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 Old Swimming Hole: Short Beach

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My home waters are on the CT side of Long Island Sound, in a sheltered cove a bit east of New Haven, between the Farm River and Killam’s Point.  I took this picture yesterday at the afternoon high tide, when I went down to swim with my daughter Olivia.  If you squint you can see on the left side the house where the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox lived in the 19c.

On a calm day, the swimming is great — warm & salty, with no waves to speak of usually.  The tide matters a lot to swimmers here.  At low tide, it’s too easy to dig down into the silt with each stroke, but with a good flood, in this sheltered cove, it’s easy to swim out a mile or so in calm open water — out to Gull Island to disturb the birds, or even toward Kelsey’s, at the river’s mouth.  Sometimes I  worry about boat traffic, but it’s mostly kayaks & sailboats (inc the Yale sailing team).

The Sound doesn’t circulate all that much, so the water isn’t as clear as it could be. You can’t usually see the bottom, which is often enough silt anyway.  I swim through a kind of sand- and salt-filled haze, with almost everything blurry even if I remembered my goggles (which I didn’t, yesterday).

This evening the surf will be up as Hurricane Earl passes offshore.

Mandelshtam

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Sleeplessness.  Homer.  Taut sails.

I have counted half the catalog of ships,

That caravan of cranes, the expansive host,

Which once rose above Hellas.

Like a caravan of cranes toward alien shores —

On princes’ heads godlike spray —

Where are you going?  Without Helen,

What could Troy mean to you, Achean men?

Both the sea and Homer — all is moved by love.

To whom shall I listen?

Now Homer falls silent, and a black sea,

Thunderous orator, breaks on my pillow

With a roar.

Indigo: a tale of two Mirandas

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Indigo, or Mapping the Waters

A compelling & poetic re-take on The Tempest in a Caribbean setting by Marina Warner.  A first-contact narrative portraying the origins of the Sycorax-Caliban-Ariel family broken by the arrival of Kit Everard from England in 1609, framed by two different sections about the modern Everards: Ant, the patriarch & master of the Game at Flinders; Kit, his uncertain son; Miranda, Ant’s grand-daughter; and Xanthe, the patriarch’s late-arriving daughter, who displaces both Kit & Miranda from the family succession.  The two girls, Miranda & Xanthe, compete for the role of chosen daughter just as the two cousins in Sacred Hunger struggle to be Ferdinand.

Some nice writing about the sea and Shakespeare: “But for Xanthe Everard this was the final transformation: a pearl of rare size and beauty, she had become incapable of further motion in mind or body; she had given her first and last cry for the love that most people crave all their lifelong days” (376).  Sounds a bit like Garcia-Marquez, I guess.

Sacred Hunger: Who gets to play Ferdinand?

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Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger

A very good novel about slavery by way of *The Tempest*.  The main plot concerns the legacy of the merchant William Kemp, who invests in a slave ship in an attempt to save his sagging fortunes.  (His son, who chooses sugar, gets better results.)

But the key tension operates between the son, Erasmus Kemp, and the nephew Matthew Paris.  Kemp wants the good mercantile life; Paris, fleeing from the death of his wife and child while he was imprisoned for publishing heretical (proto-Darwinian) tracts, wants something more radical.

From a Shakespearean point of view, they both want to be Ferdinand: the heir & chosen suitor.  Kemp even plays Ferdinand in a failed production of *The Enchanted Island* opposite a wealthy merchant’s daughter early in the novel.  But it’s Paris’s multi-racial world, on the slave ship, in Africa, and in Florida, that redefine Prospero’s magic isle.