This chapter presents The Tempest as a partial solution to The Duchess’s paradoxical mixture of disenchanted physics and Protestant affective spirituality offering no guides in the world of post-Machiavellian politics. Politically and...
moreThis chapter presents The Tempest as a partial solution to The Duchess’s paradoxical mixture of disenchanted physics and Protestant affective spirituality offering no guides in the world of post-Machiavellian politics. Politically and theologically, The Tempest’s solutions are predicated on a greater faith in both divine providence and worldly monarchs; however this faith is used, at least nominally, to constrain rather than provide unlimited license to the worldly action of kings and deities.
To begin, I show how the assertion and discernment of providential action is central to the play’s discussions of political legitimacy. Confronted by an apparently materialist world like that of The Duchess, the play dramatizes attempts to build up politics and ethics from materialist principles, particularly through the resurrected philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism. But, the play argues, these philosophies are powerless to account for a Christian providence. The dramatization of this failure mostly involves the pranks Ariel plays on the Neapolitans and rebels; since Ariel is a spirit, this naturally suggests that for The Tempest the discernment of providence centrally involves the discernment of spirits.
Like The Duchess, however, the Tempest suggests that discernment is not concerned with the substantive distinction between angels and demons. Unlike The Duchess, here spiritual beings, Ariel and his cohort, run around on stage. Yet these spiritual beings are definitively material – Ariel is an “airy spirit” – and are interpreted by different factions at different times as angelic and demonic. In essence, they are morally neutral. Moreover, though Ariel returns to nature at the end of the play, unlike the fairies of Midsummer he spends most of play the carrying out magical, if not miraculous, violations of nature. And unlike the devils of Faustus, Ariel’s relationship with Prospero is modelled on an employment contract which, though stretched, is never broken.
Given the topicality in 1611 of King James’ recent failure to reach a settlement with Parliament framed as a “great contract,” and Victoria Kahn’s study of the 17th-century development of contractual thinking in informing theories of political obligation (Wayward Contracts), I read the contractualism of the play as a framing cosmological principle spanning covenant theology, marriage, and politics. The contracting subjects in the play are not the theoretical independently consenting equals of liberal contract theory; for one, they may be coerced, or subtly materially influenced. Tthe play backs off from the affectively and epistemically isolated “buffered selves” of the skeptical Neostoics in The Duchess; Ariel and his cohort replace lunar influence with the material influence of the air, which is able to directly affect the humours and passions, for example in Ferdinand’s musical calming after his shipwreck. Yet unlike Midsummer, Prospero’s spirit magic can never directly affect the will of its victims, preserving a domain of voluntarism for the subject. The treatment of affect in the play is accordingly much more complex than in either Midsummer or The Duchess. Feelings, whether simple pleasure or pain, or more complex aesthetic responses, can appear as tokens in political contracts or theories of political obligation, complicating attempts at the affective discernment of spirits by conflating spiritual and political languages of obligation.
Yet I suggest that the play presents a possible criterion for spiritual discernment in a particular pattern of experience which exceeds political theories of obligation. Extending David Evett’s work on the play’s thematics of willing bondage, I suggest the play presents a model for discernment in the Christian spiritual experience of the imitation of Christ’s suffering and resurrection, phrased in the gospel terms of the “sign of Jonah” (Mt 12:24ff, 16:1-4; Lk 29ff), Christ’s own criterion of discernment. This models the way apparently coercive and painful obligations can transform in time to the experience of freedom, friendship, or love. It also models the way the play’s contracts can be understood as legitimate despite inequalities between the contracting parties. The marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda is the central example of eventually consenting contract between very different individuals, whether that difference is marked by gender or different degrees of worldliness or sophistication, aesthetic or political.
Therefore, unlike the skepticism of Dr Faustus or The Duchess about the possibility of relationships between beings of different substances or statuses, The Tempest grounds its politics in a theologically central paradigm of relationships between unequals. Yet it does so, I argue, without essentializing substance as The Duchess is wont to do. As Prospero’s famous “revels speech” suggests, human substance and perhaps cosmic substance is not characterized by the mechanical ugliness of The Duchess or the meaningless excrementality of Faustus; instead, it is “the stuff that dreams are made on.” The vagueness of the phrase reflects uncertainty about the ultimate constituents of physical reality. By aligning cosmological contingency with the aesthetic construction of Prospero’s spirit masque, the play redeems the aesthetic power of human creation. Yet human power and divine power are carefully balanced by covenantal understandings. Read in a Galilean context, the play’s lunar references appeal to the very same examples cited by Poole in her discussion of Calvin – the miracle at Gibeon, control over the tides – but do so in a way that reflects covenantal theology’s understanding of nature as a covenantal order temporarily transgressible in service of other divine covenants – either of nation, as in the case of Gibeon, or individual salvation, as in the case of Christ.
The politics of artifice this way extends to the cosmos, making the world lovable (pace Faustus) by making humans partners in its creation. Moreover the transformation of covenants in the play reveal an awareness of theories of biblical accommodation, the way in which biblical cosmologies and promises are expressed in language suitable for the developing understanding of human beings over time. If Sycorax can control the tides and Prospero can dim the sun, Caliban must first learn their names and, later, learn that Stephano is not really the man in the moon. In this way the cosmological implications of Galileo’s observations, whether the Copernicanism against which the miracle at Gibeon was often cited, or the undermining of lunar influence, can be theologically absorbed. The understanding of the universe as a covenantal order subject to adjustment and accommodation but premised on a reciprocal relationship between God and humans is a kind of middle ground between Hooker’s cosmology and Calvin’s. To some extent the arbitrary acts of will underlying covenants cannot be understood rationally, and the possibilities of miracles carried out by the Ariels residual in nature cannot be ruled out. But on the other hand, covenants, even accommodated ones, mean that neither the constant miraculism of Calvin nor the predestination of Calvinism need be invoked.
This covenantal understanding extends to the play’s treatment of human fertility, which, through Miranda’s marriage, models the effects of both political and theological contracts. Though Miranda’s marriage is influenced by her father, it is not coerced; while other characters in the play suggest rape or various lunar meddlings, he makes no attempt to directly control Miranda’s fertility as in Midsummer or The Duchess. Similarly, the wedding masque’s hopes for Miranda and Ferdinand’s offspring are looser and less constraining than Midsummer’s blessing of the beds. In this way The Tempest’s treatment of fertility, like its understanding of grace, is temporally limited to a single generation; each generation requires its own covenantal renewals, political and theological.
