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In a Continual Tempest

November 2nd, 2013 No comments

My brave spirit!  Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil/Would not infect his reason?  ~Prospero to Ariel, The Tempest

Far from being a play that he must have hated, The Tempest actually put a late breath of life into Ben Jonson’s early ‘Epode’, (click here to read in a separate window) which appeared alongside Shakespeare’s ‘Phoenix and the Turtle’ in Love’s Martyr.   So far, no one but Charles Downing, a turn-of-the-last-century bardolator, seems to have noticed that each of the concepts Jonson had explored in that early morality poem gained a local habitation and a name on Shakespeare’s bare island:  Vice, Virtue, Reason, Blind Desire and True Love all come alive as Antonio, Gonzalo, Prospero, Ferdinand and Miranda.

prospero-and-ariel

The thematic correspondences between Jonson’s poem and Shakespeare’s play seem to me to be sufficiently striking for us to question whether or not there may have been some silent, unrecorded collaboration between the two poets in the composition of The Tempest.  If so, it was a perfect mating of talents. Where Jonson had compressed all his static allegorical figures into a relatively brief ‘Poetical Essay’ (116 lines), Shakespeare, in The Tempest, seems to have unpacked Jonson’s mannequins and clothed their naked utility with robust poetry and ethereal song.  Thought is translated into symbolic action.  Take, for instance, Jonson’s dry musing in his poem’s first lines:

Not to know vice at all, and keep true state,
Is virtue and not fate:
Next to that virtue, is to know vice well,
And her black spite expel,
Which to effect (since no breast is so sure, 
Or safe, but she’ll procure
Some way of entrance) (Epode lines 1-7)

In The Tempest, we find Jonson’s idea moving with swift authority when Prospero questions his “Brave spirit”, Ariel, about the results of his magical project.  Paraphrased as “Was no breast so sure or safe, that this coil/ would not infect their reason?”, the question leads us directly to where Jonson is going in his poem.  A few lines further down, Jonson introduces “Wakeful Reason, our affection’s king”, who depends on us to “plant a guard/Of thoughts to watch and ward” against the entrance of Vice.  In The Tempest, Shakespeare plants two unreliable guards – Antonio and Sebastian – to watch over the sleeping king:  AHollowBurstofBellowing

We two, my lord,
Will guard your person while you take your rest,
And watch your safety. (TT 2.1.911-13)

A few minutes later in the play, Gonzalo, who plays “Virtue” to the conspirators’ “Vice”, gives us a vivid illustration of lines 22-3 in Jonson’s poem, which speak of what happens when “the sentinel, That should ring larum to the heart, doth sleep”:

Upon mine honour, sir, I heard a humming,
And that a strange one too, which did awake me:
I shaked you, sir, and cried: as mine eyes open’d,
I saw their weapons drawn: there was a noise,
That’s verily. ‘Tis best we stand upon our guard,
Or that we quit this place; let’s draw our weapons. (TT 2.1.1066-71)

The next passage in Jonson’s poem tells how “Wakeful Reason” will “quickly taste the treason” of the Vices attempting to enter each breast that seems so sure.  Once alerted to these temptations, the next step for “Reason” is to “commit/close, the close cause of it”.   The line is dense but not obscure.  “Commit” carries the meaning of imprison, as we find in Shakespeare: “Sir, here comes the nobleman that committed the Prince for striking him about Bardolph” (2H4, 1.2.350).  As for the “close cause” to be committed, it is “close” to us because our own eyes and ears are the ports of entry for Vice.  Therefore, in the logic of Jonson’s poetic essay:

‘Tis the securest policy we have,
To make our sense our slave.  (Epode lines 17-18)

“To make our sense our slave” may be the allegorical logic that binds Prospero (as “Wakeful Reason”) so uneasily to his role as master of two spirit “slaves”, Ariel and Caliban.  Caliban, who “must eat” his dinner, and would gladly people the island with a “brave brood” of Calibans, easily represents our carnal appetites.  At the end of the play, when Prospero has finished taming the beast in Caliban, he confesses what we might have guessed all along: “This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.”

Ariel is much more complicated than Caliban, perhaps because the senses he serves – Prospero’s intellectual pride and desire for vengeance – are in themselves such complex temptations.  These two pitfalls are missing from Jonson’s early poem, which has the perfect love of the Phoenix and the Turtle for its inspiration.  But Ariel also serves as Prospero’s personal Cupid, by bringing Ferdinand and Miranda together:

At the first sight
They have changed eyes. Delicate Ariel,
I’ll set thee free for this. (TT1.2.613)

ariel_ferdinand

As in The Tempest, Cupid isn’t mentioned by name in Jonson’s poem, but the blind boy’s disruptive methods and effects make a strong impression in both works.  One major object of Prospero’s “art” in raising the tempest was to bring Ferdinand safely ashore where he cannot help but fall helplessly in love with the admirable Miranda.  With this in mind, listen closely to Ariel’s response to Prospero’s, “Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil/Would not infect their reason?”

                                     …Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad and play’d
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring,—then like reeds, not hair,—
Was the first man that leap’d; cried, ‘Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.’ (TT 1.2.329-36)

Now compare this with how Jonson personifies Cupid by his other name, “blind Desire”:

The thing, they here call Love, is blind Desire,
Arm’d with bow, shafts, and fire;
Inconstant, like the sea, of whence ’tis borne,
Rough, swelling, like a storm:
With whom who sails, rides on the surge of fear,
And boils, as if he were
In a continual tempest. (Epode lines 37-43)

With both passages still fresh in mind, listen now to Shakespeare’s portrait of Ferdinand riding the swollen surge, lines that were meant as comfort to King Alonso, who has no idea that his son survived the tempest and is now smitten with Miranda: tempestAriel

                                       …Sir, he may live:
I saw him beat the surges under him,
And ride upon their backs; he trod the water,
Whose enmity he flung aside, and breasted
The surge most swoln that met him; his bold head
‘Bove the contentious waves he kept, and oar’d
Himself with his good arms in lusty stroke
To the shore, that o’er his wave-worn basis bow’d,
As stooping to relieve him: I not doubt
He came alive to land.

“It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Shakespeare wrote these lines, in which there seems to be but one trace of him, and that is “oared”, says H. H. Furness in the Variorum edition of the play, with no further discussion of his reason for doubting Shakespeare’s hand here.  Could Jonson have written these lines?  “I not doubt” is a phrase that appears twice in this play, but no where else in Shakespeare; we find it in Jonson’s Cataline.  Likewise, Shakespeare only combines “bold” with “head” here in The Tempest; Jonson uses “bold head” in his Epigram CXXVI to Mrs. Cary.  He may have publicly dissed The Tempest in Bartholomew Fair, but Honest Ben seems to have left a partial print or two on Shakespeare’s text.