The Tempest: The Applause Shakespeare Library
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism
The Tempest: The Applause Shakespeare Library Details
(Applause Books). The Applause edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest allows the reader and student to look beyond the scholarly reading text to the more sensuous, more collaborative, more malleable performance text which emerges in conjunction with the commentary and notes. Readers and students are faced with real theatrical choices in each speech as the editors point out the challenges and opportunities to the actor and director at each juncture. Readers will not only discover an enlivened Shakespeare, they will be empowered to rehearse and direct their own productions of the imagination in the process.
Reviews
"The Tempest ... Edited with a Theatre Commentary" was published in 1996 as a volume in The Applause Shakespeare Library. That is (or was) a series of editions of the plays with commentaries aimed, not at students or scholars, but at readers trying to visualize a performance, who may themselves also be directors and actors who have to realize a play on stage. (It should not be confused with the Applause Shakespeare Library Folio Texts series, which offered modern type-face editions of the 1623 First Folio texts, and notes on the variants in quarto editions.)In the case of "The Tempest," the running commentary is sensible, and often suggests interesting interpretations of the text, and how they can be communicated by action. This is not a description of a production, but offers a set of alternatives as to how each scene can be staged, and the implications of such choices for the play as a whole.Of course, this is the 1611 comedy in which one of the characters has set himself up as Producer, Head Script-writer, and Director for a "reality play" -- and has a first-rate special effects team at his beck and call. Fortunately, the acting commentary faces the text, and is distinguished by a different typeface, so we are no danger of confusing Brown and Prospero!(The once-common view that old Prospero "really" represents the aging Shakespeare is a fascinating, speculation, but, as modern critics agree, it is poorly supported by the text. And Shakespeare had been thinking along the same lines for at least ten years -- see the "back-stage" conniving of the incognito Duke in "Measure for Measure" around 1600 -- not to mention Oberon's instructions to Puck in "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the mid-1590s.)Amazon's software seems to have confused the editor, John Russell Brown, with other Russells and Browns, and, more confusingly, cross-referenced a Wikipedia article on the late actor, John Lawrence Russell on the "John Russell Brown" page. The Brown in question is an industrious critic and editor of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and other plays.Having recently re-read several "Tempest" editions of a similar date in order to review them here, I feel confident in saying that Brown seems to have been at home with the critical issues of the 1990s, although he often addresses them only indirectly, in terms of options for characterization.For those not already familiar with the play, it is the only of Shakespeare plays without a recognizable source for the main plot, although there is documentation for many details in the voyage literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, especially the earlier years of the Virginia colony. A few hints may have come from histories of Italy, but the names don't match up with any specific events. Most of the other parallels to the plot which have been identified are too general to tie directly to the play, although they may be helpful in understanding it.The grumpy magician, his beautiful daughter, the handsome young hero, and the magician's attendant creatures, are commonplaces of traditional fairytales and medieval and renaissance romances. (Not to mention a lot of modern genre fantasy, and older science fiction.) So, too, are wicked brothers and scheming courtiers.In other hands, these elements could have made a rambling crowd-pleaser like the then-popular "Mucedorus." Shakespeare, who was at home with the plots spread widely through time and space, here makes them the subject of a tightly constructed play.As has long been noted, "The Tempest" is one of the few Shakespeare plays to observe the so-called "classical unities" of (elapsed) time and a single place, in this case, a few hours on an enchanted island. In this is its unlike most other Elizabethan and Jacobean "romance" plays, very much including his own earlier ventures, such as "Twelfth Night" and "A Winter's Tale."This tight plotting indicates that the play is not likely to be episodic, and that everything in it serves a purpose -- and that the purpose is more than filling time.Brown is particular good at illuminating the political aspects of the play, not just the endorsement of a "natural" hierarchy, but the various conspiracies at work, and how the performance determines audiences' perceptions of the characters.For example, in Act One, Miranda learns that her father, old Prospero, is the deposed Duke of Milan, betrayed by his brother Antonio in alliance with Alonso, the King of Naples. In Act Two, we see Alonso and some of his courtiers, shipwrecked on Prospero's island. Antonio, the current Duke of Milan, suborns the King's brother, Sebastian, to follow his own example, kill Alonso, and seize his throne. Later still, Prospero's bestial-looking servant Caliban persuades some of Alonso's servants to join him in a (drunken) conspiracy against Prospero.Just about everyone recognizes that these are supposed to be parallel episodes, casting light on each other, but somehow the plotting of Antonio and Sebastian is often treated as neither dangerous nor comical, but just dull and pointless -- perhaps because Prospero's more reliable servant, the spirit Ariel, interrupts the action at the critical moment. Brown discusses how the conspiracy can be presented as something utterly serious (and at the same time ironic), and the conspirators wary of each other, or of the others. The whole scene offers a chance to illustrate Prospero's characterization of his brother -- and foreshadow Sebastian's responses at the end of the play.
