Sunday Morning! “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare

Why do we read so many books? What are we looking for? If you could imagine a book that fully satisfied your needs, such that you’d never have to read another book, what would be in it?

I’ve been thinking about this lately as I’ve been trying to cut down on my book collection a bit, a process that usually amounts to taking two older books that I’ll never reread to the Little Free Library across Houston Street, and then feeling free to buy ten new books. I have a problem. It’s been on my mind too because I just picked up 16 books at the “Tom Verlaine Book Sale,” an event that was like standing in a Disneyland line for people with the book problem. The late musician clearly had a book problem himself, having died with 50,000 books, something really only possible in a city where you can easily find books in the 0-1 dollar price range.

The mood was jovial, in spite of the heat, and it was nice, for once, to be in a line of people looking down at books rather than phones. Still, it was hard not to take pause when I found one of Verlaine’s bookmarks (an old ticket from the Louvre) in a book I picked up and thought, “would it be inappropriate to read past this point?”

And how does one read 50,000 books? How many books can you read in a day? Four or five? And I had to wonder what he was looking for in all these books, and if he ever found it. I suspect, if you were to ask most voracious readers, the fantasy is, by reading so many books, you will either: become a better human, and/or find magic spells.

And so, (coming at last to the point!) it’s easy to take Prospero in The Tempest as living the dream. Usurped as Duke of Milan, he has been shipwrecked the last 12 years on a paradisiacal island where he rules like a god with his beloved daughter Miranda, slave Caliban, a retinue of spirits and sprites, and the books that have given him magical knowledge.

Caroline Watson “The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1”

Not to mention, Prospero controls most of the events of the play, in which the usurper and his men are also shipwrecked on the island and tormented into a sort of submission, all by Prospero’s magic. In the end, he even becomes a better person, or at least more forgiving. Everyone is basically reconciled and the young lovers are married. All of this, along with a longstanding assumption (not obviously true) that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last play, have made it very easy to see Prospero as a wise and benevolent hero, the product of humanistic study in the liberal arts.

But, for the actors, try playing him that way, while also sticking to the text, and see how hard it becomes!

Did all of that reading do Prospero any good? We’re inclined to say that it did, and Renaissance audiences likely were as well. But it also cost Prospero the throne, and he says as much:

In dignity, and for the liberal arts

Without a parallel. Those being all my study,

The government I cast upon my brother

And to my state grew stranger, being transported

And rapt in secret studies. 

He lost touch with the world, in other words, a danger every avid reader has felt keenly at some point. It’s hard to remember, because it is a play about comeuppance, that Prospero could be as easily said to have abdicated the throne as had it usurped. A leader has to act in the world, and his pursuit of knowledge made him passive.

And now? He certainly rules over Caliban, using magic as a source of power, but the native has good reason to consider Prospero a tyrant. At the start of the play, it’s not clear that he has much in the way of authority, which is rather the opposite of power. He’s short-tempered, churlish, and surprisingly spiteful at points. Notice that he seems altogether disinterested in his wife, Miranda’s mother, saying only that he accepts she would probably not lie about his being the father. The scholar who neglects his loved ones is another uncomfortable cliché with some truth in it.

While it’s tempting to see this as a gentle story about forgiveness, love, and magic, its central protagonist makes that interpretation very difficult.

So, then, do we sympathize with Caliban, the rightful lord of the island, ruled over and enslaved by Prospero? Shakespeare alludes to Montaigne’s essay On the Cannibals, a better source for the “noble savage” myth than anything in Rousseau, and one has to notice that, while Caliban says the gift of language only taught him to curse, his command of the language is second only to Prospero in the play.

Caliban as monster: an interpretation we’re less inclined to accept today. 

But, then again, it’s strongly suggested that Caliban tried to rape Miranda at some point in the past, and Prospero enslaved him in response. With the exception of the young lovers, no one in the play is unambiguously good or bad, sympathetic or unsympathetic. Thanks a lot, Shakespeare!

Of course, this is why we still read these plays more than four centuries later. I think sometimes we forget this today, but in fiction, characters need not be “likeable” or “unlikeable”; they need only be compelling. Shakespeare is the best at this because there are so many sides to his characters, and he created such a wide array of characters, second only to God, it’s been said.

So, if you have time to read 50,000 books in a lifetime, maybe you have time to get a grasp on his work.

And so, what are YOU, reading, playing, pondering, creating, or otherwise enchanted by this weekend?