CALIBAN AS HERO: Tearing Apart the Tempest.

Having been practically raised on Shakespeare, aspiring to the heights of his genius, expecting abounding wisdom, insight and gentleness in what I took to be his Last Play (though I was mistaken, as it was second-to-last*) I was nothing short of shocked to find the ending of the Tempest to be what it was. I must have known it in the back of my mind, hence I had waited seven years to read it. Now that I have found this rather embarrassing play out, it mars my entire outlook on the Bard. Here’s how:

*And upon disillusion at its conclusion I came to understand why his last was a Royal Tragedy.

I shall begin by addressing my frame of reference. You see: I enjoy fairy tales as expressions of the Individual Unconscious. Jungian Psychology, of which I am a student, posits that the second half of life is properly devoted to self-exploration. In Carl Jung’s own words, “Life really begins at the age of forty.” Now, the Bard would have been well along in years when he penned The Tempest; he had no excuse to be unwise. His prose and poetry are among the best therein, having come a long way from the wordplay of King Richard III (especially those laughably wretched lines about the letter “G”). Yet the sentiment is tantamount to an infantile fantasy!

Cue Spoilers. ACTION:

Prospero:

The play is set on an Island, the perfect objectification of Isolation. Prospero is Lord of this Isle, the absolute personification of the Ego. Shakespeare, a playwright renowned in his own time, surely intuited that his legacy would outlive him. So his literary alter-ego, a Learned Magician named Prospero, (whose magick adheres to the Wiccan tradition in that it is based in LANGUAGE, not unlike the “magick” of the Bard’s own wordplay) is appropriately STRANDED upon an ISLAND, with all the other occupants ENSLAVED TO HIM and all his enemies upon the ISLAND fallen by his own hand and device. What’s more: he confides in his one daughter, Miranda, that he is IN FACT no MERE man but a DUKE who was ROBBED OF HIS RIGHTFUL PLACE by the “betrayal” of his brother. And of course Miranda does not question his authority in saying this; she has literally known no life OUTSIDE of this Isle.

At this point in the Bard’s life we might infer that fame and self-knowledge had crept into the softer portions of his head. He “knew” himself to be a Great Magician of the Theatre, Prosperous to that degree, yet likewise tragically, IRONICALLY condemned to Isolation in Perfection. So the name “Prospero” appeals to the vanity of the Bard in that it is of a bittersweet and sentimental irony: he is not Prosperous at all. Yet what I took initially to have been laughter at Prospero’s expense I unearthed as having probably been histrionics on the part of the very WRITER: He is unprosperous through no fault of his OWN, but simply the BETRAYAL of his LESSER BROTHER. And this is where the Elitism really starts, and this is likewise where it ends. Yet not before it reaches a fever pitch of brutality that would make Vince Gilligan’s Walter “Heisenberg” White cringe and frown.

Prospero’s enemies all lie BEYOND the Island, so that it is not in Isolation but in Company that the “true” danger to the Ego abides. In Isolation, he is Lord of the Land, possessing all the necessary instruments, internal and external, personal and impersonal, to make the Next Big Step in his Career and Destiny.

Beyond the realm of Isolation, he is a Nobody, who has been usurped. Prospero feels entitled to the throne his brother stole, just as the Bard must surely have felt entitled to a Greatness that Death would take from him before he would have the chance to breathe it. The Isolation of Worldly Success, condemned to finitude by Death, is like an Island of which one CAN BE Lord, but which is a shadow of the Life that one “Deserves to Live”. The Sea is all that lies beyond this Life; metaphysically, it is the Afterlife. Metaphorically, it is the life of Kinship with Others. Prospero desires only kinship with Others, ready to surrender all of his devices of torture and manipulation upon liberation from this Isle. Yet he will not stoop to the level of a beggar; he will ONLY RETURN AS A DUKE. And at this point the fairy tale becomes a pipe dream.

Miranda:

When Prospero first sends away his slave Ariel, shortly after berating her to do his bidding, frightening her into slavish servitude with threats of a greater severity than the very evils he had “rescued her” from, he commands his heart to awake. The following line has Miranda waking from a sleep that had been induced by his own tale of betrayal and “redemption” (or to be clear: revenge). The play is on the word “Heart”: not only does he refer to his own Heart when he tells it to awake from the Heartless Slumber with which he treats his female slave. He all so uses it to refer to his daughter, Miranda. Upon this woman he displaces his own sensitivity, which he restricts in the presence of his inferiors and subordinates. And at this point Miranda becomes the ultimate personification of the Positive Anima. She is the Ego’s Heart and Soul, and in the mirror of her eyes he is nothing short of Goodness, for that is all that her eyes behold within him. In her presence he is a Noble Gentleman, a Great Father, and a Wise Magician. He likens himself to the Wise Old Man of ancient lore. Yet this is only flattery, for she is ASLEEP or ABSENT whenever he reveals his tyrannical agenda, and it is in fact his pedantic tale, singing his own praises, that HAD PUT HER TO SLEEP.

Ariel:

It follows logically as well as it follows magickally that Ariel is the Negative Anima. She is the perfect character foil for Miranda. She is subservient, but out of fear rather than love. She is loyal, but only out of folly and an underestimation of her own power, groveling before the sheer facts of his. For every positive quality that Miranda brings to the foreground of her father’s character, Ariel brings doubly many weaknesses and sins. Because she is his slave he treats her with corrosive brutality, only regarding her delicately to the degree that she is likened to an object of fancy or a machine of utility. And her own quivering subservience and servitude are precisely what would make a Modern Man most ashamed!

Caliban:

Oscar Wilde said that Realism is Caliban seeing himself in a mirror. The name has become synonymous with ugliness and depravity*. Yet he is unequivocally a victim, and were there any lingering poetic justice in Shakespeare’s work at this time then Caliban would emerge a victorious hero. And this was what I had hoped, of course – and even EXPECTED – to see.

*Yet it is all so, in accordance with Wilde’s aphorism, a testament to Reality.

No one likes Caliban. He is a creep and most probably a rapist at heart. It is easy for Prospero to manipulate Miranda into falling in love with Fernando, all because the only other man that she has ever seen, save for her own Father, is a creature that most would not even consider to be a man.

Caliban is the Shadow. He is everything that the Ego hates but needs to use. A MONARCHICAL Ego, the root of all neurosis according to Jungian psychology, as well as one of the most tangible evils of the neurotic state, keeps the Shadow “in check” by repression, allowing it to express its self only on the Ego’s terms. So a pretentious man is a hypocrite because he condemns evil in others whilst making any exception necessary to serve his own egocentric agenda. Caliban is thus rendered a slave. He is never in the play REDEEMED by the love of Miranda, as would be the case for either Sebastian or Quasimodo, or even Aladdin. Prospero TRIUMPHS OVER Caliban.

Over the course of the play, Caliban seeks to escape his bondage by enlisting the services of two drunkards, who are products of the very shipwreck that PROSPERO HIMSELF PRODUCED (The eponymous “Tempest” is of course nothing short of a Temper Tantrum with which the Ego assaults the Surrounding World, trying to reduce the occupants of its Seas to his own Prisoners and Indentured Servants). This alliance serves to portend the dangers of a magician’s hubris: that while he strands people upon his Island there will all ways be those aspects of the Outer World which, working in concert with likewise unsettling aspects of the Inner World, will seek to supplant him.

The Shadow threatens to destroy the Ego. But the Ego triumphs. Yet no Integration follows. The Shadow remains Enslaved to the Ego, as the Ego returns to the Social World on the wings of angels. Ariel is released from bondage, but was it ever her lot in life? What does the Ego gain by releasing her? He has one less black mirror to look upon; now he will only ever court an amorous looking-glass. (If I may: that last line is one of the BETTER lines from King Dick.)

Isolation is left behind, but Hubris persists. Caliban never mates with Miranda; the Shadow and the Anima remain separate. The Anima marries the Persona, as the Ego had planned. Is all well the ends well? Only if the ends can justify the means. But neither ends nor means are valid herein.

I ask you this: if your MOTHER were killed and you had to spend the remainder of your mortal life carrying firewood for her barbaric, Caesarian murderer, and supposing that that Mother was the only touch of female gentleness you ever knew, and the only sight for sore eyes on this Island that had been your Mother’s Home was the sultry daughter of your captor…

What would YOU do?

To whom do YOU owe loyalty, in this situation?

To the man who calls you a fish, and the daughter who, no more affectionately, parrots his every word? Would you not, under the oppression of so self-entitled and delusional a tyrant, who even manipulates his own daughter, not reject all virtuous pretense and try to have a go on the wench?

Of course you would. Be glad you don’t have to.

Fernando:

No narcissistic delusion is complete without the Approval of the Public. Enter Fernando, the man that Prospero REALLY wanted to see. Fernando is the Ego’s Key to the Castle. He is the Mask that the Magician wears to fool his daughter and to sneak aboard the very ship he wrecked upon his accursed shores.

Fernando is everything Miranda wants because she does not know any better; she simply cannot. Prospero never regards her positions fairly; he only loves her under the condition that she agrees with him. Fernando comes along then and he is submissive to her, and she can only think to be submissive to him, because he is second only to Prospero in Nobility, to her mind, and (conveniently) to the Public.

Fernando is the Persona. Upon it a woman projects all of her Positive Animi, whose Negative, Repressed Corollary, known only in Sleep, are put upon the Scapegoat: the Shadow, Caliban. Likewise, invested in Fernando is all of the Ego’s hopes, so long as the Persona can be made subservient, which is the ultimate goal of the Caesarian Ego. He represents what the Ego wishes to see upon looking into a mirror. And he is byfar more pleasant to the Anima than is Caliban looking into the same mirror. In the mirror of the Anima’s eyes, the Ego sees itself in the light of Beauty, while the Shadow only sees its own ugliness. Fernando is the personification of this (very superficial and premature) Beauty that is accorded dignity because it has inherited status.

The Anima is what the Ego projects upon other women. It is ideal that she should marry the Persona because that means that other women will, in theory, love the Ego for its appearance, which is just as conveniently equated with its own Inner Greatness.

CONCLUSION:

The Tempest ends like Othello ends: the traitors are condemned and captured. Yet what made Iago evil? He was jealous and manipulative, and so is Prospero. Prospero is not generous to anyone, but he imagines himself to be so because anyone who would challenge him is either intoxicated with fabricated emotion or otherwise under physical and metaphysical threat of punishment all ready impending. So the tyrant flatters himself and fancies himself kind when in fact he is simply “powerful”. Shakespeare’s dream comes to an end as the Ego would wish. Yet what of the Soul? A more inspired play by far is Hamlet, because EVERYBODY DIES. No one triumphs in such a mess; that is the Reality that Caliban sees when he looks into the mirror.

HOW IT SHOULD HAVE ENDED:

I am still writing that. But suffice it to say that every dog gets his day. Caliban is redeemed, Miranda wakes up from her father’s spells, Prospero learns a thing or two about hubris, if he manages to live that long, and Ariel quits being a submissive little bitch. But how this shall be pulled off I have yet to entertain. Needless to say, my [indoctrinated] reservations about re-writing Shakespeare have been – shall we say? – usurped.

Dm.A.A.

POST-SCRIPTUM:

The Mother:

Though her absence from the stage leads her to evade capture on the page, some honorable mention is in order. It is convenient for the ego of a Great Writer that he forget his Mother entirely and claim the Earth to be his Mother and Heaven to be his Father. Whilst poetic and true on a macro level, it can all so, like so many spiritual sentiments, be turned to neurosis.

Caliban’s mother was killed before the start of the play. Thus the Devouring Mother that would have killed the Ego was vanquished. Yet at what cost? A break too severe and cruel left the Ego in charge of two elements that it has no affiliation with: Shadow and Negative Anima. Not unlike one’s fellows, the male is put in a Beta position, whilst the female is seduced into loyalty for the entire duration of the play.

If ever a writer was an Alpha Male, inwardly if not outwardly, it was the Bard of Avon.

SPOILERS END HERE. NONE SHALL PASS.

Dm.A.A.