Why name a play after something over and done at first curtain?Ah, one of my favourite plays. Does it actually finish before curtain up? – I seem to remember the first stage direction is something like ‘On a ship at sea – a tempest of thunder and lightning’.
But I can’t help feeling the meaning within the play is deeper than this. The tempests in Shakespeare are always a sort of leitmotif of some other process of wrack and discord in the affairs of mankind. In this play, I think it is underlining the fact that the story starts, not at the opening scene of the play, but 12 years earlier when Prospero is unrightfully evicted from the Dukedom of Milan by his brother’s perfidy. When he tells the story to his daughter Miranda, it’s worth noting that they are cast adrift in an unseaworthy wreck in a storm:
“In few, they harried us aboard a bark;
Bore us some leagues to sea, where they prepared
A rotten carcass of a butt, not rigg’d,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast – the very rats
Instinctively had quit it. There they hoist us,
To cry to the sea, that roar’d to us…”
(hope I’ve got that about right, no time to check now!)
It’s also got a wider emblematic significance – when P asks Ariel (note not with an ‘a’, I think) how the day’s going, Ariel answers it is the sixth hour “at which time, my lord, you said our work shall cease” to which P responds something like ‘yes, I did say that, when I first rais’d the tempest’. This suggests a reference to rest on the 7th day etc of the creation myth – Prospero as god-figure, eventually setting aside his staff of power.
At the very last scene, P promises his guests “calm seas, auspicious gales,/And sails so expeditious that shall catch/Your royal fleet far off (aside) My Ariel, chick,/That is thy charge. Then to the elements be free…” At this point, we know the tempest is metaphorically blown out.
[shameless name-drop] – at school, I was in a production of this play with Daniel Day Lewis. He was quite good even then
