Written by Aerial Whiting
A Shakespearean scholar from Nottingham Trent University in England lectured on “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare Tuesday, April 19, in Cone Chapel.
The scholar, Dr. Peter J. Smith, is the author of “Social Shakespeare” and “Hamlet: Theory in Practice,” and he has been published in literary journals like Shakespeare Survey and Renaissance Quarterly. He is in Arkansas on behalf of ARcare, a nonprofit health care clinic that treats patients regardless of their ability to pay, which is hosting the inaugural ARcare Arts Festival May 28 in Augusta, Ark.
The entertainment of the arts festival will be based on “The Tempest,” and there Smith will deliver the same presentation, “Something Rich and Strange,” that he gave at Harding.
“TheTempest”unfoldson an un-colonized island, where the protagonist, a sorcerer and former Duke of Milan, Prospero, conjures a storm that shipwrecks the people who stole his dukedom from him, and their companions. The shipwreck scatters thepassengers on the island, and the remainder of the play tracks their progress as they encounter Miranda (Prospero’s daughter), Caliban (a savage whom Prospero has enslaved) and Ariel (a spirite who creates mischief for the shipwreck victims at Prospero’s bidding), and as all of the characters reunite. At the end of the play, Prospero reconciles with his usurpers and lays aside his magic.
Written in 1610 or 1611, toward the end of Shakespeare’s career, “The Tempest”is often interpreted as the dramatist’s farewell, and literary critics frequently identify him with Prospero, a “figure of forgiveness, reconciliation, retirement.” However, Smith offered an alternate reading of Prospero’s character during his presentation.
“What I want to try to do today is to suggest that actually, the play is more radical than [Shakespeare’s farewell], and that perhaps we need to re-imagine Prospero, that perhaps we have been too superficial in identifying Shakespeare with Prospero,” Smith said. “And actually, in the Jacobean period, when this play is being staged at court, … it may have had quite differentkinds of resonance for its first audiences.”
According to Smith,”The Tempest” uses elements of masques, which are elaborate and costly dramas in their “zenith” during the first 10 years of the 17th century that celebrated the magnificence of the royal court and glorified the king, and inverts them to comment on the fragility of authority.
In one scene of “The Tempest,” Prospero actually has the spirits of the island perform a masque for Miranda and her fiancé, one of the shipwrecked men, and Smith said Shakespeare used the masque scene to expose the “artificiality” and “constructed-ness” of court masques. Smith said the masque scene is performed in a time when Prospero forgets about a conspiracy against the father of his son-in-law-to-be, and it acts as a test of Prospero’s memory, which draws attention to his vulnerabilities.
“[Shakespeare] has completely rewritten the genre of the masque to instead of praising royal authority, it’s actually about the vulnerability of authority, about Prospero simply being an old man, in spite of all his magic,” Smith said.
