Scott Price
Tom Blackburn
English 101 Shakespeare
April 24, 2000The Insubstantial Pageant’s Substantial Uses Human Magic and Directorship in As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest
Often the process of resolution in Shakespeare’s plays is a matter of exile to a ‘safe space’ where the characters play with identity, perceptions, and roles with greater freedom than their troubled ‘home setting’ allows. The experimentation gives the characters fresh perspective on their assumed roles in their home setting, and if the character is successful, they return or are re-socialized back to the ‘real world’ with the knowledge gained in their exile. This process is a good analogy for what the audience itself might experience if the play is successful&endash; it steps away from the real world into the ‘safe space’ of the theater, where transgression is more accepted if not expected, and there it watches characters engage their own roles as well as those of contemporary England. As in the plays, however, the most difficult aspect of that exploratory space is carrying its lessons back to the rest of life. Many of Shakespeare’s plays end self-enclosed; the audience may easily walk away and dismiss any troubling aspects of the play as part of the foolery of the theater. Directorial characters within several of the plays &endash;As You Like It, and A Winter’s Tale most notably&endash; use illusion, under the guise of magic to manipulate characters’ perceptions of their experiences and to thereby aid the process of returning with the learned lessons intact. In The Tempest, Prospero uses his ‘real magic’ in ways similar to the comedies’ illusory‘human magic’ to resolve the plot of the play. Through the metatheatrical themes of the play and through the epilogue, he also addresses the process of return at an explicit level which works outside of the plot. As Prospero emerges from his self-defined world with the lessons of the isle intact in him, he asks the audience to make the lessons of the play real outside of the theater, and to thereby participate in the process of exile and return that has served the characters of the comedies and romances so well.
A common element of the various forms of retreat and return is the suspension of the rules governing the character’s normal life for a time before the rules are reinstated. A prime example is in As You Like It where through exile or abandonment everyone ends up in the Forest of Arden. There the urban characters all experiment to varying levels with their previous identities and conceptions before using elements of their experiments to either return to society or (as with Jacques) settle into an alternate lifestyle. In the comedies and romances magic, or the appearance of magic, is often a key aspect of the alternate space which by its irrationality allows the characters to return to society as the illusion is dispelled. In its literal, supernatural form‘real magic’ such as Prospero’s releases events from the bonds of the physical world to allow concentration on the mental, moral aspects of the crisis. More often, magic appears as a manipulation by one character of the other characters’ perceptions of the world&endash; a ‘human magic’ under the control of a directorial character. The directorial character performs a feat which seems magical, irrational, and the result of the illusion allows the enspelled characters to return to their original context with the lessons of the alternate space.
Two prime directors are Paulina in The Winter’s Tale and Rosalind of As You Like It. The "magic" emerges only in the final scene to reunite Leontes and Hermione, when Paulina unveils the "statue" of Hermione. Paulina’s dispelling of Hermione at the end of the play is more conceit than conjuration, however. The illusory ‘likeness’ of supposedly-dead Hermione allows Leontes to complete the restoration of his self-tainted image of his "peerless lover" while keeping his healthy guilt intact. The artifice first requires that Leontes gain sufficient closure to move on with his life, to take a new queen, though "she shall not be so young/ As was the former, but she shall be such/ As, walked [his] first queen’s ghost, it should take joy/ To see her in [his] arms." (5.1.78-80) Paulina maintains the memory of Hermione, ensuring remembrance of Leontes’ misdeeds, while the subsequent illusion that Hermione is actually re-animated allows him to live on without being defined by his guilt&endash; this is a new Hermione. From Hermione’s point of view, the performance allows her to witness Leontes’ sincerity. The reality is withheld behind the curtain of disbelief until, first, visual ‘illusion’ can be used to verify Leontes’ sincerity, and second, ‘magic’ may provide a convenient explanation for the illusion, and so seal the lesson in the restored context. While it is interesting for later discussion to note that Paulina must disclaim her ‘magic’ to make it palatable to the audience (both the audience of the characters on stage and that in the rest of the theater), the magic of the ‘statue’s transformation is of minor importance to the fact of resolution&endash; Hermione and Leontes are together again.
Magic is similarly used and then excused in As You Like It. Rosalind tells the audience in the epilogue that "My way is to conjure you." Though on one hand this phrase rests on an archaic use of conjure, to earnestly entreat, it also recalls two ‘magical’ incidents earlier in the play. In the first, Rosalind as Ganymede uses illusory artifice, or ‘human magic’ to untie the lovers’ web, much as Paulina does. In 5.2 Rosalind creates the excuse of a magic trick, claiming that she (Ganymede) has long conversed with a magician, and that through that ‘magic’ she can make the illogical happen&endash; Rosalind to appear in the wood. Indeed, Rosalind wanders off to effect the magic, and returns with Hymen, whose ‘real magic’ is evoked to bless the union in a pageant so fantastic that it allows the audience to cast the experience into socially ‘safe’ disregard as they return to the real world. The play does not concern itself with the rationality of the resolution. In Ganymede’s transformation, it is unclear and almost irrelevant whether the other characters understand the artifice, as Hymen quickly comes in to tie the lovers’ knot into a comfortable pattern&endash; she need not explain herself, but simply state that "I bar confusion./ ‘’Tis I must make conclusion/ Of these most strange events." (5.4.24-26) On the play’s metatheatrical level, however, the illusion is exposed, and the audience leaves a closed play. In his commentary on the similarly mythological masque of Ceres in 4.1.60-139 of The Tempest, David Bevington asserts that "These visions are illusory in the profound sense that all life is illusory, an ‘insubstantial pageant’ melted into thin air." (p. 1529) The comedies in large part support Bevington’s analysis&endash; those containing magic end with an apologetic air which draws the magic back into the world of the play and allows the audience, if they are displeased, to consider the play but a play, a dream or illusion. The classic example is Puck’s epilogue to A Midsummer Night’s Dream&endash;"If we shadows have offended,/ think but this and all is mended,/ That you have but slumbered here/ While these visions did appear." (4.1.150-155). Such a step toward consciousness of the play’s artifice, as Bevington asserts, leads us toward an awareness of the constructed nature of many aspects of ‘real’ life, of the masks which we put on, of the flexibility of our own ‘natures.’ On the other hand, there is room for the audience to simply dismiss the play’s ‘deeper’ level.
The epilogue of As You Like It works a little like Puck’s metatheatrically&endash; the male actor playing female Rosalind (who has been playing male Ganymede, playing a woman) steps out like Puck to hope that the audience enjoyed the play. In the process he plays with the audience and makes ‘safe’ the gender-bending in the play by acknowledging the artifice of every aspect of his role. "It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue," but he is not a lady; a good play needs no epilogue, but it helps; he is not "furnished like a beggar; therefore to beg will not become [him];" if he were a woman, he would kiss the beautiful men, but he is not, and yet he curtsies farewell. Rosalind drops the audience’s suspended disbelief to expose the artifice, to seal the world of the play and its potential messages and morals back into the play; the magic is revealed as theatrical artifice. Even if the audience may not be convinced that life is illusory, constructed, the play is certainly cast within a magical circle, unable to reach out to the substantial world. Any anxiety over Rosalind’s directorship and gender-bending is allayed by the Pageant and then the epilogue as they remind the audience that it is in a theater. In effect, Rosalind closes with a Puck-like chance to opt-out of the issues raised&endash; after all, it’s only a play, and to see slander in an allowed fool is to acknowledge your own foolishness.
As critics of Shakespeare (and of the postmodern underpinnings of this perspective) will complain, however, Bevington’s reading of the comedies produces a counterproductively relativist text. What is gathered from the play cannot be taken out of it; Shakespeare effectively dismisses any potential ‘point’ to the play and it can only work relative to itself, it is entertainment only. Robert Egan’s counter to that potentially nihilistic conclusion is sound&endash; that much of the power of the later plays, especially the romances, comes from how they avoid the comedies’ apologetic conclusions in favor of more thoroughly examining how art can affect life. By affecting, even effecting, the mind of the viewer, who then affects the world, the play may reach out and have substantial consequences. The comedies’ alternative is to hint at the constructed, perspective-based underpinnings of human will, but then to close the curtain and finish back in the play’s world. By more thoroughly presenting the difficulties of resolution, and by making the artifice of the theater a more central and explicit theme in the play, the romances offer better chances for the audience to engage the issues in their own terms.
The Tempest is the quintessential example of these issues. Prospero’s magic is not only undeniably, physically real to the characters, but it is also only excused in Prospero’s disavowal of his power at the end. His full understanding of the broader process represented by the ‘magical’ manipulation and resolution allows the theme to rise to the level of explicit discussion; next to exposition, Prospero’s emergence from his magical space is the theme of the asides and the epilogue (the sections of the play which most address the audience). The eminence of the theme shows that the concrete end of ‘real magic’ as one mode of manipulation of perception is neither whether the meaning of the characters’ actions is self-contained or is left to the audience nor whether the end-product of a play can encourage agency or whether it falls into relativism or fantasy. Instead, it highlights the process which directorial characters use to shape the perceptions of those around them and hence shape, through those characters’ actions, the world itself. The Tempest’s meta-theatrical elements open the agency of certain characters out to the audience and leave the final meaning of the play to the audience. To understand this, however, we need to examine the very different space and directorship in The Tempest, and examine the interaction between ‘real magic,’ ‘human magic’, spectacle and sincerity.
The reparative space in The Tempest is, at the most basic level, the isle itself. Distant from Milan, the tamed isle is harmless but rich with potential energy. The characters face an island where every familiar image undergoes a "sea change"&endash; friends have vanished in a terrible storm which left each person in better shape than they entered it (2.1.64). Underneath the safety, however lies a rich bed of tensions, urges, and motivations. The ‘real magic’ that the isle teems with is amoral. Linked with Air, Water, and Fire but not Earth, "the spirit is morally neutral but incredibly vital" (Bevington 1528) and works not with or against or for human (earthy) morals, but in a distinct, separate plane. Ariel, the primary representative of the spirits, strives only toward freedom, serving to the letter of the command and only expressing will and self-direction when such activity might bring it closer to freedom, as when in 3.2. it overhears the plot against Prospero and leaves to tell him. The magical music allays both fury and passion(1.2.396), and magic is used alike to cause helpful sleep (so that Prospero’s magicking will not affect his impressionable daughter &endash;1.2.187) and pinching, stinging, and misdirection (4.1.256). The ethereal, energetic nature of the spirits and true magic is set against the earthy, sexual power of the hag Sycorax and Caliban. These energies provide a rich playground for the characters to express themselves within, and for them to directly experiment with their characters. Stephano and Trinculo play at politics, for instance, while Ferdinand is set to playing at love and being without his father.
To Prospero, those energies are resources for productive use. Each character reacts to the possibilities and qualities of the isle in their own way, though Prospero, with complete understanding and control, sets their bounds. This is not to say that he is omnipotent; There is a bookish tendency in his rule, most visible in the island’s power dynamics. Caliban’s sexual energy is held in check by Prospero and his books, for "without [the books]/He’s but a sot,"(3.2.92-93) like Caliban, who is so wholly earthy, natural, that "as with age his body uglier grows,/ So his mind cankers." (5.1.192). In Prospero’s anti-Milan, those without learning are but Calibans, impotent against the powers of the spirit and intellect and subject to the world, rather than being in command of it.:
You fools! I and my fellows
Are ministers of Fate. The elements
Of whom your swords are tempered may as well
Wound the loud winds, or with bemocked-at-stabs
Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish
One dowl that’s in my plume. (Ariel, 4.1.60-65)Prospero has established a relatively safe ‘play’ context for the characters to reform within &endash;if they will ‘play’. Sebastian and Antonio, still viewing their predicament in terms of exile from Milan, cannot see good in the isle, and hence do not function effectively at first within the experimental setting. To Prospero as exiled Duke, the ability to adapt or ‘play along’ and learn from the self-examination the isle allows is equivalent to reformation. They prove their inability to adapt as they plot to kill the king to achieve sovereignty over a kingdom of no use to them. Prospero keeps in full awareness of the events on the isle through his spirits, and manipulates the characters’ perceptions to his own ends. Prospero, then, is director complete; the island is his space, its characters, spirits, even its time moves in accordance to his plan ("My charms crack not, my spirits obey, and Time/ Goes upright with his carriage." 5.1.2). Spirits keep him alerted to movement, and the conspirators arrive for punishment just as the other characters near. Prospero rules the comic time in the romance.
Yet the end for all these means is return, to Milan, to power, and to a normal life for Miranda, and magic is anathema to return. At the level of the plot, he had clearly become too dependent on it, or too absorbed in it (cite lines about old self). At the level of commentary on directorship, however, Prospero must renounce the magic because it is incompatible with a complex world where he is not sole master; in Milan, there are more subjectivities than his own, and they cannot all be led as the few on the isle may. Prospero’s substantial, ‘rough’ magic works only in the context of the exile-space he rules over; as he returns to the ‘real world’ context of Milan his self-constructed context must give way to the social rules which he self-admittedly failed to participate in during his time as Duke (explained in1.2). Prospero is fully aware of this requirement; he is prepared for the relatively easy process of abdication, requiring only the sundering of the manifestation of his social sovereignty over the island, of breaking his staff and the drowning his book. The key in that passage is his condition:
But this rough magic
I here abjure, and when I have required
Some heavenly music&endash;which even now I do&endash;
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for. . . (5.1.52-57)Prospero has gathered the characters together, as at the end of each of the plays discussed here to unmask, to complete the exile’s journey by returning them to their original context ("they shall be themselves" -5.1.30), having learned their lessons ("they being penitent" -5.1.28). Prospero has wisely marshalled the physical rules of the island to affect the senses of the characters toward his end. Here, as well, the physical magic has its limit, in that it can only do so much to the characters before it becomes what we might call the dark magic of Shakespeare, or magic that is irreversible and therefore progresses characters toward wild ends in ways inconsistent with the flexible comic spirit. ‘Human magic’ is reversible, is dissociated from the physical earthy reality and instead works in the mind.
The efficacy of Prospero’s magic, then, is in its use of physical magic to effect mental or spiritual change&endash; to create the effects of ‘human magic.’ The conspirators participate in the surreality of the isle because it offers them advancement; Miranda knows of her father’s art but is uniquely untouched by it (even when Prospero summons Ariel, he puts Miranda to sleep so that she does not participate in the magic). Each character has their own reason for participating in the ritual which make them play their part and allow Prospero to marshall their energies.
Maintaining the semi-belief, or suspending one’s disbelief to participate in the ‘play,’ requires a slight distance which the romances take pains to construct. Many critics have commented on the enigmatic distance of the final plays in one form or another, usually to the effect that the performativity of every action, the references to existant tales, the relative lack of descriptive dialogue all establish an enigmatic distance between the stage and audience, keeping the performance at arms length. Prospero himself directs the masque in such a manner, acknowledging the artifice of it to Ferdinand and Miranda. At the end, Caliban, earthy nature, interrupts, sending Prospero into minor despair over the ephemerality of the idyllic vision; the sexuality and power dynamics of earthy nature will trouble the lovers’ spiritual peace. However, the despair is short-lived, and introspective. Prospero reasons it out, and in his forgiveness and restoration we see his recovery&endash; he is able to step back from the pageant and see that all dissolves, but his resolution to restore his malefactors to their pageant shows that he does not despair at the constructed nature of that peace. He cannot retreat utterly, as his daughter has pulled him into the action toward kindness &endash; he knows that he "and his more braver daughter could control [Ferdinand], /If now ‘twere fit to do ‘t," (21.2.442-3) but he relinquishes that control for the enjoyment that his daughter will have from playing her part. He is distant, but not utterly; in 5.1 he takes part with his "nobler reason‘gainst [his] fury" (5.1.26-7) and thereby chooses to leave his own safe space, to make his own return.
The emphasis for Prospero, and therefore for the audience’s understanding of the play, is on how to return. The plot-level of the play shows that the characters are taken care of&endash; they have been so jostled from their senses that they easily accept Prospero’s miraculous return (5.1.159). However, the unmasking of illusion has only happened within the plot-level of the play; for the meta-narrative treating the audience’s return from the space of the play to be effective, Prospero offers the Epilogue.
In his unique context, Prospero stands alone at the end of the play, making literal the symbolic journey of a constructed character out of the self-contained world of his devising, the expression of his very thoughts and feelings, into a broader context where he is not his own self, but is defined in part by each observer. His success in Milan will depend on his subjects’ views of him just as the success of the play will depend on the understanding of the audience. The temptation to draw parallels between the long-exiled Duke, who has achieved mastery over his lonely realm of metaphor and magic and the playwright nearing the end of his career is almost too great to withstand the very real arguments of intentionality and historicity, but what can be drawn from Prospero’s emergence is the process of return. Working still within the play’s imagery, he asks the audience to complete the process that he has outlined&endash; not by immortalizing the play itself, which is to bind his character to the island he has inhabited ‘historically’ throughout the play by the audience’s internalized ‘spell’ of static memory, but to understand his spellcasting process of perception manipulation, of navigating contexts, so to achieve at any time the exile’s journey of discovery.
The potential gain in the unmasking of magic, in the revelation of the play’s magic as theatrical artifice is only partly in revealing the constructedness of our own interaction with it. With a skillful abjuration, the playwright may hope to bring the audience from the alternate space he has created in the theater back to the world having recontextualized lived experience to some extent. The process of penitence and understanding concluded, the careful director casts off the artifice of the work, buries the book to reveal the human significance behind the process. The magic of careful distance, artifice, disbelief and reconciliation may be the only escape for the characters and their messages, through the gentle breath of the audience and the spells of their actions on the real world with the play in mind.
SourcesEgan, Robert. Drama Within Drama: Shakespeare’s Sense of His Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.
Peterson, Douglas L. Time, Tide, and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Romances. San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1973.
Shakespeare, William. "As You Like It", Complete Works of Shakespeare, David Bevington, ed. London: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 1997.
Shakespeare, William. "The Tempest", Complete Works of Shakespeare, David Bevington, ed. London: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 1997.
Shakespeare, William. "A Midsummer Night’s Dream", Complete Works of Shakespeare, David Bevington, ed. London: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 1997.
Shakespeare, William. "The Winter’s Tale", Complete Works of Shakespeare, David Bevington, ed. London: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 1997.