Noises, / sounds, and sweet airs: The burden of Shakespeare's tempest

Shakespeare Quarterly

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 36-59

  Neill, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67649730016     PISSN: 00373222     EISSN: 15383555     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/shq.2008.0000     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. Seamus Heaney, "Gifts of Rain" in Opened Ground; Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 51-53, esp. 51.
2. For a good analysis of the play's elaborately patterned aesthetic, see Mark Rose, Shakespearean Design (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1972).
3. See Enid Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and the Revels (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1927);
4. Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1961);
5. and David Lindley, ed., The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984).
6. quotations from Shakespeare's works follow The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d ed., gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
7. Orgel's note in the Oxford edition insists that the wording "need not imply that no visual effects accompanied the sound of thunder," since we know that "Jacobean theatres had lightning machines" (97n); so that here, as in Macbeth, the spectacle of the storm was to be as important as its sound. It is difficult to believe, however, that such machines can have been particularly effective in a theater where darkness had to be imagined by the audience; and Lindley (citing Andrew Gurr) suggests that "the SD's heard may accurately reflect a performance in which only off-stage noise was employed." See The Tempest, New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. David Lindley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 1.1 sd note.
8. and Peter Holland,"The Shapeliness of The Tempest"Essays in Criticism 45 (1995): 208-29, esp. 208.
9. In their Arden3 edition of The Tempest (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1999), Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan discuss Crane's role and conclude that, while the directions appear to be the work of someone less familiar with theatrical technicalities than Shakespeare must have been, they nevertheless give a good sense of the play's original staging (126-30).
10. and Lindley, ed., The Tempest, 18-25.
11. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 219.
12. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 279.
13. For a general account of the relationship between sound, sounding, and "deep subjectivity" in early modern culture, see Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002), 25-33.
14. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), s.v. "relieve, v.," 3a, 4c, OED Online, http://dictionary.oed. com (accessed 7 January 2008).
15. Michael Neill, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), 13-48, esp. 24.
16. The paradox of service as "perfect freedom," which received its classic expression in the Second Collect for Morning Prayer from Cranmer's prayer book, is discussed at length by David Evett in Discourses of Service in Shakespeare's England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1-16;
17. and David Schalkwyk in"Between Historicism and Presentism: Love and Service in Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest" Shakespeare in Southern Africa 17 (2005): 1-17, esp. 13-15.
18. All biblical citations are taken from the Geneva Bible, the version best known to Shakespeare, and are made parenthetically in the text. See The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, intro, Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969).
19. The phrase is borrowed from Sir Walter Raleigh's grimly witty descant on death, "The Life of Man"; see The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition, ed. Michael Rudick (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), 70 (poem 29c, 1. 2).
20. See also New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan., 2001), vol. 3, s.vv. "bourdon," 1;
21. J. M. Coetzee, Foe (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), 100.
22. The fullest of these attacks has been mounted by Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky in "Shakespeare and the Voyagers Revisited." Review of English Studies 58 (2007): 447-72,
23. The authors argue that the Repertory uses material that cannot have been available to Strachey until after the supposed arrival of his letter with Sir Thomas Gates's ship in July 1610, but a forthcoming article by Alden C. Vaughan challenges the alleged historical grounds for Stritmatter and Kositsky's conclusions. The only significant textual parallels in the Bermuda section of Strachey's narrative are with Silvester Jourdains Discovery of the Barmvdas (London, 1610).
24. However, no other account of storm and shipwreck seems as close to Shakespeare's as Strachey's. Stritmatter and Kositsky, in another unpublished essay, argue for the influence of Erasmus's Naufragium, while Arthur F. Kinney, in "Revisiting The Tempest" Modern Philology 93 (1995): 161-77, identifies James Rosier's voyage narrative A Trve Relation (London, 1605) as a probable alternative to Strachey's text, noting that Rosier's narrative too begins with a storm. However, no proposed source gives so much emphasis as Strachey's to the terrifying sound of the storm, nor does any other offer so rich a collection of verbal parallels with The Tempest.
25. and The First Folio of Shakespeare, prep. Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), through-line number (TLN) 1216.
26. Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), 337, 336.
27. The fullest treatment of noise in Shakespeare is Kenneth Gross's Shakespeare's Noise (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001).
28. Lindley sees the play as"grow[ing] out of [a] general disquiet [with the court masque], and attempt[ing] itself to grapple with the problems it raises." See David Lindley, "Music, Masque and Meaning in The Tempest," in The Court Masque (see n. 4 above), 47-59, esp. 54.
29. See, for example, John P. Cutis, "Music and the Supernatural in "The Tempest': A Study in Interpretation," Music and Letters 39 (1958); 347-58;
30. Theresa Coletti,"Music and The Tempest," in Shakespeare's Late Plays, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens: Ohio UP, 1974), 185-99;
31. and Robin Headlam Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 63-80, esp. 63.
32. In his essay on "Music in Shakespeare," by contrast, W. H. Auden insists that while "The Tempest is full of music of all kinds, ... it is not one of the plays in which, in a symbolic sense, harmony and concord finally triumph over dissonant disorder." See The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 500-27, esp. 526.
33. Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (London: Eric Partridge, 1970), 70, 72.
34. v.
35. See The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed. W. Speed Hill, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press for Harvard UP, 1977-82), 3:342.
36. For the possibility that Prospero's island was conceived as a figure for Ireland, and Caliban for the so-called "wild Irish," see Paul Brown, "'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 48-71;
37. and David J. Baker, "Where Is Ireland in The Tempest?," in Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (London: Macmillan, 1997), 68-88.
38. The Irish Masque at Court in Ben Jonson: The Complete Works, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 7:403,1. 141 sd.
39. See also Michael Neill, "Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare's Histories," Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 1-32.
40. See Douglas L. Peterson, Time, Tide and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances (San Marino. CA: Huntington Library, 1973), 3-70, 214-54.
41. Lindley writes that the play "exploits and explores the tensions" between the conventions of the court masque, in which the symbolic power of music was "firmly controlled and directed" (47), and those of the playhouse, where its function was more varied and unpredictable. See also his discussion of audience response in Shakespeare and Music (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 218-33.
42. Howell Chickering,"Hearing Ariel's Songs,"Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 131-72, esp. 155, suggests that the raucous chorus of these songs links them with the discordant catches of Stephano and Trinculo.
43. For a full discussion, see Deborah Levine Gera, Ancient Greek Ideas on Speech, Language, and Civilization (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003).
44. For Lindley, the barking and crowing of the choric sprites creates a discomfort with the sublime metamorphoses of Ariel's "sea-change," to "make ... us uneasily conscious of the compromise with truth that Prospero's designs necessitate." What Shakespeare dramatizes is a clash between the traditional Neoplatonic view of music as an instrument of transcendental harmony and a newer account of it as primarily rhetorical in its effects. The audience is left, Lindley suggests, divided between skepticism and a nostalgic regret at the dissolution of those Platonic theories that once sustained "a Sidneyan belief in art's golden world" ("Music, Masque and Meaning," 49, 58).
45. After the entry of "MADMEN above, some as birds, others as beasts," Isabella explains, "Sometimes they imitate the beasts and birds, / Singing, or howling, braying, barking - all / As their wild fancies prompt em." See Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, 3d rev. ed., ed. Michael Neill (London: A. and C. Black, 2006), 3.2.184 sd, 189-91.
46. My own translation, adapted from Aimé Césaire, A Tempest (Based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest"; Adaptation jor a Black Theater), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1992), 73.
47. and Alexander Cruden, A Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament... (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1854), s.v. "burden."
48. This approach goes back to at least 1838, when Thomas Campbell declared The Tempest marked by "a sort of sacredness as the last work of the mighty workman, Shakespeare, as if conscious that it would be his last, and as if inspired to typify himself, has made its hero a natural, a dignified and benevolent magician." See the New Variorum edition of The Tempest, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892), 356.