“Wood, Work, and Etymology: A Neglected Source of Aesthetic Unity in The Tempest,” by Carmine Di Biase.
“Wood, Work, and Etymology: A Neglected Source of Aesthetic Unity in The Tempest,” by Carmine Di Biase. In North Meridian Review: A Journal of Culture and Scholarship (Volume 5: Issue 1), pg. 17-40.
The various social strata on display in The Tempest—king, duke, prince, drunken butler,[1] jester—form a continuum, its upper limits marked by the superhuman Ariel, its lower by the subhuman Caliban. And this continuum is fluid; characters are located in it according to their understanding of the ennobling power of work, or, as John Kerrigan puts it in an important new chapter on this play, “the merits of labour as against idyllic idleness” (p. 86). That some workers are incapable of improvement, and that their purpose is to work for others, are of course convenient notions constructed by the colonizer to enable and to justify all manner of brutalities against the colonized, and these notions, as Patricia Akhimie has shown, certainly inform The Tempest (pp. 151–86). On another, perhaps deeper level, however, this play exposes the essential nature of work—work as a basic, universal human compulsion. All the characters in this play, including Ariel and Caliban, are in some sense workers, or artisans. Except for Prospero, they may not be artists, but their work results in objects of art, all of which, no matter how humble, elicit some degree of wonder, which is the enticement and the reward of work. And all these workers, as I hope to show, are brought together by their common medium—wood—and William Shakespeare’s etymological explorations of the terms for the wooden objects they make and use.
Patricia Parker has shown how, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is not only Snug the joiner who works in wood but his cohorts as well, and how, on higher, metaphorical levels, so do the aristocrats, for some kind of “joinery” is involved in practically every sphere of human endeavor, from grammar, to theater, to marriage, and to the highest levels of politics (pp. 43–82). In The Tempest, however, from the manual laborer to the magician, even indeed to the playwright behind the scenes, all the characters are in some way carpenters, for all of them, in one way or another, actually work with wood, often in a material way. Wood, as Vin Nardizzi says in his brilliant recent study, “knew no social boundaries: every English person required it to sustain a minimal subsistence and maintain a modicum of shelter and warmth, especially during the winter months” (p. 9). The wood shortage in early seventeenth-century London, whether real or perceived, certainly contributed to the making of The Tempest[2]; wood becomes in this play a metaphor for work, work as a fundamental and transformative human activity—inescapable even for the elite. What emerges, it seems to me, is a coherent aesthetic, a Shakespearean vision in which the ultimate work of art is the human individual. Prospero’s goal, his “project,” as he calls it so often, is not merely to see Miranda married to a prince but to shape both, and to teach them how, eventually, to shape themselves, as a carpenter might a block of wood.
When Shakespeare laments, in Sonnet 44, that his “flesh” is a “dull substance,” and wishes that it were instead “nimble thought” so that he could “jump both sea and land” (ll.1 and 7), he articulates the aesthetic vision that informs all the main movements of The Tempest: humanity as pure “thought” or spirit—fire and air—trapped in the “dull substance” of earth and water—it might as well be wood—yearning to be liberated, like Ariel, who can defy space and time and “leap large lengths of miles” (l. 10) by simply calling the desired destination to mind. In this sonnet, humanity is itself a work of art, the raw materials of which have been “wrought” (l. 11)—that is, worked. To make an object, however humble it might be, is to enjoy one’s power over the materials in question; to make, or remake, oneself, to shape one’s life, is a pleasure of a higher order, a liberation from one’s old self to one’s new self. Both, however, require time and effort—in short, work—and both are transformative. As Prospero understands it, only work can liberate him, his daughter, Ferdinand, and whoever else—even Caliban—embraces the exacting and selfless task of mastering one’s own fleshly existence. Gabriel Egan agrees that “especially regarding human flesh,” this play “is clearly concerned with the possibilities of transmutation” (p. 149). Everyone on the island, as the following brief overview will show, is engaged in some kind of work, or in evading one’s obligation to work, for the references to work in The Tempest abound, and they involve every level of the social hierarchy.
During the crisis of the opening scene—a crisis brought about by the storm, which is itself the product of Prospero’s work—the boatswain, frustrated by King Alonso, says to him: “You mar our labor. / Keep your cabins: you do assist the storm” (I.1.13–14). The frustrated boatswain also addresses Gonzalo with the same sarcasm: “You are a councilor: if you can command these elements to silence and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority” (I.1.20–24); and to Sebastian, who has just called the boatswain a “bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog,” he replies, contemptuously, “Work you then” (I.1.40–42).[3] The high-born characters are introduced, therefore, as ignorant of work and what it entails, unaccustomed to exerting themselves, and presumptuous enough to meddle in the specialized work of their subordinates. Prospero, on the other hand, is a task master who keeps Ariel and Caliban in his employ with a pronounced strictness: “Ariel,” he says, “thy charge / Exactly is performed; but there’s more work” (I.2.237–38). And Prospero’s own work is performed on the very bodies of his subjects: “For this, be sure,” he says, as he threatens Caliban, “tonight thou shalt have cramps, / Side stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins / Shall, for that vast of night that they may work, / All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinched / As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging / Than bees that made ’em” (I.2.325–30). Caliban knows that Prospero “works” on all his subjects: “Now Prosper works upon thee” (II.2.79–80), he says to Stephano, who, he fears, is yet another spirit who has been sent there to torment him at Prospero’s direction.
Ariel too is quite aware that Prospero’s is a kind of work that shapes or reshapes the creatures over whom he has some measure of control. When Prospero asks about the king and his followers, Ariel assures him: “Your charm so strongly works ’em, / That if you now beheld them, your affections / Would become tender” (V.1.17–19). On the island, all work—its nature, when it begins, when it ends—is in Prospero’s control. When he asks for the time of day, Ariel replies, “On the sixth hour, at which time, my lord, / You said our work should cease” (V.1.4–5). But there is a force working on Prospero as well; it becomes most clear when he aborts the masque and Ferdinand, addressing Miranda, makes the following observation: “This is strange. Your father’s in some passion / That works him strongly” (IV.1.143–44). All the characters in this play, Prospero included, must work. Ferdinand himself, of course, gives us a dissertation on the ennobling effect of work, speaking of “labor” that brings “delight,” on how Miranda, whose hand in marriage will be his reward, “makes my labors pleasures,” and how thoughts of her “do even refresh my labors” (III.1.1–14). The play’s low-born characters can be as unwilling to work as the high-born Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, and Gonzalo. Stephano, for example, before doing the “work,” as he calls it, of finding and assassinating Prospero, hears a lovely music which distracts him: “This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing,” then adds: “The sound is going away: let’s follow it, and after do our work” (III.2.143–44, 47–48). And after losing his bottle in the filthy swamp, he wants to go and retrieve it, the only kind of work he is willing to do: “I will fetch off my bottle, though I be o’er ears for my labor” (IV.1.213).
In “‘Stir’ and Work in Shakespeare’s Last Plays,” Maurice Hunt has examined how in The Tempest there is “a scale of attitudes toward work” (p. 299), and how, at both extremes, represented by the sub-human Caliban and super-human Ariel, “work feels like punishment” (p. 301). Humanity, therefore, lodged in the continuum between Caliban and Ariel, cannot escape: the only kind of freedom, or redemption, to be had is the momentary idleness or rest that comes after labor and that is made possible by its resulting fruits. “Disciplined work,” says Hunt, “ordered by the Master’s whistle,” is “necessary for salvation during the storm at sea” (p. 297): seen metaphorically, this reality informs the experience of this play’s every character. Hunt, however, and other scholars who have studied this theme, have not examined how, in The Tempest, from the lowest social ranks to the highest, the language of work is essentially the language of carpentry; and how this humble art and its sole medium—wood—serves as a unifying metaphor for this most elegantly unified of Shakespeare’s plays.
Stephano, for example, upon meeting Caliban, reveals that he has already done a bit of carpentry: “How cam’st thou hither? Swear by this bottle how thou cam’st hither. I escaped upon a butt of sack which the sailors heaved o’erboard, by this bottle, which I made of the bark of a tree with mine own hands since I was cast ashore” (II.2.117–21). Later, Trinculo, saying that he and Stephano will steal the frippery like professionals thieves, uses a carpentry image which will connect these low-born characters to their superiors: “We steal by line and level” (IV.1.239)—a carpenter’s level, that is, and a plumb line, a string with a lead weight on the end, used to measure the vertical. This image, through which Stephano and Trinculo express their contempt for work,[4] resonates with an image that Shakespeare seemed to like so much that he used it twice more in this play, both times appearing, in almost identical phrasing, as the plumb line used by sailors to measure the depth of the water: Alonso, expressing his determination to find his son, who he thinks has drowned, says, “I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded / And with him there lie mudded” (III.3.101–102); and Prospero, as he gives up his magic, says, “I’ll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book” (V.1.54–57).[5] At the low end of the human continuum, the tools of carpentry are used not only to self-destructive ends, as in the making of wooden bottles to hold one’s liquor, but for graver, malicious purposes as well, as Caliban, telling Stephano how to kill Prospero, makes clear:
I’ll yield him thee asleep,
Where thou mayst knock a nail into his head (III.2.60–61).
There thou mayst brain him,
Having first seized his books, or with a log
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his wesand with thy knife. (III.2.88–90).[6]
One would expect the opposite to be true of Ariel—that is, that Ariel’s carpentry is not only constructive but refined. In fact, Ariel’s carpentry—his craft—results in the play’s intoxicating music; among the play’s exquisite ironies, however, is that it is Caliban who most poetically gives voice to the island’s music:
Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears […] (III.2.134-37)
The “twangling instruments,” one can imagine, must be lutes and viols, resonating wooden boxes made by luthiers, the most expert of wood workers. Ariel, moreover, in describing the work he has done for Prospero—the wrecking, or as I see it, the disassembling, of the ship in the opening scene—employs the language of carpentry in a most subtle way. Ariel here, as he divides and meets and “joins,” actually becomes carpentry:
[S]ometime I’d divide
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards, and bowsprit would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join. (I.2.198–201).
Again, contrary to the common assumption that the ship is wrecked, I would suggest instead that it is disassembled, and that by the final scene it is not so much repaired as it is reassembled.[7] When Gonzalo cries out “We split, we split!” (I.i.60), he is using the verb that was most often applied to the making of the staves—the planks of wood, that is, to which whole logs were reduced—which were then used in the making of a ship’s hull; the irony is that what is happening is precisely the reverse. Shakespeare would have read about the carpentry of ship building in William Strachey’s account of the wreck of Sir Thomas Gates.[8] And the carpentry of ship building was not far removed from the carpentry involved in theater work and in the building of the first wooden playhouses in England.[9] James Burbage, who in 1576 built The Theatre, was not only an actor but a carpenter; in late 1598, that theater was disassembled and its pieces transported across the Thames, where they were reassembled and became the Globe. According to Irwin Smith,
the Globe must have been stick-for-stick a replica of The Theatre. This is a necessary consequence of the methods of joinery employed by Tudor carpenters: methods which precluded the interchanging of timbers, methods which demanded that timbers, if re-used, should be re-used in their original relationship to one another. (p. 113)
Shakespeare would have been familiar with this kind of reverse carpentry when he conceived the idea of representing the undoing and rebuilding of a ship.[10]
To return, however, to Caliban’s suggestion that Stephano and Trinculo might “batter” Prospero’s skull with a “log,” a series of important connections suggest themselves, for the log imagery unites disparate moments of this play, moments that go beyond the two scenes in which we see Caliban grudgingly, and Ferdinand dutifully, carrying wood on Prospero’s orders. The second scene of Act II opens with the following stage direction: “Enter Caliban with a burthen of wood.” Caliban, capable of appreciating the exquisite natural beauties that surround him, sees no purpose to work but service and the protection of one’s master. “I’ll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough” (II.2.158), he says to the drunken Stephano, soon after they first meet. Ferdinand, by contrast, understands work the way that Prospero wants him to: as a toiling which ennobles the worker, a kind of mastering of the carnal impulses—a means by which to rise to a higher level of awareness. Act III opens with Ferdinand, who, “bearing a log,” immediately gives us this philosophy of work in a short soliloquy:
There be some sports are painful, and their labor
Delight in them sets off; some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters
Point to rich ends. This my mean task
Would be as heavy to me as odious, but
The mistress which I serve quickens what’s dead
And makes my labors pleasures. (III.1.1–7)
Soon afterward, he conveys this philosophy, in more vivid form, directly to Miranda:
I am, in my condition,
A prince, Miranda; I do think, a king
(I would not so), and would no more endure
This wooden slavery than to suffer
The flesh fly blow my mouth. Hear my soul speak!
The very instant that I saw you, did
My heart fly to your service; there resides,
To make me slave to it; and for your sake
Am I this patient log-man. (III.1.59–67)
He flies instantly to Miranda’s service, then, like Ariel to Prospero; but Ferdinand’s obvious sexual innuendo marks the difference between his kind of servitude and Ariel’s. Being “wrought,” as Shakespeare says in Sonnet 44, “of earth and water,” Ferdinand knows that he must be a “patient log-man” and submit to his “wooden slavery” to earn, or to “quicken,” his own inner Ariel: his spirit.[11] Deeply significant here is that Ariel too can be released from Sycorax’s wooden prison only through work, as Prospero says:
Thou, my slave,
As thou report’st thyself, was then her servant;
And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorred commands,
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years. (I.2.270–79)
And it was Prospero’s skill—he calls it his “art” but in this instance it amounts to an ability to split wood—which allowed him to free Ariel: “It was mine art, / When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape / The pine, and let thee out” (I.2.291-93). Ariel’s ultimate freedom will come only after his service to Prospero is done; similarly, Ferdinand will not be permitted to undo Miranda’s “virgin-knot before / All sanctimonious ceremonies may / With full and holy rite be ministered” (IV.1.15–17).
And those ceremonies will not take place unless Ferdinand earns his right to them through work. The sight of Ferdinand hauling logs, doing the same kind of work that Caliban does, is comical, of course, but it suggests that to be reflective, that to study the world, its people and oneself, as Prospero does through his books, is also taxing. Akhimie presses her point that work, for the lower classes, is categorically different, physically rather than mentally taxing, and makes their very bodies rough and hard, a result of an elite ploy. “Hardness,” she says, in reference to the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “signifies a lack of social mobility, indicating a natural deficit of capacity to imagine and thus to be better by knowing better” (p. 118). Regarding The Tempest, she agrees that Ferdinand’s hauling of logs has the desired result, “transforming him, elevating him, and making him the desirable object of courtly love,” but in the same breath she stresses that his work “is a labor of love, short-lived, end oriented, and merely for show” (p. 162). To emphasize this division thus—between the lower classes who labor physically and the elite whose leisure is made possible by that labor—is to lose sight of Shakespeare’s awareness of work as an inescapable, universally human compulsion.
Prospero himself, in fact, knows that he is subject to the same law that governs work and freedom. His own negligence, after all, allowed his dukedom to fall into the hands of his brother. When he recounts how his dukedom was usurped by Antonio, Prospero likens himself to a log, or rather to an unfelled tree; and it is important to note here that both dukes, the legitimate and the illegitimate, are described as making, or forming, their subjects, who are here called their creatures.
Antonio,
Being once perfected how to grant suits,
How to deny them, who t’advance, and who
To trash for overtopping, new-created
The creatures that were mine, I say, or changed ‘em,
Or else new-formed ’em; having both the key
Of officer and office, set all hearts i’ th’ state
To what tune pleased his ear, that now he was
The ivy which had hid my princely trunk
And sucked my verdure out on’t. (I.2.79–87)
This image of the duke as a “princely trunk”[12] is one that Shakespeare had used before, in Cymbeline. When in that play the king is reunited with his sons, the soothsayer interprets Jupiter’s riddle thus: “The lofty cedar, royal Cymbeline, / Personates thee, and thy lopped branches point / Thy two sons forth,” and those two sons, or branches, “For many years thought dead, are now,” at the end of the play, “revived” and “To the majestic cedar joined” (V.5.452–56). Here again, the language of carpentry—joining—momentarily works its way into an otherwise natural, vegetative image. Art, therefore, or the work of an artisan, improves upon nature;[13] there is nothing false, or artificial, about humanity’s impulse to rework or reshape nature. This seems, in fact, to be among the governing principles of Shakespeare’s vision. Its most explicit expression may be found in The Winter’s Tale, when Polixenes explains to Perdita that there is nothing unnatural about modifying the nature of the flowers in one’s garden:
[N]ature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean. So, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
which does mend nature—change it rather—but
The art itself is nature. (IV.4.89–97)
In The Tempest the image of Prospero as a “princely trunk,” a noble tree besieged by the ivy that is Antonio, is perfectly natural; and that threatened trunk can only be saved through human intervention, which, as Polixenes would say, is itself perfectly natural, and will involve an intermingling of “barks” of baser and nobler kinds—including those that float and all the other useful hollow vessels that carpenters carve from felled trees.
The logs carried by Caliban and Ferdinand are also etymologically linked to the shipwreck at the beginning of the play. The ship’s log, or record book, has its origin in another measuring device, in this case not the plumb line but a quadrant of wood—called the ship’s “log”—which, attached to a rope calibrated at regular intervals by a series of knots, was thrown overboard to measure the ship’s speed. Logs, however, as in felled trees, were also split into planks which were then bent and joined. In the opening scene of The Tempest we hear, according to the stage direction, a “Confused noise within,” and then cries of “Mercy on us!”—”We split, we split!”—”Farewell, my wife and children!”— / “Farewell, brother!”—”We split, we split, we split!” (I.1.59–61). As the ship comes apart, so do the strongest of human relations. And at the end of the play, after all the reunions, the boatswain reports that the ship is again intact: “our ship, / Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split, / Is tight and yare and bravely rigged as when / We first put out to sea” (V.1.222–25). Here and elsewhere in The Tempest, images of ship building are evoked and prompt us to reconsider the language of other parts of the play which might seem at first to be unrelated to carpentry.
Consider, for example, Prospero’s account of how he lost his dukedom. Like the ship builder, who splits logs and then bends them into shape, Antonio proceeded to “bend / The dukedom yet unbowed (alas, poor Milan!) / To most ignoble stooping” (I.2.114–16). Milan, of course, is both the city and Prospero himself; and Antonio has been a shaping force operating on Prospero, whom he “new-formed,” as he did his lesser subjects. Prospero, like all other human beings, is himself a kind of vessel; what distinguishes him is his passionate and arduous studies, which have turned him into a vessel capable of housing and, in both senses of the word, containing the power of magic. And his staff, which is indispensable to his magic—it is the stage property which most fully embodies his magic—is itself, in its plural form, etymologically linked to boats, which are made of bent staves.[14] That the word “staff” occurs only once in this play—when Prospero says, “I’ll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth” (V.1.54–55)—is indicative of the subtlety with which Shakespeare handles this collection of images, and particularly the image of Prospero’s staff.
Also made of staves are wine barrels, or butts. The meaning of this word—which was then, and is still today, also the word for the ends of a ship’s planks—resonates throughout this play, bringing the low-born characters into dialogue, either literally or thematically, with the high-born. Prospero evokes the image when he explains to Miranda how they came to the island:
In few, they hurried us aboard a bark,
Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepared
A rotten carcass of a butt, not rigged,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats
Instinctively have quit it. (I.2.144–48)
The indignity of having to brave the elements in such a vessel is reinforced by the comical appearance, shortly after this moment, of Stephano, the butler, who has the following exchange with Caliban:
How cam’st thou hither? Swear by this bottle how thou cam’st hither. I escaped upon a butt of sack which the sailors heaved o’erboard, by this bottle, which I made of the bark of a tree with mine own hands since I was cast ashore. (II.2.117–21)
Through this “butler,” or keeper of the “butts” and bottles in his master’s “buttery,” another deeply relevant word emerges, for the buttery is also a “cellar,” whose variant, “cell,” resonates in The Tempest in important ways.
This word, in fact, contributes to the etymological unity which arises from this play’s language of carpentry. For the high-born Prospero, his work—his arduous study of books of arcane knowledge—results in his power over the magic that controls the world’s elements; the result of Stephano’s work—his looking after the buttery, his absurd struggle to float ashore on a butt, and his carving a bottle for himself—is powerlessness over the magic of drunkenness. With exquisite appropriateness, Shakespeare has him make Caliban swear, not by the book, but by the bottle; and when Stephano says, “kiss the book” (II.2.127), which is an indirect mockery of Prospero and his books, he means of course his wooden bottle.[15] The words “book” and “bottle” are both involved in the etymological play that contributes to the unity of The Tempest. Although books in Shakespeare’s day were not yet made of wood pulp but from rags, “book,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, already had a history that connected it to wood:
A long-standing and still widely accepted etymology assumes that the Germanic base of BOOK n. is related to that of BEECH n. Explanations of the semantic motivation have varied considerably, with earlier scholars generally focusing on the practice among the Germanic peoples of scratching runes onto strips of wood, but more recent accounts place more emphasis on the use of wooden writing tablets.
And “bottle,” a word which occurs often in The Tempest, is similarly involved in the play’s unity. The lineage of “bottle” connects it closely to “butt” and even to “boat” and “boatswain.”[16] Stephano, albeit for a short time, even has his own cellarage. In response to Trinculo, who asks him if he has any more of the wine, Stephano says, “The whole butt, man: my cellar is in a rock by th’ seaside, where my wine is hid” (II.2.131–32). The word “cellar” here, in such proximity with the word “hid,” places Stephano comically in dialogue with Prospero, whose abode on several occasions is referred to as a “cell.”[17] This word, along with cellar, shares a root with “cult” and “occult,” or the hidden knowledge or science, whether of alcohol or floatation, and science and magic, especially in the theater of the time, were often inseparable.[18]
When Trinculo looks up and sees a storm cloud about to burst, he employs a wine cellar analogy: “Yond same black cloud, yond huge one, looks like a foul bombard,” or leather bottle, “that would shed his liquor” (II.2.20–21). This image, ironically, places Trinculo (and Stephano too) in sharp contrast with Caliban. When he looks up to the sky, what he sees is “clouds” that might “open and show riches / Ready to drop upon me” (III.2.140–41), and what he hears, wafting down from that sky, is the music of “a thousand twangling instruments” (III.2.136), the magic produced by yet another kind of wooden vessel: the viol, perhaps, or the lute, or a woodwind instrument.
We have seen, however, neither the beginning nor the end of this imagery. The importance of it is stressed by the fact that the very first word of this play—a word that is hollered out at the top of the Master’s lungs—is boatswain, a cry for the officer in charge of the boat’s deck. When the boat begins to fill with salt water, the magic of flotation fails as Ariel, under Prospero’s direction, exercises a higher form of magic. As the boat begins to come apart, a curiously salacious outburst comes out of old Gonzalo’s mouth: their vessel, he says, is “as leaky as an unstanched wench” (I.1.47–48).[19] By “unstanched” Gonzalo means of menstruating age. The only leaking wench in this play is Miranda; and like the boat, which will eventually have to have its holes plugged, so too, to put it bluntly, must Miranda be properly stanched, or, to use the word which Gonzalo uses to describe his utopian vision, “occupied,” the bawdy meaning of which escapes him but would not have escaped Shakespeare’s audience. In Gonzalo’s utopia, there would be “No occupation; all men idle, all; / And women too, but innocent and pure” (II.1.154–55). Forming a contrast with this naïve vision is Prospero’s “project,” which is to see his daughter properly married to Ferdinand, whose sexual labor will result in procreation, yet another kind of magic.[20]
This analogy, however, human being as boat or vessel, is not entirely sexual; it is suggestive of maturation in general, or as Stephen Greenblatt might say, self-fashioning, and it applies as much to the men in this play as it does to the women. Nevertheless, this analogy, which is sustained from the beginning of the play to the end, recalls Miranda’s frank and vivid response to Prospero’s account of his brother’s betrayal: “Good wombs,” she says, “have borne bad sons” (I.2.120). The key word here is not wombs but “borne,” which, in other forms, serves to eroticize the work that Caliban and Ferdinand must do. Act III opens with the stage direction, “Enter Ferdinand bearing a log.” Miranda pities him when she sees him at work: “If you’ll sit down, / I’ll bear your logs the while” (III.1.23–24). Here the log in Ferdinand’s hands takes on an obviously phallic meaning. For Ferdinand, the work of hauling wood—of carrying that burden of “dull substance” that is a symbol of his flesh—results in that other kind of magic, not the low magic of drunkenness, nor the magic of floatation or of music, nor even the high magic of Prospero’s mastery of the elements, but the magic of sexual pleasure and of procreation, aligned in this play with the procreative magic of the natural world. “Even the plants,” says Kerrigan, “are burdened, like Caliban and Ferdinand bearing logs, by the produce they carry” (p. 93). Ceres most vividly brings out the labor inherent in nature itself: “Earth’s increase, foison plenty, / Barns and garners never empty, / Vines with clust’ring bunches growing, / Plants with goodly burden bowing” (IV.1.110–13). The word “burden,” however, echoes in The Tempest in ways that bring together seemingly disparate but related moments, all relevant to this discussion of wood and work. The most concrete manifestation of it is Caliban, who enters, according to the stage direction: “with a burden of wood” (II.2). For the incorrigible Caliban, who has sometime before the play attempted to rape Miranda, and whom no amount of work can ennoble, hauling wood will forever be nothing but painful servitude; but that all the corrigible creatures in this play must also work suggests that there is something of Caliban in them too. When Prospero says at the end of the play that Caliban is “mine” (V.1.276), the newly re-instated Duke of Milan is acknowledging that there is a Caliban within him who must be tamed. As Ronald Bond says, “Prospero sees fully the extent of the ruler’s responsibility for his subject, sees how head and foot are connected, and, most remarkably, sees that the subtle knot that makes him man is composed, in part, of darkness, the flesh, and mortality” (p. 338).
Work in The Tempest is, again, ennobling only for those who look up to the skies with respect and wonder. Old Gonzalo’s utopian vision, of a world in which all men would be and all women pure and innocent—a world in which there will be no “occupation” (II.1.154), by which he inadvertently suggests no sexual intercourse—comes to seem all the more impossible and naïve.[21] It is a vision of “cultivated decadence,” as Hunt calls it, which, in the moral universe of The Tempest, is to be avoided just as much as “primitivism,” for both “are extreme states in which idleness abounds” (p. 302). Is it perhaps for this reason that Shakespeare had Gonzalo, and not some genuinely corrupt character, such as Antonio, compare the sinking ship to “an unstanched wench”? “The realms of innocence and corruption,” after all, as Hunt puts it, “surprisingly are not that dissimilar” (p. 302). Shakespeare’s vision of the world is deeply informed by Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Daedalus, for example, can fly only because he has constructed, with ingenuity and painstaking care, a set of ingenious artificial wings. And in The Tempest, work—be it the work of the cooper or the ship builder, the lover or the luthier, the mother or the magician—is similarly transforming, and while Prospero “works” on his subordinates and inferiors, he is only imitating the work to which nature subjects all living things. The most poetic expression of this vision is Ariel’s song, in which nature is a maker:
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange. (I.2.398–402)
This vision—of a world in which the force of nature can mineralize humanity’s woefully ephemeral flesh, making it permanent and gemlike—loses none of its beauty or power if we know that Alonso has not in fact drowned; for this transformative force is also at work in living human beings, especially those who, like Prospero or Miranda or Ferdinand, and to a lesser extent Alonso and Antonio, embrace change and growth as a moral imperative. Their first impulse upon gazing at the “brave new world” (V.1.183), as Miranda calls it, and the creatures who populate it, is the noblest, and most ennobling, impulse: to attempt, however imperfectly, to reproduce all they admire, making it gemlike and permanent, “rich and strange.”
Shakespeare himself was quite aware, of course, that “the dull substance” of his own flesh was not “thought,” that he too, in a real sense, was a lowly worker in wood. All the theaters he performed in were made of wood, as were most of his stage properties, and even his use of the word “book” might have reminded him of the ancient Germanic practice of carving linguistic symbols into pieces of wood. Deeply significant to this discussion of The Tempest, moreover, is that the technical language of the theater derived from that of seafaring. Gary Taylor, in his fascinating essay on a 1607 production of Hamlet aboard the Red Dragon while it was anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone, reminds us that “London was, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, a major international port city, and that ocean-going ships sailed up the Thames to within sight of the Globe theater. Britain until recently could only be reached by sea, and could only exert an influence on the rest of the world by sea” (p. 237). He adds, moreover, that “early modern London carpenters produced at least two structures” called the Globe: one was the theater, of course, but the other was built in the shipyards of the East India Company, “a 350-ton vessel called the Globe, which left London for Asia on January 5, 1611,” and it was at about that time that “the King’s Men began performing at their wooden structure called the Globe, a play called The Tempest, which begins with a scene in which the audience has to imagine that the stage is a ship at sea.” Taylor points out that while Hamlet was being performed aboard the Red Dragon, audiences back in London were seeing Pericles, which “repeatedly depends upon the structural similarity between stage and ship” (p. 235). Compelling too are the concrete similarities between the work of The King’s Men and the work of the East India Company: both, says Taylor, “did their business in large, multistory, rope-worked, hollow, resonating wooden structures, designed and built by London carpenters. A wooden stage is indistinguishable from a wooden deck, a trap door resembles a ship’s hatch, a tiring house façade is remarkably similar to a forecastle, a theater’s ‘cellarage’ is structurally parallel to below-decks” (p. 234).
Shakespeare was fully aware, as he says in the Prologue to Henry V, that like the magic of floatation, his own brand of magic, the magic of theatrical illusion, must proceed from the work performed in his own wooden structure:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention;
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,
Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat, unraisèd spirits that hath dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt? (Prologue 1–14).
The wooden “scaffolding” of the material theater evokes here the wooden structure of a ship, both of which have a “cockpit.” This word, deriving from the staging area of cock fights, came to be used not only for the lower deck of a ship, where the wounded were taken, but also for the theater’s pit and, more generally, for any scene of battle, where “casque”—which meant helmet or skull—collides with “casque.”[22] In The Tempest, Prospero, himself a director of stage performances, gives voice to this awareness that the magic of theatrical illusion proceeds from the work one does with base materials, which for the most part means wood. His observation, shortly after he aborts the wedding masque, might take on a new meaning here:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (IV.1.148–58).
All human experience, he seems to say, is rooted in the world’s coarse though fertile “stuff,” a word which even then was quite capable of carrying a vulgar meaning.[23] And that “stuff,” by force of labor, is transformed into a “vision” which, however humble or lofty, is always fleeting, “insubstantial,” and wondrous. The language of this passage is rich in the imagery of carpentry which runs throughout the play; here, in particular, it is theater carpentry. The “insubstantial vision” is the theatrical illusion created by the players, who are also wood-workers. To watch a theatrical performance, Prospero suggests, is to be consoled. It is to know that the ephemeral beauty of human experience can be transformed by a writer, a sort of ingenious carpenter, into “something rich and strange,” and be preserved, or locked, in the “cloven pine” that is every book of imaginative literature, to be released again and again, as Shakespeare says in Sonnet 18: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”
Works Cited
Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. London: Routledge, 2018.
Bond, Ronald B. “Labour, Ease, and ‘The Tempest’ as Pastoral Romance.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 77.3 (1978): 330–42.
Carlson, Donald. “‘Tis New to Thee’: Power, Magic, and Early Science in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” Ben Jonson Journal 22.1 (2015): 1–22.
Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2006.
Hunt, Maurice. “‘Stir’ and Work in Shakespeare’s Last Plays.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22.2 (1982): 285–304.
Kerrigan, John. Shakespeare’s Originality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Muñoz Simonds, Peggy. “‘My charms crack not’: The Alchemical Structure of The Tempest.” Comparative Drama 31.4 (1997–1998): 538–70.
Nardizzi, Vin. Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
Parker, Patricia. “Rude Mechanicals.” In Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Eds. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1960.
Rockett, William. “Labor and Virtue in The Tempest.” Shakespeare Quarterly 24.1 (1973): 77–84.
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
Smith, Irwin. “Theatre into Globe.” Shakespeare Quarterly 3.2 (1952): 113–20.
Strachey, William. “A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight.” In A Voyage to Virginia in 1609: Two Narratives. Strachey’s “True Reportory” and “Jourdain’s Discovery of the Bermudas.” Ed. Louis B. Wright. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. 1–101.
Taylor, Gary. “Hamlet in Africa 1607.” In Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the
Early Modern Period. Eds. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 223–48.
Urban, Raymond A. “Why Caliban Worships the Man in the Moon.” Shakespeare Quarterly 27.2
(1976): 203–205.
Vaughn, Alden T. “William Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’ and Shakespeare: A Closer Look at the
Evidence.” Shakespeare Quarterly 59.3 (2008): 245–73.
Woodward, Hobson. A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown
and Inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: Viking, 2009.
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[1] For the idea and the inspiration behind this study, I am deeply indebted to Kevin Jannot, who played Stephano in Jacksonville State University’s 2017 production of The Tempest, and who asked me (I was serving as dramaturg): “What exactly did a Renaissance butler do?” That question sent me on the search that is recorded in this study.
[2] Vin Nardizzi, “‘There’s Wood Enough Within’: The Tempest’s Logs and the Resources of Shakespeare’s Globe,” in Wooden Os, 112–38.
[3] The storm as an image evoking work has been examined by Ronald B. Bond, who, aligning the otium of Gonzalo’s utopian vision with Prospero’s aborted wedding masque, argues against seeing The Tempest as a conventional pastoral romance. The storm scene, he says, “is more than a humorously realistic framing device for the wonderfully unreal events to follow; it is an image of activity, of men doing their proper duty. It is an image of negotium, where the real not the putative gubernator is in control.” See Ronald B. Bond, “Labour, Ease, and ‘The Tempest’ as Pastoral Romance,” 334. Like William Rockett, Bond sees the theme of work as rooted in Christian philosophy. The Tempest, he says, “tempers the facile sentimentalism of ancient pastoral with the puritanical conviction that sloth is sinful and exults not in the pleasures accruing to otium, but in the satisfactions of tasks well done.” Ibid., 342.
[4] What Bond says of Antonio and Sebastian—that their plot against Prospero “is a parody of action, as opposed to sloth and idleness”—applies equally to Stephano and Trinculo; all four of them “parody the actions of Prospero” and in so doing, they parody work and its ennobling value. Ibid., 338–39.
[5] Peggy Muñoz Simonds notes that “plummet,” which derives from the Latin plomb, or lead, is “that same base metal which must be transmuted into gold by Prospero” See Peggy Muñoz Simonds, “‘My charms crack not’: The Alchemical Structure of The Tempest,” 548. Again, however, the two metaphors—human experience as alchemical process or as carpentry project—are compatible. For an analogous discussion of joining and the carpenter’s other tool, the rule, see Patricia Parker, “Rude Mechanicals,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, 51–53.
[6] Nardizzi is alert to how in The Tempest wood takes on various “layers of meaning,” including this destructive and sinister one. See Nardizzi, “‘There’s Wood Enough Within,’” 123–24.
[7] The illuminating argument of Muñoz Simonds, that this play is “a theatrical exercise in alchemical transmutation,” is especially relevant here. In this passage, and particularly in Shakespeare’s use of the word “divide,” she sees the play entering the first stage of the alchemical process, Separatio or Divisio, then proceeds to examine how the play illustrates the eight more stages that follow, among which is the seventh stage, Conjunctio, or joining. See Muñoz Simonds, “‘My charms crack not,’” 541, 542, 554. Her thesis is compatible with mine, for Shakespeare was perfectly capable of seeing the points of convergence between alchemy and the humbler art of carpentry.
[8] That Shakespeare indeed knew William Strachey’s account is an argument that has been thoroughly revisited and reaffirmed, most persuasively by Alden T. Vaughn. “The abundant thematic and verbal parallels between the play and ‘True Reportory’” make it clear, says Vaughn, that The Tempest was shaped in part by Strachey’s account. See Alden T. Vaughn, “William Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’ and Shakespeare: A Closer Look at the Evidence,” 273. See also Hobson Woodward, A Brave Vessel.
[9] “Sir George Somers,” says Strachey, “consulted with our governor that if he might have two carpenters (for we had four, such as / they were) and twenty men over with him into the main island he would quickly frame up another little bark to second ours, for the better fitting and conveyance of our people.” This is followed by a description of carpenters sawing timbers and readying them for a vessel. And towards the end of Strachey’s “True Reportory,” he writes about how fervently, with “a solemn and sacred oath,” Sir Thomas Gates believed “that the country yielded abundance of wood, as oak, wainscot, walnut trees, bay trees, ash, sassafras, live oak, green all the year, cedar, and fir: which are the materials of soap ashes and potashes, of oils and walnuts, and bays, of pitch and tar, of clapboards, pipe staves, masts and excellent boards of forty, fifty, and sixty length and three-foot breadth, when one fir tree is able to make the main mast of the greatest ship in England.” See William Strachey, “A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight,” in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609, ed. Louis B. Wright, 38–39, 100.
[10] On how the case of the “recycled Globe” reflects the wood shortage in Shakespeare’s London, see especially Nardizzi, “‘There’s Wood Enough Within,’” 15–31. Egan, considering the piles of logs which Caliban and Ferdinand are made to haul, makes the following observation: “Howsoever the expected action of a shipwrecked man in possession of wood is to make a boat, nothing in the play suggests that Prospero is doing this. What, then, would an early audience have understood from all this deforestation? The answer appears to be colonization” (pp. 156-57). This work of colonization, however, depends on the transformative art of carpentry. Egan agrees that this play “is clearly concerned with the possibilities of transmutation, especially regarding human flesh” (p. 149). And Prospero’s magic is not so mysterious as it might seem. It “represents,” says Egan, pointing to the prescience of Shakespeare’s vision, “human ingenuity at its peak, not supernature at all. Most importantly, the one-way transformatory power of Prospero’s ‘art’ (in which we may read the new technologies of commercial exploitation) illustrates that the only way to hold on to what one most wants to preserve is not to discover how to bring it back once it is gone, but to learn not to destroy it in the first place.” See Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare, 156–57, 149, 169.
[11] The sexual innuendo here is unmistakably present. “Log-man,” moreover, recalls Shakespeare’s use of “woodman” in Measure for Measure. Lucio, thinking that Duke Vincentio is a friar, slanders him thus: “Friar, thou knowest not the duke so well as I do. / He’s a better woodman than thou tak’st him for” (IV.3.160–61). See Eric Partridge On the use of “woodman,” see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 223). On the erotic significance of the logs in The Tempest, see Nardizzi, Wooden Os, 124–27.
[12] The obvious metaphorical function of this vegetative image has often been noted. Rockett, for example, says that “implicitly affirmed” through this image is “[t]he necessity of disciplined and prudent cultivation in political affairs.” Rockett grounds his interpretation of this and other vegetative imagery in The Tempest in Christian and classical philosophy, seeing labor—the cultivation of one’s garden—as redemptive and leading to virtue. My emphasis, which I believe is compatible with Rockett’s, is on Shakespeare’s vision of the meaning of work at every level of human experience, work as a primal human impulse, divorced from philosophy and religion. See William Rockett, “Labor and Virtue in The Tempest,” 77–78.
[13] “Preoccupation with ‘joining’ is everywhere in Shakespeare,” says Parker, and her probing and lucid examination of “joining” covers not only A Midsummer Night’s Dream but many other Shakespeare plays. The absence of The Tempest, therefore, in Parker’s study is notable. See Parker, “Rude Mechanicals,” 68.
[14] This observation, which had escaped me, I owe to Helen Companion, who kindly read a draft of this article.
[15] “The main reason why Caliban worships Stephano as the Man in the Moon,” says Raymond A. Urban, “is that Caliban is being inducted into the religion of drunkards—a comic Bacchanalian sect that took the man in the moon as its God and the liquor bottle as its Bible. The vagabond clerics of medieval Europe invented this burlesque religion.” See Raymond A. Urban, “Why Caliban Worships the Man in the Moon,” 204.
[16] That “bottle” is connected to “boat” more directly through the German Boot is significant here, for Trinculo’s name, as Muñoz Simonds notes, is itself linked to the Germanic trinken, or drink. See Muñoz Simonds, “‘My charms crack not,’” 561.
[17] He tells Miranda, for example, that he is now “master of a full poor cell” (I.2.20). He tells Caliban, “I have used thee / (Filth as thou art) with human care, and lodged thee / In mine own cell” (I.2.345–47). When he aborts the masque he tells Ferdinand and Miranda, “If you be pleased, retire into my cell / And there repose” (IV.1.161–62). Ariel, telling Prospero what has become of Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban, says, “At last I left them / I’ th’ filthy mantled pool beyond your cell” (IV.1.181–82). Caliban, as he approaches Prospero’s cell with Stephano and Trinculo, says, “Prithee, my king, be quiet. Seest thou here? / This is the mouth o’ th’ cell. Make no noise, and enter” (IV.1.215–16). And at the end, addressing Alonso, whom he has forgiven, Prospero invites him in: “Welcome, sir; / This cell’s my court. Here have I few attendants, / And subjects none abroad” (V.1.165–67).
[18] On the relationship between power and science, which during this period was conflated with magic, see Donald Carlson’s study of The Tempest. “Truly,” he says, writing about modern and Early Modern special effects, “theatre and entertainment remain one of the few realms in which science and magic maintain a tight bond.” Donald Carlson, “‘Tis New to Thee,’” 6. See also John Kerrigan, who examines how Davenant and Dryden revise the play, “drawing out and inflecting” its “Baconian elements” and “dramatizing the magic of science.” John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Originality, 98.
[19] Shakespeare would have seen variants of the word “leak” repeatedly in the early pages of the “True Reportory,” where Strachey describes how the sailors detected leaks by listening for the sound of water running in. “Many a weeping leak was this way found,” says Strachey, “and hastily stopped.” Strachey, “True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates,” 9.
[20] Nardizzi is illuminating in pointing out that the chess pieces on Ferdinand and Miranda’s board would have been made of wood, a fact which aligns them with Prospero’s kings and queens and pawns, real and breathing though they are. Nardizzi, Wooden Os, 129.
[21] Carlson aligns Gonzalo’s utopian vision with the pastoral ideal dramatized in the aborted wedding masque and with all other suggestions of the use of power, or magic (or science), to evade work. “Prospero,” says Carlson, “looks to gain by embracing the limitations of his humanity and, given the vagaries of the human condition, thereby invokes a force more efficacious than magic: the healing balm of mercy.” See Carlson, “‘Tis New to Thee,’” 19.
[22] The Cockpit was the name of a London theater which opened in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. “Casque,” it is interesting to note, also evokes butts of wine, but in The Tempest Shakespeare does not use it, employing instead the Germanic “skull” twice (III.2.89 and V.1.60).
[23] In Timon of Athens it is suggestive not only of the sexual act but of semen. “If thou wilt curse,” says Timon to Apemantus, “thy father, that poor rag, / Must be thy subject, who in spite put stuff / To some she-beggar and compounded thee / Poor rogue hereditary” (IV.3.271–74). See also Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 197.