A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest (26 page)

To a Jamestown veteran such was William Strachey, the musings of Gonzalo would have seemed a virtual recapitulation of the Virginia Company pamphlets that depicted Jamestown as a paradise awaiting the establishment of an ideal commonwealth. Gonzalo’s imagined plantation was Shakespeare’s distillation of the arguments of the colonialists at their wildly optimistic peak. The playwright, demonstrating why his literature would be so enduring, presented both sides of the question in equally strong terms. The pointed repartee of Sebastian and Antonio perfectly reflected the pessimism of reports that depicted drought-ravaged Jamestown as a barren and spiritless colony of helpless laggards. These were arguments the people of London would recognize, and Shakespeare delivered them as usual with the best and worst aspects of both positions fully explored. Here was an example of his ability to penetrate a debate on current events and lay it gleamingly bare in a way that is eminently entertaining.

To Strachey the coincidences were tumbling from the Blackfriars stage. He would probably have noticed that the characters of the play were preoccupied with water quality. Both Prospero and Caliban threatened to punish others by withholding fresh water and forcing them to drink salt water. Caliban especially seemed to evoke Strachey’s fears of the Jamestown well when he wished Prospero to suffer the consequences of poor drinking water: Strachey described “fens, marshes, ditches, muddy pools,” while Caliban in
The Tempest
said, “all the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him by inch-meal a disease!” Ariel also commented on the questionable water of the
Tempest
isle, mentioning a “filthy-mantled pool” near Prospero’s cave from which Trinculo emerged to complain, “I do smell all horse piss.” Like the briny flow of the James River, it seemed, the contaminated water of Prospero’s island was a source of illness.

Shakespeare and Strachey were equally fond of classical allusions, and the playwright may have written one into
The Tempest
that he read in the voyager’s account. Strachey was drawing on Virgil’s
Aeneid
when he said the Jamestown fort was located on “a low level of ground about half an acre (or so much as Queen Dido might buy of King Hyarbas, which she compassed about with the thongs cut out of one bull hide and therein built her castle at Byrza).” Queen Dido makes an appearance in
The Tempest
, as well, when the play’s characters debate whether she was from Carthage or Tunis on the Barbary Coast. Though Shakespeare needed no excuse to draw on one of his favorite classical texts, his prominent allusion to Dido suggests that he was reading Strachey’s chronicle at the time. Perhaps Strachey’s aside even nudged the playwright’s attention to the Mediterranean coast of Africa when he was considering places in which to set
The Tempest
.

 

While Shakespeare resisted the trend toward including audience-participation masque dances in his play, he could not avoid the spectacle associated with the masques if he hoped to maintain the favor of the king and queen.
The Tempest
therefore included the lavish dance and music interludes marked by special effects that the royals had come to expect, even if they were never invited to leave their seats. In the debut of the play at the Masquing House, Shakespeare and the set designers did not disappoint the royal family. Complex scenery and costume were used during the onstage masque in the third act of the play. At the Blackfriars it was a lesser version of the pageantry, but dramatic nevertheless.

At the Masquing House a full consort of musicians had provided the music. Bandoras and citterns with their wire strings and lutes with their gut strings composed the plucked instruments. A musician played the keyboard of a virginal, while others used bows to play viols and violins. Wind instruments included cornets, flutes, recorders, sackbuts, and shawns. Drummers provided percussion on kettledrums, side drums, and tabors. The Blackfriars had no keyboard musicians, but it did feature a small group on string, wind, and percussion instruments.

Prospero watched from the stage balcony as the masque scenes began that afternoon at the Blackfriars. As instructed in the stage directions, to “strange and solemn music” wraiths of “several strange shapes” carried a fully set banquet table onstage and danced around it with “gentle actions of salutations,” inviting Alonso and his entourage to feast. After the dancers withdrew and Alonso and the noblemen moved toward the table to eat, they were interrupted by Ariel emerging from the clouds in the shape of a harpy. In a costume resembling a giant bat, Ariel descended from the rafters of the theater with the assistance of a hidden levitation machine. Such devices were new to the English stage, recently copied from Italian designs by the king’s stage technicians. At the Masquing House heavy post-and-beam frames covered by scenery supported small movable platforms. Hidden stagehands operated ropes and pulleys to raise and lower the actors. The Blackfriars lacked such expensive equipment, and so Ariel descended on a simple rope and pulley. Truly, it was a bit of an awkward entrance—one theatergoer likened the appearance of a Blackfriars descent to watching the lowering of “a bucket into a well.”

Ariel descended from the
Tempest
clouds, landed on the stage, approached the table, and enveloped it with his wings. The cover of the giant wings allowed other actors surreptitiously to turn a revolving panel in the tabletop that made the dishes of food and drink seem to vanish when the wings were withdrawn. Ariel then proceeded to break the tension of the play by telling the king and his noblemen that Prospero still lived and that they had been brought to the island to answer for their crimes against him. Ariel then exited to the sound of thunder, and the dancing wraiths returned and carried the table out. Prospero, hidden from the other characters on his balcony perch, then declared to himself that his spells were working and exited the stage.

Grand spectacle continued in the fourth act of the play. The action opened with Prospero embracing Ferdinand and welcoming him to the family. An engagement celebration then commenced, featuring more dancers. The most elaborate costumes were reserved for the goddesses Iris, Juno, and Ceres, who continued the masque with more levitation, dance, and song. Their appearance on the Masquing House stage likely resembled Ben Jonson’s presentation of Juno in a production three years earlier: “Sitting in a throne supported by two beautiful peacocks; her attire rich and like a queen, a white diadem [crown] on her head from whence descended a veil, and that bound with a fascia [chinstrap] of several-colored silks, set with all sorts of jewels and raised in the top with lilies and roses; in her right hand she held a scepter, in the other a timbrel [tambourine]; at her golden feet the hide of a lion was placed.”

A less richly attired Juno entered from the heavens and descended slowly to the Blackfriars stage. A succinct stage direction—“Juno descends”—calls for the character to enter from above the stage over the course of several lines. Stagehands behind the scenes worked the pulleys while musicians played to cover the creaks of the apparatus. Nymphs who served the goddesses did the dancing this time, along with “sunburned sicklemen, of August,” costumed as “reapers properly habited.” The dance played out for two or three minutes as the main characters watched, until Prospero recalled that Caliban and his accomplices were plotting to kill him and ended the revelry with a clap of his hands. A stage direction suggests that the scene change is barely covered by music, saying of the dancers that “to a strange hollow and confused noise, they heavily vanish.”

Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano appeared next on the stage, and their costumes again contributed to the spectacle. As the trio approached Prospero’s cave they were distracted by “glistering apparel” that Ariel had hung on a linden tree. Stephano and Trinculo took down the clothes from the branches and tried them on, and as they did so mirrored spangles sewn on to the costumes reflected the light of the candelabra. Caliban urged his two cohorts to ignore the clothes and proceed with their plan to murder Prospero, but the butler and jester put on the garments and marveled at their good fortune.

Strachey in the Blackfriars audience may again have been taken back to his time on Bermuda. The newfound clothes of the
Tempest
mutineers seemed to recapitulate the unexpected request of the last group of Bermuda mutineers for “two suits of apparel.” Strachey probably found it hard to believe, but his account of the rebels’ request seemed bizarrely close to the
Tempest
trio’s comic interest in the glittering clothes on the tree. Perhaps Shakespeare paused at the section of the Bermuda narrative where Strachey derided the apparel request of the
Sea Venture
mutineers as “the murmuring and mutiny of such rebellious and turbulent humorists.”

There were more tidbits, too, that seemed to mimic the
Sea Venture
experience. The conspiracy of the
Tempest
’s comic trio failed when Prospero confronted them. In an echo of the Bermuda hog hunts, the three were chased from the stage by dancers costumed as baying hounds named Mountain, Silver, Fury, and Tyrant. Musicians behind the screen provided “a noise of hunters” as the dancers in dog masks pursued the mutineers offstage. A reminder of the Bermuda hog hunts had already come to Strachey’s mind earlier, when Caliban accused Prospero of holding him prisoner by saying “you sty me.”

The play culminated in the fifth and final act when Prospero forgave the enemies who exiled him and announced his plan to return to Milan. After his declaration, the lovers Miranda and Ferdinand were revealed at the back of the stage playing chess. In addition to confirming the play’s romantic association, the scene served to reunite the lost father and son when King Alonso and his son Ferdinand each realized that the other was still alive. The drama ended with the lovers safely betrothed, the enemies of the court neutralized, and the rightful king returning to his land. Ariel was released from servitude and Caliban was presumably left to roam the island alone.

Prospero closed the play with a soliloquy delivered from center stage. As Strachey listened to the closing lines of the ruler of the
Tempest
isle, he may have been reminded of Thomas Gates of Bermuda. Each was a well-read governor marooned on a wild island; each threatened severe punishment but was ultimately satisfied with spoken assurances of renewed allegiance by the condemned; and each modeled dutiful behavior when his countrymen suggested that expediency trumped responsibility. In crafting the character of Prospero, Shakespeare may have taken special notice of Strachey’s description of the transformation in Gates’s personality after the ambush of Humphrey Blunt. Gates was freshly arrived in Virginia when he sent Blunt to retrieve an errant boat on the James River, only to watch from afar as his man was set upon and killed by Powhatans. The experience steeled Gates’s resolve and precipitated his attack on the unsuspecting people of Kecoughtan. Throughout his narrative Strachey depicted Gates as a patient patriarch who abhorred violence but who was forced into the role of a wounded overseer resigned to delivering punishment. Shakespeare would lead the character of Prospero through a similar passage in
The Tempest
. In Virginia the killing of Blunt caused the conversion; in
The Tempest
it was brought on by Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda. That difference aside, the transformations of Gates and Prospero are remarkably similar. “Thou most lying slave, whom stripes may move, not kindness;” Prospero said of Caliban, “I have used thee (filth as thou art) with humane care and lodged thee in mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate the honour of my child.” In
The Tempest
as in Virginia, the perceived recalcitrance of the indigenous person moves the interloper to use force instead of the moderate persuasion he prefers.

Prospero may also have received a bit of Shakespeare himself in his personality. In the magician’s closing speech some critics have sensed that the playwright was announcing his own retirement. Prospero told the audience that he would give up his spells and lead a quiet life in Milan, just as Shakespeare mulled an end to his stage magic and a new life of retirement in Stratford-upon-Avon. Carrying the interpretation further, Ariel may be understood as Shakespeare’s creative imagination being released from servitude and Caliban as his darker impulses being left to roam in a private place unseen by the world. There are parallels, after all, between a magician who conjures up storms and manipulates people with magic and a playwright who creates theatrical storms and manipulates characters with stagecraft. Shakespeare might even have been referring to his most famous venue, the Globe theater, when Prospero in his closing speech said, “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.”

Strachey would have been amused as he watched a dreamlike version of his Bermuda and Virginia experiences play out in candlelight. Many moments of recognition would have taken place as he heard variations of his own language in the lines of the actors. The play would have seemed strangely familiar yet incredibly distant in the shadowy theater as his thoughts turned to his days in Bermuda and Jamestown. Even so, to Strachey the drama on the Blackfriars stage would have been little more than an ephemeral diversion. While he would have been flattered to see his words so used, he would also have thought that
The Tempest
was popular entertainment that would soon fade into oblivion as all popular entertainments eventually did. This version of his story would not last; no, it was up to him to create a work of literature that would have the enduring impact that this fleeting stage show would never enjoy.

Perhaps as soon as that evening, in his spare room a few doors from the theater, William Strachey took out his diaries and the memoirs of his Virginia voyage. He may also have reread his introductory letter to the
Lawes Divine, Morall and Martial
. “I have both in the Bermudas and since in Virginia been a sufferer and an eyewitness,” he had written, “and the full story of both in due time shall consecrate unto your views.” He intended to keep that promise, and so perhaps even that night he put down the book, picked up a quill, and began to write.