![]() He made it back to England after Jamestown, but his wife was already dead from illness. ![]() Some feel like the character of Alonzo in the tempest was based on him. ![]() He organized a failed mutiny while on the Island, and was going to be executed by the Captain, but talked his way out of it by stating that his poor wife and children would surely die if he did not return to care for them. Steven Hopkins was on the crew of the ship that ran aground in Bermuda. This may all be a reach and Shakespeare intended no reading into the character of Caliban, but the strangeness of the character invites it, although the part in this telling of “Tempest” does not. Ariel is an indentured servant–the British eventually sent a lot of them to the colonies, essentially white slaves. Prospero obviously can’t care for himself and Miranda and needs slaves. And, anyway, they can be seduced with a little firewater. Prospero claims it as his, apparently because he is the only white man on the island–natives don’t count. But why would Shakespeare create such a strange character just to sort of throw him away? And is there any fact behind the notion that he is Shakespeare’s anagram of cannibal? If there is, and even if there isn’t, is he a stand-in for all the people enslaved by European imperialism? It is, it would seem, Caliban’s island, and he has the urge to fill it with little Calibans. It seems he adds little to the play except some low humor. The trouble I have with “Tempest” is Caliban. Not unlike Prospero-whose art contracts the vagaries of life into his magically-controlled universe-Shakespeare contracted the far reaches of the known world to the perimeter of his dramatic stage, using the stage itself to infuse this world with its own far-reaching mysteries. Ariel describes himself to Prospero, flitting around the shipwreck, “flam amazement,” “burn in many places: on the top mast,/The yards and bowsprit….” To the cramped streets of London, Shakespeare brought these images of a sparsely-populated island, a place whose existence had only recently been made known to Europe at all. Elmo’s Fire”-the luminous plasma created by an electric field emanating from a volcanic eruption or a storm. Īs you’ll read in my program article, what Strachey saw was a phenomenon called “St. The Virginia Company Secretary William Strachey, one of the survivors, reports seeing in the aftermath:Īn apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze,…shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, tempting to settle as it were on any of the four shrouds:…half the night it kept with us, running sometimes along the mainyard to the very end, and then returning. Moreover, Ariel herself (for whom there is no literary precedent) was probably inspired by what the sailors saw after the wreck of the Sea venture. Who, with a charm join’d to their suffer’d labour, Exhausted by battling the tempest and suffering the effects of food deprivation, the sailors huddled on the battered ship in corners or, indeed, as one sailor put it, “wheresoever they chanced first to sit or lie.” This sailor’s account was most likely the basis for Ariel’s report to Prospero: How could they have survived such peril? Ariel conveys the amazement that Shakespeare probably felt in reading of the safe delivery of the sailors to the shore: “Not a hair perish’d,” he says to Prospero in wonderment. ![]() "The Sea Venture in a Heavy Sea in 1609," painting by Christopher Grimes One of them, The Sea Venture, carrying the fleet’s Admiral, ran ashore. The vessels in the fleet couldn’t keep together, and two fared particularly badly. It is thought to have been inspired by Shakespeare’s reading of a real-life event described by a voyager: On Ja fleet of nine English vessels was nearing the end of a supply voyage to the new colony of the Bermudas when it ran into “a cruel tempest,” presumably a hurricane. The Tempest is also one of the few Shakespeare plays not to have a clear literary source. The Tempest has an unclear setting: We know simply that it takes place somewhere in the Mediterranean, since Alonso and Antonio are on their way back from Tunis (where Alonso’s daughter has been reluctantly married off) to Naples. Resident Dramaturg Philippa Kelly reveals real-world inspiration for one of Shakespeare’s final plays.
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