Understanding The Tempest

Abstract

Understanding The Tempest Robert B. Pierce (bio) Some years ago I wrote an article 1 on Shakespeare’s The Tempest in which I gave a reading that was quite sympathetic to Prospero and Miranda. I tried in that article to express an important part of my understanding of the play at that time, and I would still stand behind what I then said. On the other hand, I find much that is appealing and persuasive in a series of New Historical and anticolonialist readings of the play, 2 which tend to be not at all sympathetic to Prospero and if anything to turn Caliban into a sort of hero or at least victim. How am I to explain this weak-minded doubleness in my understanding of The Tempest? Is it that I cannot make up my mind about what Shakespeare’s play means, or can two contradictory readings be part of the way I understand it? My difficulty with The Tempest is suggestive of a larger problem in assimilating varied interpretations of a complex literary or dramatic text, one that I suspect we all encounter. The task of adjudicating among different and even contradictory commentaries is dependent on what counts as understanding The Tempest. A stern New Critic would argue that all the writing about the New World and English colonialism is irrelevant to understanding the play, however accurate it may be as history. On the other hand, the New Historicist would condemn a formalist commentary on images and characters as naive and shallow, as incapable of addressing the social and political implications of the text. The two point in very different directions where to look in seeking the meaning of The Tempest. What might it mean to say that one understands a play? And what is the function of critical commentary in providing that understanding? These seem like very basic questions for our enterprise of teaching and writing about literature, including drama, and no doubt we all have developed some personal answers to them, but they are hard to deal with in any definitive way. I would like to suggest that the difficulty comes partly from a misleading picture of what constitutes the meaning of a play, the kind of misleading picture that according to Wittgenstein bewitches much of our thinking. 3 This article will not solve all the problems of how to understand a play, but I do hope to sort out some of the issues and confusions in a way that will clarify how to make critical commentary useful and how to judge the usefulness of the criticism we read. [End Page 373] I plan to take as my test case Shakespeare’s The Tempest, partly because the flood of recent commentary on it has raised much controversy and for many of us has radically altered our understanding of the play. How can one play look so different from different perspectives, and how can I make sense of my seeing it in two such seemingly incompatible ways as the traditional and colonialist readings? Should I reject the one or the other view as mistaken or perverse? Can I reconcile them in some larger framework? Or must I simply live with the incongruity? Let me suggest the nature of the problem by quoting a series of statements about The Tempest, all of which presumably make some kind of claim to truth and to usefulness: In The Tempest whatever evil remains is impotent, and goodness returns to action. Here, as in all the last plays, there is a re-birth, a return to life, a heightened, almost symbolic, awareness of the beauty of normal humanity after it has been purged of evil—a blessed reality under the evil appearance. 4 In Prospero’s metastance striving for power, secure identity, and certain belief is transcended through a choice by the whole self to live with faith in a world it knows man can never fully control or predict. 5 To come to the island is to start life over again—both his own and Miranda’s—with himself as sole parent, but also with himself as favorite child. He has been banished by his wicked, usurping, possibly illegitimate younger brother...