A Tempest Comes to Wilton

Parting was such sweet sorrow for William Shakespeare as he penned “The Tempest,” the last of his solo works.

In Act 5, Scene I, the exiled Duke Prospero tells the spirit Ariel: “…any by the spurs plucked up the pine and cedar; graves at my command have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth by my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure.”

Images of farewells abound and the notion that all the world’s a stage culminates in this final romance, penned between 1610-1611.

“It’s impossible not to see the final farewell of Prospero as William Shakespeare’s farewell to theater,” said Judson Scruton’s during the last of his four-part series  “Shakespeare and the Uses of Imagination.”

Shakespeare wrote other plays, such as Henry VIII. But they were collaborative projects. 

James I, a Stuart king, ruled at the time Shakespeare wrote the play. Masques, tremendous costumed affairs in which the royals often participated, were common.

Actors and royalty acted out scenes wearing elaborate costumes. Inigo Jones, a noted seventeenth century British architect and designer, fashioned some of the more sumptuously grotesque numbers, Scruton told a roomful of people at the Wilton Library on Thursday.

“They looked like Peter Maxx on steroids,” Scruton said. 

The court often spent 3,000 pounds on a single night’s entertainment. Scruton equated it with WorldCom’s notorious party replete with a life-sized sculpture of Michelangelo’s David.  In fact, “The Tempest” was commissioned to celebrate the marriage of James’ daughter Elizabeth to Frederick Elector Palatine.

An ode to the imagination, “The Tempest” inspired at least 46 operas, scores of songs, numerous paintings, and a plethora of poems. 

It influenced the 1650s ballad “Full Fathom Five” and Pete Seeger’s 1966 “Dangerous Songs!?."  The play was W.H. Auden’s muse for the long poem “The Sea and the Mirror”. 

Set on an island, “The Tempest” explores reconciliation, be it a man’s relationship with power or a father’s relationship with his daughter. 

Ariel’s song in Act I, Scene I is about a sea change, on one level she sings of Ferdinand’s father. But she also speaks to the idea that all must transform, Shakespeare included.

In real life Shakespeare left the Globe Theater partly to spend more time with his daughter Susanna.  At the end of the play, Prospero drowns his magic book as if it were a witch. That’s akin to Shakespeare setting down his quill.

“ Our revels now are ended; these our actors,” Prospero said in Act 5, Scene I. “As I foretold you, were all spirits…. The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve.”

Again the play addresses the idea that everything, including the theater, is ephemeral, Scruton said. But the work endured.

“Nothing is faded,” Scruton said. “If anything it’s more vivid 400 years later. Ten million kids read it everyday. It’s in the fabric of our consciousness. The fabric of his [Shakespeare’s] vision is not baseless.”