Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

The Storm

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About four years ago, when I was in the rare books library at Mystic Seaport making some notes that eventually turned into At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, I wanted to write the entire book on The Tempest.  And, really, to be even more extreme, I wanted to write the whole thing about the first scene.

I’ve never seen the storm scene done well on stage (it was the low point of the great Bridge Project Tempest last year at BAM, and also of the engaging RSC production with Patrick Stewart I saw in London a few years ago).  As I read it, the scene exposes the chaos and disruption at the play’s core.  “We split,” say the wet mariners, and at this moment — before the magus & his emotive daughter & the air spirit & etc arrive to explain & clarify & order everything — disorder rules the stage.  In production that have Prospero on the stage in 1.1 — as he was in the Sam Mendes/Bridge version, as in many others — it short-circuits the scene.  We shouldn’t have anyone visible to trust.

So many choices — I wrote about the Boatswain’s technical maritime language (“yar!”) in Shakespeare’s Ocean, and I’ve read good explanations of the scene’s anti-monarchism (“What cares these roarers for the name of king?”).  Alonso’s plea for theatrical authority (“Where’s the master?”), Antonio’s rough individualism (“Hang, cur, hang”), and Gonzalo’s weepy plea for “long heath, brown furze”  all amount to different efforts to wring chaos into order.

But there’s a brief moment here, before Miranda & Prospero come on stage, when it’s not clear that any order is forthcoming.  That’s the wrack really does wreck everything.  That that play really investigates the meaning of being “lost at sea” (to borrow a phrase).  That’s what I don’t think anyone has managed to capture on stage.

I wonder what it would be like to try to stage it underwater.

The Tempest & Grad School in English

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Here’s a cover image of The Tempest from a 1707 ed of Shakespeare’s Works that I used in the opening case of the Folger show last summer.  If you look at the terror on the faces of the mariners, the demonic glee of Ariel in the clouds, & the bemused unconcern of Prospero on shore (hard to see on the left hand side), it’s a pretty good image of grad school in English.

Please comment below  & read this image back for me: do you see a different allegory, of teaching or learning or something else?

(This’ll give me a chance to test the comments, & to approve each of you as a commentor for the blog going forward.)

The Tempest and the Postmodern Novel

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The new semester’s here, so it’s time to put away the summer reading & turn to class prep.  In the past few months I’ve been reading postmodern (mostly 21c) novels that in various ways respond to The Tempest, & I thought I’d jot down some thoughts.

Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (1997): The utopian fantasia becomes a “Visto through the Wilderness,” as Englightenment rationality does for Pynchon what humanism did for Shakespeare, though Pynchon is more overtly skeptical.  But I wonder if the deep ambivalence that’s M&D wears on its sleeve isn’t the underlying anxiety that clouds Shakespeare’s play: the sense that, at the end, Prospero’s brave new world isn’t as “brave” (in the early modern sense of decked out, dressed up) so much as it is costly, both morally and economically.

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger (1992): The two cousins both want to be the princely heir, and the great thing about this book is that the multiracial utopian section, in which the proto-Darwinist doctor enters into a matriarchal mixed marriage with a former slave, isn’t cloying or overdone.  Instead it’s a version of that old feminist plea about Caliban and Miranda forming an alliance, even if it doesn’t end up working out any better than it might in the play.

Marina Warner, Indigo (1992): What does Miranda want?  She, too, gets her Caliban (in the 20c frame tale), and Warner’s novel presents the various Prospero-ish men as the fuller opacity than the fertile Caribbean.   Great stuff about sports & sporting culture — perhaps an oblique way of thinking again about the theater, another profession that runs on sanguy or physical charisma?

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004): In the end more Melvillean than Shakeseparean (if that’s a distinction with a difference), Mitchell’s high-wire act of stylistic change mirrors, on the level of the phrase, the experience of radical cultural change that the novel describes (and that we’re all experiencing).  Perhaps a bit sentimental on the last page?  How can you reconcile the novel’s deep fear of corporate power structures with a humane plea for abolition?  Need to re-read Benito Cereno..