, bless the couple, and nymphs and reapers dance.
In the middle of the dance Prospero remembers the clowns’ plot against his life, and the masque is broken off. He speaks to the startled lovers: “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air” (4.1); the towers and palaces, the great globe itself, shall dissolve like the vanished show. “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1). He is vexed, and walks to still his mind. Ariel has led the clowns through briars and a filthy pool; they find gaudy clothes hung up as bait, and while they quarrel over them spirits in the shape of hounds hunt them off.
Movement V
All his enemies are in his power. Ariel tells Prospero that the king and his brothers are held distracted in a grove, and that Gonzalo weeps for them, and that if he saw them his affections would become tender. Prospero asks whether Ariel thinks so. “Mine would, sir, were I human” (5.1). Prospero answers “And mine shall”. He has been touched by their affliction, and he decides: “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (5.1). He calls up the powers he has used, “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves” (5.1), in words adapted from Medea’s invocation in Ovid, and gives them up: “I’ll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book” (5.1).
The court enters the charmed circle he has drawn and stands spellbound. Prospero puts on his ducal robes and forgives them, his brother among them; Antonio never answers. He shows Alonso his son, playing chess with Miranda: “Sweet lord, you play me false” (5.1). Alonso, who thought him drowned, finds him alive. Miranda, seeing the court, cries “O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!” (5.1), and her father answers “’Tis new to thee”. The ship is found whole and the crew asleep. Caliban and the clowns are driven in, and Prospero says of the slave: “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1). He will go home to Milan, where every third thought shall be his grave.
Ariel is freed. Then Prospero comes forward alone and speaks the Epilogue, in short couplets: “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, / And what strength I have’s mine own” (Epilogue). He cannot leave the island unless the audience release him with their hands and fill his sails with their breath. He ends: “As you from crimes would pardon’d be, / Let your indulgence set me free” (Epilogue). The man who controlled every outcome of the play now asks the audience for the same mercy he has just given.
Act III · The Twelve
The play is lean by the standard of the canon: nine scenes, one afternoon, and almost no matter that does not mirror the main action. The three conspiracies are required. Antonio and Sebastian’s plot against Alonso in 2.1 replays the usurpation of Milan in the present tense; the clowns’ plot in 3.2 replays it as farce, Caliban offering his island to a drunken butler. Ferdinand’s logs in 3.1 answer Caliban’s in 2.2. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what a production can cut without the play noticing: the court banter of 2.1, some of the clowning in 2.2 and 4.1, and the stasis of the long exposition in 1.2. Perhaps a tenth of the whole is slack.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The play brings a condition into the open: power over others, however justified by injury, ends in a choice between vengeance and release, and the release costs the power. Prospero states it at the turn of 5.1: “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance”, and he takes the choice from a spirit, Ariel: “Mine would, sir, were I human”. Through Caliban it discloses the relation of master and subject in a new country: the claim of prior possession, “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother” (1.2), and language given as dispossession. The play leaves that claim unanswered, and the refusal is the disclosure. Held below the tragedies because much of its meaning is carried as valediction and dream, a mood of great power more than an argument.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The play rises often and in more than one register. The storm of 1.1 is terror in prose, a ship splitting and the court useless on deck. “Full fathom five thy father lies” (1.2) is the beauty of death transfigured into “something rich and strange”. Caliban’s “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises” (3.2), ending “I cried to dream again”, is the highest lyric in the play, given to the monster. Ariel as a harpy in 3.3 is dread. Then come the two summits: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on” (4.1) and the abjuration of 5.1. The flats are 2.1 and stretches of the clowning. Height is near the top; frequency is high but not constant.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. The whole action is a ritual of death and return by water: the court is drowned in its own belief and given back changed, Alonso mourning a son lost in the sea and finding him alive at chess. On that frame stand figures that have become archetypes through this play as much as in it: the magus with his book and staff, the spirit of air bound to service and longing for freedom, the earth-born wild man who claims the land, and the daughter who sees the court and cries “O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!”, to be answered “’Tis new to thee” (5.1). The drowning of the book closes the plot. The particular holds: Prospero’s “every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1) is a man’s, not an emblem’s.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The departure is real but partly made before. The turn from tragedy to plays of loss, wandering and recovery had been taken in Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, and the tragicomedy of Beaumont and Fletcher was the fashion. Within that mode the play swerves hard. Romance is a form of time, and sixteen years pass in the middle of The Winter’s Tale; here the unities Shakespeare had flouted all his career are kept, and the wandering is told as past in 1.2. The protagonist controls all that happens, which stakes the drama on whether he will forgive: a real risk, a play whose hero cannot lose. The court masque is fused into the drama and broken off. Held lowest of the gated five because the mode itself was not its discovery.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. Its subject is art as a power over others that is bounded in time and must be given up, and the form enacts it. The action takes about as long as its playing; Prospero sets the clock in 1.2, “At least two glasses”, and in 5.1 the work ceases at the hour he named: the play is a performance run by a maker within it. The masque of 4.1 is a play inside the play, staged with spirits as actors, and its breaking off is the moment the maker remembers what his art cannot govern: “Our revels now are ended”. The Epilogue passes the power to the audience: “Now my charms are all o’erthrown”. Told across years, or as narrative, all this would be lost.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The evidence is four centuries of reading that has not closed. The play has been read as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage since the nineteenth century, as a play of the Bermuda voyage and the Virginia venture, as a Neoplatonic play of theurgy, as a play of forgiveness and as a political play of usurpation and legitimacy. Since the middle of the twentieth century it has carried a second life as the founding text for thinking about colonisation, in Mannoni (1950), George Lamming (1960), Aimé Césaire (1969) and Roberto Fernández Retamar (1971). Each reading finds its warrant in the words. One line, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1), bears confession, possession and kinship at once. Held short of the top because it is a play of figures more than of persons, less inexhaustible in single character than Hamlet.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is English drama of the 1600s and, for reach, European and world literature after. The intrinsic force is real but bounded: the play perfects the romance and fuses the court masque into public drama, yet it culminates a mode rather than founding one, and did not reorganise drama as Hamlet reorganised tragedy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Dryden and Davenant adaptation, The Enchanted Island (1667), was among the most played works of the Restoration; Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos” and Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror answer it; from Renan’s Caliban (1878) and Rodó’s Ariel (1900) through Lamming, Césaire and Retamar, Caliban and Ariel became the names of a continent’s argument with itself; and Huxley took his title from Miranda.
Score: 9.0 / 10
About four centuries. The text survives whole in one clean early print, the Folio of 1623, with no rival version and no lost part, so nothing is charged on form. It was printed without break in the later Folios of 1632, 1663 to 1664 and 1685 and in every edition since Rowe’s of 1709, and it has been read, taught and translated continuously; it is now among the most widely taught and most performed of Shakespeare’s plays. One charge is made. For a long period after 1667 the stage played the Dryden and Davenant adaptation in place of Shakespeare’s text. Reading never lapsed, so the charge is small, but a play staged throughout in its own words does not carry it.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The making is load-bearing at almost every level. The late verse is supple and compressed, its sense running across line ends and between speakers, so that dialogue in 1.2 and 5.1 moves at the speed of thought. Each order of being on the island has its own idiom: Ariel’s songs, light and exact; Caliban’s verse, physical and particular, the richest sensory language in the play given to the lowest figure; the clowns’ prose; the masque’s couplets; the Epilogue’s short lines. The stagecraft is of the first order: the storm on a bare stage in seamen’s prose, the vanishing banquet, the lovers discovered at chess, “Sweet lord, you play me false” (5.1). Charged: the knotted syntax of the 1.2 exposition and of Antonio’s temptation in 2.1.
Score: 9.3 / 10
One law governs the whole: everything on the island happens under Prospero’s art, within his afternoon, and everything replays the first usurpation. Take the two most distant elements, Stephano drunk on a butt of sack and singing, and Prospero drowning his book. They obey the same law. The clowns’ plot is the usurpation as farce, the butler made king of the isle as Antonio made himself duke, and it is ended by the same art, the conspirators hunted by spirit hounds in 4.1. The range is wide: slapstick, court intrigue, lyric, masque, theurgy and confession in one structure. What is left open is kept open by law: Antonio never answers the forgiveness, and his silence marks the limit of the art. Charged lightly: Prospero’s sudden disturbance in 4.1, lightly motivated.
Score: 9.1 / 10
For a play of a dozen persons it holds a great deal, and holds it together. The state: a dukedom usurped, a dynastic marriage to heal it, the politics of Milan and Naples, and Gonzalo’s ideal commonwealth after Montaigne. The family: a father and a daughter, brother against brother, a father mourning a son. Labour: Caliban’s logs and Ferdinand’s, service bound and service chosen, and Ariel’s term of indenture. A new world and its first inhabitant. The natural order, in the island’s springs, brine pits, berries and weather. The sacred, in the masque’s goddesses and the Epilogue’s prayer. Consciousness, in sleep and dream; art itself; and mortality. Held below the long novels and the great tragedies by compression: the state is a few nobles on a beach, and society beyond the court is only the clowns.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.4, then The Made at 9.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.2. A text whole in its one clean early print and read without break for four centuries; a making in which each order of being on the island has its own idiom and the stagecraft is of the first order; and a myth of drowning and return that is the plot itself, with figures that became archetypes through this play.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3, held by what a production can cut without the play noticing: the court banter of 2.1, the extension of the clowning, and the stasis of the long exposition. Next above it, The Encompassed at 8.4: the play holds the state, the family, labour, a new world, the natural order and the sacred, but in compression, the state seen through a few nobles on a beach.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest axis, The Inevitable, stands at 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, written about 1610 to 1611 and first recorded in performance at court, at Whitehall, on 1 November 1611, in the Revels Accounts; it was played at court again in the winter of 1612 to 1613, among the festivities for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. It is scored as one play in five acts and nine scenes with an epilogue, in the only text that survives: the First Folio of 1623, where it stands first in the volume, at the head of the Comedies. There is no quarto, so there is no choice of version to make. The Folio text is unusually clean, with full act and scene divisions and descriptive stage directions, and it closes with a list of the actors’ names in which Caliban is described as a savage and deformed slave. That the masque of the fourth act was inserted for the court performance of 1613 has been conjectured and is not established; the masque is part of the work either way. The English is Shakespeare’s, with no translation between. No text was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain, in modern spelling, and cited by act and scene, since line numbers differ between editions; everything else is paraphrased. The sources are not part of the work: the accounts of the wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda in 1609, above all William Strachey’s letter (dated 1610, printed 1625) and Sylvester Jourdain’s Discovery of the Barmudas (1610); Montaigne’s “Of the Cannibals” in Florio’s translation (1603), which Gonzalo’s commonwealth follows closely; and Medea’s invocation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses VII, which “Ye elves of hills” adapts. Facts that could not be verified, among them the line count, the share of the lines spoken by Prospero, the copy from which the Folio was set, whether the main plot has a narrative source, the metrical figures of the late verse, the length of the stage’s use of the Dryden and Davenant adaptation and the date of the restoration of Shakespeare’s text to the stage, and the musical settings of the play, are not given.