The Tempest by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online

court of James I on Hallowmass Night, 1 November 1611. 1 In 1613 it was performed at court again, this time as one of fourteen plays chosen to celebrate the marriage of James I’s daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. 2 These performances and the masque in Act 4 have sometimes suggested a special association with the Jacobean court. However, the effects called for in the masque—descents, ascents, and the use of a trapdoor—all suggest performance in the public theaters used by the King’s Men, the Globe and the smaller indoor Blackfriars Theatre.
    This was one of the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be revived after the Restoration and the reopening of the theaters. Samuel Pepys saw the first performance in 1667:
    at noon resolve with Sir W. Penn to go see
The Tempest
, an old play of Shakespeare’s acted here the first day … the most innocent play that ever I saw.… The play is no great wit; but yet good, above ordinary plays. 3
    The “old play of Shakespeare’s” described by Pepys was not, however, Shakespeare’s
Tempest
but an adaptation by Sir William Davenant and John Dryden called
The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island
, which developed the plot to suit Restoration tastes and capitalized on the newly permitted presence of women onstage by inventing a sister for Miranda called Dorinda, together with the cross-dressed “breeches” part of Hippolito, Prospero’s ward. Sycorax became Caliban’s sister and even Ariel had a female consort, Milcha. Whereas scholars were busy recovering Shakespeare’s text for published editions from the early eighteenth century, this adaptation, and a revised operatic version by Thomas Shadwell with music by Henry Purcell dating from 1674, supplanted Shakespeare’s on the stage for more than a century and a half. They had machinery, elaborate effects, spectacular staging and music, and proved immensely profitable and popular with London theatergoers. The highlight seems to have been the storm scene, which was moved toAct 2 in order to accommodate latecomers. This adaptation in turn spawned Thomas Duffett’s obscene burlesque,
The Mock Tempest, or the Enchanted Castle
, in which Miranda and Dorinda feature as prostitutes.
    David Garrick had briefly presented Shakespeare’s original play, with some cuts, in the mid-eighteenth century, but in the next generation John Philip Kemble returned to the Restoration version. When Shakespeare’s text was finally restored by William Charles Macready in 1838, the spectacular staging of the storm scene and the masque were fixed theatrical traditions, which Macready retained, together with much of the music. By the end of the nineteenth century two contrasting production modes were evident—the elaborate spectacle, exemplified by directors such as Herbert Beerbohm Tree in London and Augustin Daly in New York, which offered scenic staging and pantomimic action with a full orchestral score versus the innovatory pared-down productions by F. R. Benson at Stratford and William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society, which used a bare set on an open stage.
    The dominant theme in twentieth-century productions was the exploration of the play as colonial experience, evident even in the pro-imperial Beerbohm Tree production of 1904. Romanticism had changed attitudes to Caliban and it was Macready’s 1838 revival of Shakespeare’s text that “confirmed … the romantic critics’ more sympathetic conceptions of Caliban.” 4 As Vaughan and Vaughan record, it was in this production that “the modern Caliban, victim of oppression, was born.” 5 Caliban became less comic but more monstrous; when in 1854 in New York the leading comic actor William Burton took the part in his own theater, the anonymous
New York Times
reviewer records how
    A wild creature on all fours sprang upon the stage, with claws on his hands, and some weird animal arrangement about the head partly like a snail. It was an immense conception. Not the great God Pan