You Do (Not) Assist the Storm

Abstract

Since Rowena Cade located an amateur production of The Tempest on the rocky sea-cliffs at Minack, Porthcurno, Cornwall in 1932, there have been nine full productions of Shakespeare’s island play at this hazardous yet captivating coastal theatre. In this short article, I begin to ask what it may mean to read The Tempest at Minack along the lines of a ‘blue ecocriticism’, such as that proposed by Shakespearean ecocritic Dan Brayton, in ‘an intellectual and ethical commitment to the watery parts of this terraqueous globe’ (2011: 190). My suggestion is that the affective agency of the Atlantic always evaded wholesale appropriation into performance in the immediate moment of reception. Transporting The Tempest to a literal and living landscape at the Minack Theatre temporarily appropriates the vertiginous edges of Cornwall as Prospero’s island, reinscribing Shakespeare’s narrative on to the landscape—a landscape already historically appropriated in Shakespeare’s name, etched with memories of this particular play—and, anthropocentrically, putting the sea to work in the service of the play. The result can be read as an erasure of local specificity in response to a generic Shakespearean ‘nature’, naturalizing a claim for all of Cornwall as Shakespeare’s. But, the sea is also always in excess of the Shakespeare, affective, unsettling, vibrant, refusing to privilege human performance, and simultaneously reminding us of our place within a wider ecology. The best of Shakespeare bellowed out to sea can’t change the weather.