Poetry Checklist

title — appropriate to subject, tone and genre? Does it generate interest, and hint at what your poem's about?

subject — what's the basic situation? Who is talking, and under what circumstances? Try writing a paraphrase to identify any gaps or confusions.

shape — what are you appealing to: intellect or emotions of the reader? What structure(s) have you used — progressions, comparisons, analogies, bald assertions, etc.? Are these aspects satisfyingly integrated? Does structure support content?

tone — what's your attitude to the subject? Is it appropriate to content and audience: assured, flexible, sensitive, etc.?

diction— appropriate and uncontrived, economical, varied and energizing? Do you understand each word properly, its common uses and associations? See if listing the verbs truly pushes the poem along. Are words repeated? Do they set mood, emotional rapport, distance?

personification — striking but persuasive, adds to unity and power?

metaphor and simile — fresh and convincing, combining on many levels?

rhythm and metre — natural, inevitable, integrate poem's structure?

rhyme — fresh, pleasurable, unassuming but supportive?

overall impression — original, honest, coherent, expressive, significant?

Prospero's Books, Genesis and The Tempest

Introduction

Peter Greenaway's film, Prospero's Books, has developed a small cult following, but most people who try can't sit through it. If you don't know the book it's based on, Shakespeare's TheTempest, the film is likely to make no sense at all. And if you do know The Tempest, this version is likely to seem stiff, obscure and boring, compared to other productions. However, by following its bookish lead and comparing the film both with Shakespeare's play and with a work I believe the play is based on, the Book of Genesis, I came upon conversations and couplings which brought the film to life for me.

In a whimsical comment included in the published screenplay, Greenaway implies that the film's source is a fictional tome: 'This is the "example-book", the template for Prospero's imaginings...With this book - a primer and textbook of his humanist education - Prospero populates the island...the camera halts before the large Book of Mythologies - and the title of the film - Prospero's Books - is superimposed'. (14.4) 1 (Title image above) Though the Bible is never mentioned in connection with this source book of stories about gods and heroes, it was as much a 'primer and textbook of ... humanist education' as the Greek and Roman classics. And though explicit references to the Bible are rare in the film and in Shakespeare's play, I hope to show that it in fact has served as just such a generative template.

The Book of Revelation is the most likely biblical candidate for being the template of The Tempest and Prospero's Books because of their shared depictions of the dissolution of the world and the dissolution of conventional discursive forms. The Tempest and Revelations are both capstone pieces - final retrospective works in a large corpus. 2 But in the 1623 Folio, the original collected edition of the plays,The Tempest appeared as the first work, Shakespeare's Alpha as well as his Omega.

II. Creation

Like many stories of creation, Genesis opens with an image of dark turbulent waters, a stormy sea: 'In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth, the earth was without form and void, with darkness over the face of the abyss, and a mighty wind that swept over the surface of the waters'. (Genesis 1:1-3) 3 Upon this shifting, undifferentiated chaos (sounded in the original Hebrew by the word, 'Tohuvavohu'), the speech of the creator first imposes separation: the polarities of light and darkness, then day and night. 4 Most performances of The Tempest begin with a god-awful racket, and the stage direction in Shakespeare's script indicates that in the opening sequence static overwhelms signal: 'A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard'. 5 The play itself comes into being for spectator or reader as barely emergent meaning - snatches of desperate shouting amongst the ship's crew and passengers. 6 Prospero's Books also begins with the elemental: 'Much magnified and slow motion...a drop of back-lit water splashes into a black pool', (1.1) and then characteristically slips into the textual: 'Pages in a book called the Book of Water are turned - there are drawings of seas, rain, clouds, sleet, snow...illustrations of climate - storms, high winds, hurricanes and tempests'. (1.2, 1.5)

As does the opening chapter of Genesis and the start of the TheTempest's second scene, the film then cuts to an image of the creator who both raises and calms the storm - a nude John Gielgud in a Roman bath - and we hear the sound of his first words. (Fig. 1) Greenaway irreverently improvises upon his originals here by construing the creation as a form of childish bathtub play - swinging on a trapeze, manipulating a toy boat, peeing into the water and masturbating. 7 This mode of origination soon gives way to verbal invention, first spoken and then beautifully calligraphed with water that turns to ink dipped by the quill pen of a Renaissance humanist scholar-playwright sitting in his compact study. (Fig. 2) Greenaway frequently alternates among different representations of the creative process: divine magic as his Prospero roams the island, make-believe play as he stands in his bath, literary art as he writes at his desk. These alternatives derive from The Tempest's characterisation of Prospero's Faustus-like control over nature and spirits, his delight in playing with his toys and his victims, and his absorption with reading books and writing masques. But they also resonate with the Bible's personification of a God who commands the element and the angels, who teases his offspring mercilessly, and who fabricates nature and people out of words:
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
(Psalm 139:14-16 [AV])

The creator makes a world in a book by writing words and pictures, but that world only comes alive when it is read by a comprehending reader. The ability to read and to understand his magic books is, according to Caliban, the source of Prospero's power. Likewise the wisdom and grace of both Hebrew and Christian prophets often derives from what they can read with comprehension, whether it be the handwriting on the wall, the book of the law or the parables of the master. 8 This incarnation of the word into flesh recurs at frequent intervals when Greenaway conjures up his elaborate images of the 24 books that have accompanied Prospero to the island. In both verbal description and through computer animation, plants grow, animals walk off the page, renderings of buildings pop-up into models, engravings turn into cartoons:
End Plants: Looking like a log of ancient, seasoned wood...It is a thick block of a book with varnished wooden covers that have been at one time, and probably still are, inhabited by minute tunnelling insects. The pages are stuffed with pressed plants and flowers, corals and seaweeds, and around the book hover exotic butterflies, dragonflies, fluttering moths, bright beetles and a cloud of golden pollen-dust...
(p.21)

The idea of the book itself as a source of life is celebrated with Rabelaisian, Cervantine abandon.

The animated books occupy a realm intermediate between print and motion picture. As Genesis' god writes his creation of the world within a book of his own creation, and as Prospero produces his world in the books he reads and writes, Greenaway mounts multiple displays of the generation of Prospero's Books within the film itself. The opening sequence of production credits conventionally signifies the beginning of a movie, even if it occurs, as it does here, several minutes into the actual projection. As the magically robed Prospero walks with a procession of his minions through Escher-like arcades inan endless horizontal travelling shot, the sets and the characters out of which the fictional story will be constructed appear like Dramatis Personae. Superimposed on them are the titles, which likewise introduce those who have constructed the film. Reminiscent of earlier shots in which the team pulling Prospero's study look like a crew of grips moving a set across a studio floor (12.1) (Fig. 3) and spirits holding mirrors that reflect Prospero's imaginings look like technicians with light baffles, the bustling crowds of naked helpers surrounding Prospero suggest the characters listed in the credits performing their duties during the actual film shoot. 9

The opening section of Genesis tells several different stories of the origin of humans. Male and female are spoken into existence in chapter 1 (Genesis 1), Adam is moulded from dust and Eve is taken from his rib in chapter 2 (Genesis 2), and in chapter 5 (Genesis 5), 'the generations of Adam' make their first appearance on the pages of a prior book. Likewise, Greenaway represents yet another kind of creation in the opening credits of Prospero's Books: intertextual reproduction. In the foreground of the marathon travelling shot, books are placed on tables and plinths and are passed from one naked spirit character to another. They open the books, read and reflect upon them briefly and then pass them on, often with an exchange of significant glances, suggesting a transmission of texts across space and through time - the weave implied in the etymology of 'text' itself. (Fig. 4) Greenaway ascribes to Prospero intertextual methods of reference, repetition and parody approved in the Renaissance by both the classical tradition of imitation and the biblical tradition of typological repetition:
In the building of his palaces, the stocking of his libraries, and in the fashioning of the indigenous spirits into classical allegories, he has quoted extant buildings, paintings and books...
(pp. 12-13)

Greenaway himself practises these methods in thousands of details as well as in the overall plan of making a postmodern version of a Shakespearean classic - a creative offspring that's also a critical commentary on the original. The very use of the film convention of a second start in the credits sequence draws attention to Shakespeare's dramatic device of making the opening shipwreck scene an action-packed but indecipherable prelude to its explanation in act 1 scene 2. And Greenaway quotes as liberally from modern film classics - especially Shakespearean films - as from traditional literature, painting and architecture. 10

As the 'auteur' Greenaway breeds his creation from books, so did his sources, the author Shakespeare and the multiple authors of the Bible. The Tempest includes a pastiche of quotations from Montaigne, from sea voyage accounts, from Vergil's Aeneid. One of Prospero's Books is 'An Alphabetical Inventory of the Dead...It contains all the names of the dead who have lived on earth. The first name is Adam and the last is Susannah, Prospero's wife...' (20) Greenaway's fictional source seems to be modelled on one of the actual sources of Genesis, '...the book of the generations of Adam...' (Genesis 5:1). These sources are discoverable not only through modern scholarly research on the Documentary Hypothesis but in the text's own internal citations. 11

Intertextual generation succeeds by breeding as well as inheritance. According to Greenaway, his Prospero is partly modelled upon the Renaissance scientist and humanist, Athanasius Kircher: 'In this film, Prospero is like Kircher a book making machine...turning books into more books....' (12.1) In addition to Greenaway's film, The Tempest has spawned stories like Poe's 'Masque of the Red Death' and movies like Forbidden Planet. The Bible is the prime example of such book making machines - the source of countless copies, translations, commentaries, interpretations, Testaments, Midrashes, Talmuds and Summae, as well as artistic and literary offspring modelled upon it: illuminated manuscripts, stained glass windows, frescoes and paintings, epics, novels, poems, plays and films. This is why William Blake and, following him, Northrop Frye, refer to the 'Old and New testaments as the Great Code of literature and art'. 12 They contain both the genetic 'template' and the key to unlock meanings in their descendants.

When Greenaway explicates the generative function of the 'template' in the screen image of The Book of Mythologies, he decodes the symbol's encrypted meanings and thereby reproduces more text from it on paper. In doing so, he engages in the dual aspects of textual reproduction exhibited by the book which contains the gloss, Prospero's Books: A Film of Shakespeare's The Tempest. This book is not just a screenplay but also a commentary on the film, its child as well as its parent. Richly designed and beautifully manufactured, the book is replete with post production stills as well as preproduction sketches to guide the film producers. While the film is bookish, the book, largely organised as a storyboard sequence of shots, is filmic.

The book is also divided into larger sections delineating three parts of the film, derived from Greenaway's reading of a tripartite structure in Shakespeare's script. He calls them Past, Present and Future. Whether or not he was influenced by it, this division resembles that proposed in an essay on The Tempest by John Bender:

The Tempest divides past, present, and future as clearly as dramatic art allows. In the past Prospero lost his authority through absorption in supernatural arts; in the present he regains his Dukedom by employing those arts at the apogee of their force-only to abandon them in favor of 'nobler reason'; in the future he will contemplate death and final judgement. Having attained Prudence and being an old man, he finds that 'Every third thought shall be my grave'. 13

III. The Past

The section that Greenaway labels The Past '...deals largely with Prospero relating his history both to us, the audience, and to Miranda, his fifteen year old daughter. It represents in a sense "the story so far". As many narrative events happen in this first part as in all the other parts of the script put together. The story is quick-moving and episodic...' (p. 37) This description also applies to Prospero's retrospective exposition of events sunk in 'the dark backward and abyss of time' in the second scene of The Tempest, (1.2.1-374) and to Genesis 2:5-11:10, the section labelled by the editors of the New English Bible as 'The Beginnings of History'.
The protagonist and chief speaker in these sections is a benevolent ruler whose subjects rebel and threaten him. In Genesis, the antagonists are the ambitious Eve in league with the serpent, who convinces credulous Adam to steal forbidden fruit; Cain, a jealous and murderous brother; the violent contemporaries of Noah affiliated with offspring of the sons of god and the daughters of men; and the aspiring citizens of Babel who want to make a name for themselves by building a tower to heaven. In The Tempest, Prospero tells Miranda how his lack of vigilance '...in my false brother awaked an evil nature' (1.2.92-3), who then '...new created/The creatures that were mine, I say, or changed them,/or else new formed them' (1.2.81-2) so that in league with Alonso he took control of the state. Prospero also recalls the revolt of Caliban, the island's primitive inhabitant whose brutish nature he had attempted to elevate until the monster sought to retake control of the island by raping Prospero's daughter and peopling it with his own offspring.

The second stage of this past history unfolds as the protagonist punishes the rebels, indulging a vengeful rage and threatening to undo his own acts of creation with reversions to disorder. God drives Adam and Eve out of the garden he planted for them into a barren landscape, he sends Cain wandering, and he returns the cosmos to chaos with the Flood, a forerunner of other tempests he'll unleash against those he wants to discipline - at the Red Sea, on the way to Tarsis, at Galilee, and in the final days. He also creates a mental tempest when he renders the universal human language into a babble of incomprehensible dialects. Prospero reestablishes his dominance as 'A God of Power' (1.2.10) and 'a prince of power' (1.2.55), by throwing Caliban out of his home, forcing him to live by the sweat of his brow, and reducing the language that he taught him into profitless cursing, by repeatedly storming at Ariel that he'll be returned to the oak that imprisoned him, and by tormenting his countrymen with the prolonged ordeal of death by drowning.

The horror of that ordeal is vividly conveyed in one of the Bible's longest pericopes, the description of flood waters rising and destroying all life on earth. (Genesis 7:1-23) This horror is relieved by an equally lively and extended description of the chosen remnant's salvation, with its anxious waiting, its raven, dove and olive branch, and its account of debarkation onto dry land. (Genesis 7:24-8:22) God seals that experience with a vow to all living things never again to send such destruction and with the rainbow, which signals the end of the flood and the blessing of renewed fertility. It also marks the restoration of a link between heaven and earth: 'My bow I set in the cloud,/Sign of the covenant/between myself and earth./ When I cloud the sky over the earth/the bow shall be seen in the cloud'. (Genesis 9:13-14)

This language of deliverance is echoed in Prospero's pledge to Miranda, who weeps with compassion for the suffering of those in the wreck: '...there is no soul,/No not so much perdition as an hair/Betid to any creature in the vessel...' (1.2.29-31) His words echo Paul's words of reassurance to the frightened sailors on board ship in a tempest near Malta: 'Remember not a hair of your heads will be lost', (Acts 27:34) which in turn echo Jesus' words of comfort to a crowd at Galilee: '...even the hairs of your head have all been counted. Have no fear...' (Luke 12:7) 14 Upon completing the deliverance of Ferdinand and Miranda from his rage in the fourth act, Prospero also presents them with the spectacle of a rainbow and a blessing of fertility in the wedding masque. In Prospero's Books, Greenaway adds a sequence which celebrates the end of the storm with specific allusions to the Noah story. As Miranda awakens from sleep: 'A songbird begins to hesitantly whistle after the rain...below Miranda's bedroom window...water runs along the stems and leaves of tall grasses...water-droplets form at the tip of a leaf and slowly drop into darkness'. (25.2-27.6) He also strengthens Shakespeare's suggestion of a link among the sinking ship, Noah's ark and the 'stinking butt' of a boat which delivers Prospero and baby Miranda to the island, by superimposing her tumbling and turning in sleep with the thrashing of the sailors underwater (18.5-21.1) and by making the grounded vessel land up against the windows of Prospero's library as if it were Mt. Ararat. (22.1)

God's shift from vengeance to partial forgiveness of his wayward children also concludes the story of Adam and Eve, as he clothes their nakedness, the story of Cain as he provides the outcast with a protective mark, and the story of Babel, as he refrains from violence against those he punishes. This parallel pattern of modulation from disappointment to rage and then to rescue and reconsideration lead, at the end of the 'beginnings of history' in Genesis and of the 'Past' sections of The Tempest and Prospero's Books, to a new point of view and narrative style. 15

IV. The Present

The next section of all three works reads like heroic romance rather than myth. Human characters come forward and take on individuality while the god figure moves into the background of the story, limiting his direct involvement in events, showing less raw power, and behaving in a more deliberate and controlled manner. God develops amore sophisticated way of carrying out his purposes, perhaps as a result of regret after the flood:
When the Lord smelt the soothing odour [of Noah's burnt offering], he said within himself, 'Never again will I curse the ground because of man, however evil his inclinations may be from his youth upwards. I will never again kill every living creature as I have just done'.
(Genesis 8:21)

Rather than creating, destroying and recreating, he begins to work by selective breeding, conditioning, and teaching. To go beyond the accomplishments of the sixth day and improve the strain of humanity, he uses longer intervals of time as the instrument of evolution.
In contrast to the asexual and linguistic modes of creation used by God, these next sections present genesis as sexual reproduction. J.P. Fokkelman observes that the first book of the Bible's 'overriding concern [is] life-survival-offspring-fertility-continuity'. 16 Appropriate to a nomadic herding culture, the stories of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, involve both God and human in a project of selective breeding to produce a genetic strain that will bring forth a tribe, a nation and eventually an empire based on bloodline. This is the line of David and Solomon, at whose court, most scholars agree, the earliest versions of Biblical texts were codified and written. 17 It's likely this Davidic court shared dynastic preoccupations over origins, legitimacy and lineage with the Stuart divine right monarchy for which Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. 18

To develop the right stock, both God and Prospero employ two cultivator's methods. The first is inbreeding. God distinguishes his preferred line of descent with something resembling a genetic marker:
When Abraham was 99 years old, the lord appeared to him and said...I will make you exceedingly fruitful;...I will make nations out of you and kings spring from you...For your part ...you and your descendants after you generation by generation...shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin and it shall be the sign of the covenant
between us.
(Genesis 17:1-11)

The subsequent stories of the patriarchs centre on the drama of selecting the chosen over the rejected offspring by virtue of consanguinity. Isaac's line prevails over Ishmael's, whose mother Hagar was of different class and family origin from Sarah, Abraham's step sister. (Genesis 20:12) Even though he's the younger brother, Jacob is preferred to Esau who marries a local Hittite woman rather than his own kin. Jacob's mother, Rebekah, steers him northward to mate with a first cousin, daughter of her brother. (Genesis 28:1-3) And the scandalous story of the massacre of Schechem by the sons of Jacob for the rape of their sister Dinah reinforces a warning against exogamy. (Genesis 34) Prospero inflicts rigorous punishment upon Caliban as well as upon Stephano for their attempts to breed exogamously with his daughter. After assurances about the purity of both Miranda's mother and her grandmother, in Ferdinand he finds a scion of close and distinguished lineage, whose sister Claribel's competing claims of inheritance have been disposed of by marriage to the heathen King of Tunis. In Prospero's Books, Greenaway depicts the change from Prospero's role of creator to that of breeder at the beginning of the 'Present' section of the film by placing the encounter in a pastoral setting and dressing him in a bishop's outfit, bearing a crozier instead of a wand.

Pastoral suggests romance as well as sheepherding, and the Present section of all three texts includes a major love interest. A second criterion for breeding is vigour and fertility. Abraham is tough enough to defeat four kings in battle when he first arrives in Canaan (Genesis 14) and he avoids the allure of Sodom. Sarah is so beautiful that Pharaoh and King Abimelelch court her. She's also fiercely jealous, and has a sense of humour. The fact that this couple have their first child together in their nineties not only demonstrates God's miraculous power over nature, it makes their offspring particularly precious as the distillation of a lifelong love.

The human tends to supplant the divine perspective on reproduction as the patriarchal stories unfold. Though parents continue to select mates for their children, the moment of encounter, love at first sight, is dramatically emphasised in the texts. With Isaac, the lengthy discovery of the beautiful bride occurs through the eyes of Abraham's anonymous servant (Genesis 24:10-60), but Jacob's first meeting with Rachel at the well immediately conveys the power of physical passion within the framework of family continuity:
While [Jacob] was talking [to the herdsmen] Rachel came up with her father's flock, for she was a shepherdess. When Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of Laban, his mother's brother, with Laban's flock, he stepped forward, rolled the stone off the mouth of the well and watered Laban's sheep. He kissed Rachel, and was moved to tears. He told her that he was her father's kinsman and Rebecca's son; so she ran and told her father.
(Genesis 29:9-13)

Ferdinand's first entry into Miranda's presence, accompanied by wondrous music, produces a heavenly sensation in both of them - 'I might call him/A thing divine, for nothing natural/ I ever saw so noble'. 'Most sure the goddess/On whom these airs attend', (1.2.418-22) - before the conversation also quickly turns to fathers. In Prospero's Books, this meeting takes place in a setting of vegetative fertility - tall wheat field, soft music and golden light, the air redolent with pollen and seeds - 'whorls of cornchaff'. It begins with a turn of the pages of The Book of End-Plants and concludes with The Book of Love, featuring Ariel as Cupid.

These love-scenes are reminiscent of the innocent sexual encounter of Adam and Eve - 'Now they were both naked, the man and his wife, but they had no feeling of shame towards one another'. (Genesis 2:25) That early experiment in perfecting humanity through male parthenogenesis aborted in various ways, but it did set the pattern of triangular tension among parents, child and spouse: 'that is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and the two become one flesh'. (Genesis 2:24) In order to compensate the parent for loss, the children must sacrifice. In order to qualify for the benefit, they must pass tests. Though Adam and Eve failed to do both in the patriarchal section of Genesis, all three parties to the transaction, parent, child and spouse, learn to deal with this intergenerational problem.

The children must subordinate the desires for one another and their procreative urges to their obligations to the parents that fostered them. The aged as they wane thereby retain some control over and protection from the youth who succeed them. God drives this lesson home with Abraham, his first founding father, first by making him wait so long before breeding the promised child, and then by demanding Isaac back after they have bonded. (Genesis 22) This cruel and risky trick has several beneficial results. It intensifies Abraham's feeling of love for his son, it reinforces his fear of God's authority, it strengthens his gratitude that God didn't follow through on his demand, and it reassures a deity still skittish after what happened in prehistory that he hasn't spoiled his chosen successor.

In the case of Abraham's feisty grandson Jacob, God challenges him directly only with a brief wrestling bout, but the young man's father-in-law Laban takes over the role of patriarchal tester. After welcoming his nephew with open arms, he too plays cruelly with his nephew's emotions, demanding seven years hard labour for Rachel's hand in marriage and then substituting his older daughter Leah in the wedding bed. (Genesis 29:20-28) Jacob works another seven years to get his choice, but Laban cheats him out of the flocks he has rightfully bred for himself. Only by proving that he has the patience and restraint as well as the cleverness, mettle and generative prowess to overcome these obstacles, does Jacob gain his father-in-law's blessing and his right to go home with his beloved to become his nation's founder.

Ferdinand too must yield to his prospective father-in-law and willingly perform the servile labour of moving logs to acknowledge Prospero's control. Doing so distinguishes him from the upstart Caliban who carries out the same tasks as a slave. This discipline also corrects Ferdinand's misstep in prematurely anticipating his own father's death and his early, easy accession to the throne. (1.2.429-431) The spectacle of Ferdinand's suffering causes Miranda to transfer her love from her father to him. Like Rachel, who steals her father's gods and escapes with Jacob in secret, Miranda repeatedly violates Prospero's precepts (3.1.36-7; 58-9) and takes the initiative to propose marriage herself. Her father also imposes the ordeal on Ferdinand to test the prince's commitment to the girl he compares to his many previous flirtations, '... lest too light winning make the prize light'. (1.2.453) Like Laban when he catches up with the couple (Genesis 31:39-41), he expresses concern about the future treatment of his child, but also the bottomless need for compensation that later surfaces in his shared grieving with Alonso for the daughters they both have lost to sons-in-law. (5.1.146-8) Accepting the pain of this loss is a parental test, shared by God with all mothers and fathers in the Bible.
God and Prospero both offer those who successfully pass their qualifying tests - the selected or 'chosen' ones - a graphic vision of the future with a promise of fertility and prosperity as a premium for distinguishing themselves from those who are rejected. After Abraham displays his willingness to sacrifice his son, an angel of the lord appears to him:
called...inasmuch as you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will bless you abundantly and greatly multiply your descendants until they are as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the sea-shore.
(Genesis 22:15-17)

Jacob's courtship of Rachel is framed by visions at Beth-El:
He dreamt that he saw a ladder which rested on the ground with its top reaching to heaven and angels of God were going up and down upon it. The lord was standing beside him and said, 'I am the lord the God of your father Abraham, the God of Isaac. This land I give to you and your descendants. They shall be countless as the dust upon the earth....
(Genesis 28:12-18)
...Israel shall be your name...Be fruitful and increase as a nation; a host of nations shall come from you/ and Kings shall spring from your body.'
(Genesis 35:10-11)
Prospero apologise for his severe treatment of Ferdinand by promising a worthy reward: 'All thy vexations / were but trials of thy love, and thou hast strangely stood the test. Here, afore heaven, I ratify this my richgift'. 19 The gift is his daughter but also the vision of deliverance, fertility and prosperity in the masque, linked by a rainbow to Jacob's ladder and Noah's flood.
Following the vision of parental acceptance and bounty, the young man wishes to go no further:
Jacob woke from his sleep and said, 'Truly the Lord is in this place...this is no other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven'.
(Genesis 28:16)
Ferdinand: Let me live here everSo rare a wondered father and a wifeMakes this place paradise.
(4.1.122-124)
Ferdinand gives himself over fully to enjoying his father in law's gift - the product of his art that Prospero has been rehearsing with Ariel while carrying out his other projects. Though the playwright-father had insisted on total attention as the curtain went up, Ferdinand's rapt appreciation, along with the 'hollow and confused' noise of the clowns, causes Prospero to interrupt the performance himself. Rather than reinforce the masque's vision of a timeless, winter-free return to Eden, he abruptly dispels it, though with a kind acknowledgement of his son-in-law's discomfiture: 'You do look, my son, in a moved sort,/As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful sir....' (4.1.146-7) 20 The very success of the project marked by the celebratory masque - establishing a dynasty - signifies not permanence but transformation. While Ferdinand and Miranda take on the world, he must relinquish it. Coming in a flash, this familiar realisation about genesis and generation, fulfilment and completion, nevertheless is disorienting for young and old alike:
Our revels now are ended...
...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. Sir I am vexed.
Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled.
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
(4.1.148-58)
The transformation from creator-god-father to prospective grandfather leads to Prospero's abjuring his magic, freeing his slave-spirits, and releasing his hold on the humans under his spell. When he crosses this threshold - what Greenaway calls 'the central platform of Prospero's machinations', (44.14) - he passes from the Present into the Future. In Prospero's Books, Gielgud stops writing and saying the parts of the other characters, and for the first time they speak with their own voices. The completion of the Ferdinand and Miranda romance plot in The Tempest parallels the conclusion of the patriarchal chapters of Genesis. This is the end of Jacob's personal quest, when he is renamed Israel, the progenitor of the future nation. From hereon God recedes further from his creation, removing himself completely from the narrative as speaker and player and standing outside of events as providence. Though Joseph is the protagonist of the longest story in Genesis, God never addresses him directly. 21

V. The Future

Parallels between Genesis' Joseph and Shakespeare's Prospero are detailed andstriking. 22 Linguistically they are linked by the roots of 'prosperity' - 'And the Lord was with Joseph and he was a man that prospered...And his master saw that ...the Lord made all that he did to prosper in his hand'. (Genesis 39:2-3) 23 In Prospero's Books, the connection between Joseph and Prospero is strongly marked by the otherwise inexplicable insertion of a pyramid and obelisk into the island landscape. 24 (Fig. 5) Prospero carries out his plot from the pyramid's balcony as he looks down on his victims assembled in front of its doorway. Thematically, the stories of Joseph and Prospero bring to conclusion a problem repeatedly elaborated in preceding texts: jealousy between brothers. In Genesis that topic is introduced with Cain and Abel, further explored in the relationships between Noah's sons, Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael and Esau and Jacob. According to Fokkelman:
Finally in the last cycle of the book the psychology of crime, guilt, remorse and compunction among brothers is worked out much more thoroughly, under the direction of the master manipulator Joseph....the theme of brotherhood, a metonymy for the bond that links humanity, is handled with growing complexity from the beginning of Genesis to the end.
(53)

That theme, with its Biblical resonances, is also central to many of Shakespeare's plays preceding The Tempest, including As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear and Hamlet. What Claudius calls the 'primal eldest curse' drives Antonio to plot with Alonso to kill the rightful Duke Prospero and drives Sebastian in turn to plot with Antonio to kill his brother Alonso, just as Joseph's brothers plot to kill the distinctively robed brother favoured by his father.

Joseph starts out as 'that dreamer' (Genesis 37:19), a person with true visions but lacking enough prudence to anticipate the resentment of those who don't share his gifts. Like Prospero, who, 'neglect[s]worldly ends, all dedicated/To closeness and the bettering of my mind' 'rapt with secret studies' in the liberal arts. (1.2.89-90) Joseph is at first oblivious to the reality of his political situation. Both he and Prospero 'awaked an evil nature' (91-3) in their brothers and as a result, suffered usurpation, exile and imprisonment. Joseph's brothers steal him from his father's favour, plan to kill him, and end up imprisoning him in a pit and then selling him into slavery and exile in Egypt. Prospero's brother and his cronies remove him from his dukedom, try to kill him and allow him to be abandoned at sea in a leaky boat which ends up marooned on the island.

Rudely awakened from innocence and forced to cope for survival in their places of exile, both Joseph and Prospero learn some practical wisdom. As a convict in Pharaoh's jail, Joseph goes from a dreamer to an interpreter of dreams, using his intelligence as well as his intuition. Though he insists that interpretative power comes from God (Genesis 40:8), in proclaiming that Pharaoh's two dreams of the fat sheaves and cows being devoured by the lean ones are really one (Genesis 43:25), he uses human analytical skill to penetrate surfaces by discovering abstractions. By predicting that lean years will consume fat ones he expresses the homespun foresight of the ant to the grasshopper. Prospero has fewer books after his sea voyage, those discreetly s elected for him by his counsellor Gonzalo, and once outside the confines of the library, he finds enough applicable information in them to gain some control over his environment.

Wearing his robe and consulting his books, Prospero teaches the ignorant Caliban to speak and releases Ariel from imprisonment. At the same time he enslaves them appropriates their power to rule the elements. After Joseph bests Pharaoh's magicians and sages (Genesis 41:8), he is entrusted to rule over all of Egypt. Dressed in fine clothing and wearing a signet ring, he delivers the people from famine while divesting them of their wealth. By the time fate - in the form of famine and storm - lands their lost brothers in their places of exile, both have exercised their acumen long enough to have risen to the status of 'Prince of Power'.
Having attained power, each undertakes the godlike project: to right wrong with vengeance, instruction and forgiveness. Jacob's sons arrive in Joseph's Egypt desperate for grain and disoriented by travel. Prospero's brother and his companions wander the island, waterlogged, bereaved and exhausted. Both parties have been partially rescued by the exiled brother and find themselves at his mercy - that is, within his power. One source of that power is immediate knowledge. He recognises them because he remembers the wrong done him. They don't know him because he's disguised or invisible, but also because they've repressed the memory of their crimes long past.

After harshly accusing the ones he spies on of being spies (Genesis 42:9, The Tempest 1.2.456), the hidden brother manipulates the others into a replay of their earlier crimes of conspiracy and rebellion, now within his control. Joseph insists they return home and bring him their brother Benjamin who has stayed behind, thereby once again stealing a youngest preferred son away from their father. He does this, one may infer, to enjoy the revenge of inflicting pain on them, but also to determine whether they have killed his mother's other son and to see whether they are capable of repentance. If so, reenacting the old crime can remind them of what they've forgotten and teach them about the pain it inflicted. Prospero similarly works on the lords by setting up a situation in which the treasonous coup which exiled him is now reenacted by Antonio and Sebastian against his brother, King Alonso. The pain of being betrayed by his own brother - though only half-conscious - and of apparently losing a son awakens Alonso's memory of having betrayed his brother monarch.
In a comic replay of another element of their crime - selling him for silver and sneaking him into the caravan of the Midianites - Joseph tricks his brothers with an apparent gift of silver in their bags and then has them arrested for theft. Both elements of this trick recur in The Tempest's subplot of Caliban and the clowns, who are first manipulated into hatching a new conspiracy to overthrow Prospero to gain wealth and power and then entrapped with the false delights of a royal wardrobe.
Joseph's methods of interrogation activate his brothers' consciences and soon elicit a confession that he overhears:
They said to one another, 'No doubt we deserve to be punished because of our brother, whose suffering we saw; for when he pleaded with us we refused to listen. That is why these sufferings have come upon us'.
(Genesis 42:21)

This encourages him to take the cat and mouse game further with what may be termed a 'banquet trick'. When the brothers return to Egypt with Benjamin as hostage a few years later, he offers them a resplendent meal, and while their defences are lowered he hides a silver goblet in Benjamin's pack.

After they depart, 'Joseph said to his steward, "Go after those men at once, and when you catch up with them, say '"Why have you repaid good with evil? ..You have done a wicked thing.'"' Once opened, Benjamin's pack is found to contain the goblet, and he and his brothers must return to Joseph who accuses him of the theft and threatens to keep him as a slave.

Similarly, Prospero surprises the hungry nobles with a lavish buffet after having them led blindly around the island in search of the King's lost son. Watching their approach to the meal from an invisible vantage point above, he instructs Ariel to defecate on the food in the disguise of a harpy and to deliver a tirade expressing Prospero's wrath, exposing the lords' original guilt, threatening eternal perdition and demanding full contrition.

This stunt produces the desired effect of repentance in both stories. Joseph's oldest brother Judah is willing to sacrifice himself for the release of Benjamin:
Now my lord, let me remain in place of the boy as your lordship's slave, and let him go with his brothers. How can I return to my father without the boy? I could not bear to see the misery which my father would suffer.
(Genesis 44:33-34)

Alonso falls to the ground acknowledging his crime and willing to give up his own life to return the life of the son that he believes has been taken from him as punishment:
Methought the winds did sing it to me; and the thunder...
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.
Threefore my son I' the ooze is bedded; and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded.
(3.3.96-102)

At this turning point in both stories, the focus shifts to the hidden controlling brother. Each has forced his antagonists to experience the suffering of the victim of fratricide. Each now feels compassion for the repentant criminals. After dismissing his servants, for the moment abjuring his royal powers and distance, Joseph breaks down crying, discloses himself to his brothers' wonderment, forgives them fully and arranges for them and his father to take up residence in Egypt where they will be reunited and provided with land and wealth. So too, after Alonso's repentance, Prospero acknowledges his common humanity with those he has dominated and offers them forgiveness:
...shall not myself
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply
Passion as they, be kindlier moved...
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th' quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part...They being penitent
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.
(5.1.22-30)

These revelations, recognitions, restorations and reconciliations produce an ecstatic happy ending. They also produce a retrospective vindication of all previous confusion and suffering as purposeful contributions to the positive outcome - a theological assertion of the fortunate fall:
Now do not be distressed...that you sold me into slavery there; it was God who sent me ahead of you to save men's lives...to ensure that you will have descendants on earth, and to preserve you all, a great band of survivors.
(Genesis 45:5-8)

Was Milan thrust from Milan that his issue
Should become kings of Naples? O rejoice
Beyond a common joy and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars...In one voyage
...Ferdinand...found a wife
Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle, and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.
(5.1.206-213)

This purpose involves more than a conventional comic conclusion in marriage and family reunion. In their projects, Joseph and Prospero are completing the project of God chronicled from beginning to end of Genesis. From the very start, God's paradoxical purpose and problem with his creatures / subjects / children was the familiar parental one of maintaining their obedience while granting them freedom. This involves taking risks that often fail - risks that they will overestimate that freedom and try to usurp his power, as in the cases of Adam and Eve, the citizens of Babel or Antonio and Alonso, or that they will try to escape it by subjecting themselves to a more binding rule, as do, say, the citizens of Sodom or Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban. These are failures that God, because of his all-powerful and all-knowing nature, is not well equipped to accept and move beyond. He needs to train and appoint a human viceroy, a 'Son of Man', to replace and represent him as he recedes from direct engagement. Joseph is the first of several Biblical characters to play this rôle.

Joseph's alternations between cruel manipulativeness and warm acceptance stem from the conflicting requirements of the task. So do Prospero's mood swings between crotchety imperiousness and loving concern for his daughter, his in laws and his earthy and airy spirit-servants. Their success as princes, teachers and parents requires both rule and compassion. Such compassion, as Ariel reminds Prospero, is only possible for a fellow human, who understands the frailties of siblings because they are shared. He needs to be reminded by a non-human spirit that mortality is common to leaders and followers, judges and criminals, because like Joseph, while playing God, he's lost that awareness. The ending of both works require that these viceroys join their subjects in finding 'all of us ourselves/when no man was his own'. (5.1.212-213)
If, as Genesis proceeds, God is replaced by a mortal ruler, the breeding, instruction, and liberation of that ruler's successors is in turn necessary to replace him when he is gone. Genesis concludes with an account of the peaceful death and burial of Joseph along with that of his father, Jacob, and a lengthy chronicle of the births of Jacob's grandchildren and the blessing he passes on to them. As Prospero changes from a 'god of power' (1.2.10) into a man 'whose old brain is troubled' (4.1), Ferdinand and Miranda change from naïve romantics to chess players who can 'wrangle for a score of kingdoms and still call it fair play', (5.1.174-5) while Caliban changes from an 'abhorred slave' who will 'not any print of goodness take' (1.2.350-352) to a freed 'thing of darkness' who 'will be wise hereafter and seek for grace'. (5.1.294-5)

However, apart from the transformations of heartfelt repentances, joyful recognitions, dynastic weddings, providential consolations, and predictions of orderly succession stand Antonio and Sebastian. These unregenerate schemers never apologise, and retain their witty cynicism to the last. In his final judgement scene, Prospero distinguishes 'holy Gonzalo/honourable man...a loyal sir' from the forgetful and frail Alonso who is capable of contrition and repentance, and from Antonio, 'most wicked sir, who to call brother/would even infect my mouth...' (5.1.130-1) Though he forgives the mall, he recognizes that there are people in whom self-interest, cruelty and power-hunger remain ineradicable. His forgiveness of Antonio involves no expectation of redemption or improvement. He, and others like him, must be continually watched and controlled with tactics that appeal to their limited motives.

Before he relinquishes political power, Prospero appropriately greets each of these three. He embraces Gonzalo, he commiserates with Alonso, and he frightens Antonio with a display of Machiavellian force and fraud:
I do forgive
Thy rankest fault - all of them - and require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know
thou must restore.
(5.1.130)
Welcome my friends all!
(Aside to Sebastian and Antonio) But you my brace of lords, were I
so minded,
I here could pluck his highness' frown upon you,
And justify you traitors. At this time
I will tell no tales.
(5.1.124-8)
By retaining the threat to expose their conspiracy to Alonso, he keeps them in his debt, and as a result of marrying his daughter to the prince of Naples, 'his death will remove Antonio's last link withthe ducal power'. 25 'The devil speaks in him!' says Sebastian.

This discordant note in the conclusion often troubles commentators. Parallels with the close of Genesis help to explain it. Following the recognition-redemption scene and the Pharaoh's welcome of Jacob to Egypt, the earlier story (Genesis 41:46-57) of Joseph's deliverance of the land during the lean years by distributing grain stored in the fat ones is repeated. But this time the account is more detailed, plausible and ironic. After having accumulated a huge surplus by taxing the peasants during the period of glut, Joseph sells it back to them during the famine - first for all their silver, then for their herds. Finally,
...they came to him again and said, 'My lord, we cannot conceal it from you; our silver is all gone and our herds of cattle are yours. Nothing is left for your lordship but our bodies and our lands... Take us and our land in payment for bread, and we and our land alike will be in bondage to Pharaoh. Give us seed corn to keep us alive, or we shall die and our land will become desert'. So Joseph bought all the land in Egypt for Pharaoh...Pharaoh set them to work as slaves from one end of the territory of Egypt to the other.
(Genesis 47:18-22)

Joseph's ruthless transformation of Egypt from a feudal to a mercantile society makes it possible for his descendants to expand their numbers at a rate that could never be supported by the nomadic subsistence conditions they lived under in Canaan. His centralisation of authority also guarantees the privileges now granted by the Pharaoh, at least for the forseeable future. 26

The last chapter of Genesis contains an equally cynical rerun of the earlier story of fraternal reconciliation which illuminates the concluding episode between brothers in The Tempest.

When their father was dead, Joseph's brothers were afraid and said, What if Joseph should bear a grudge against us and pay us out for all the harm that we did to him?' They therefore approached Joseph with these words: 'In his last words to us before he died, your father gave us this message for you; "I ask you to forgive your brothers' crime and wickedness; I know they did you harm"'....But Joseph said to them, 'Do not be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You meant to do me harm; but God meant to bring good out of it by preserving the lives of many people as we see today. Do not be afraid. I will provide for you and your dependants'.
(Genesis 50:15-21)

Given their persistent mistrust and the narrator's tacit but unmistakeable disclosure of their bad faith, and given Joseph's canny strategy toward the Egyptians, a close reading suggests that this last utterance of forgiveness is just as guarded as Prospero's forgiveness of Antonio, pieties notwithstanding. 27

Machiavellian realism goes together with the prophetic vision of an expanded community tracing itself to an originating family. The nation of Italy, which Prospero foresees through the union of his daughter and Alonso's son, is analogous to the nation of Israel envisioned by Joseph and Jacob on the father's deathbed. Jacob's benevolent blessing of his progeny and his projection of their return to the promised land is filled with predictions of the war and fraternal strife chronicled in Exodus and beyond, where the myth and family romance of Genesis is replaced by political history, the genre of discourse in which time bears absolute sway. 28 In fact, those future power struggles surface at the moment of blessing, as the son unsuccessfully tries to control his father's determination of precedence among his grandsons, Manasseh and Ephraim. (Genesis 48:17-20) Prospero promises 'calm seas and auspicious gales' for the voyage home, but it is clear that the new kingdom will experience continuing tensions between aristocratic factions and as a result of the class hatred between courtiers and mariners loudly voiced by the utopian socialist Gonzalo, both at the moment of death in the first scene's storm, and at the concluding moment of miraculous resurrection: 'O look, sir, look, sir, here is more of us!/I prophesied if a gallows were on land/This fellow could not drown'. (5.1.216-220)

VI. Conclusion

Genesis means beginnings, emergence, movement into time - from creator to creature, eternity to nature, word to flesh, signifier to signified, order to freedom. The divine gives way to the human, textual reproduction to sexual reproduction, omnipotence fantasies to power politics. Genesis, The Tempest and Prospero's Books all tell the story of an old magician creating a world, seeing it is good, and not so good, fixing it as best he can, and then, with difficulty releasing it from his control.

The last long shot of Greenaway's film (91.33) distils this story in an emblematic sequence. Divested now of his Duke's costume as well as of his magician's robe, Prospero addresses the audience directly asthe camera dollies in to a close-up: 'Please you draw near...'Following cues in the Shakespearean epilogue, the speaker's voice imperceptively shifts its origin from the fictional character to the actor portraying him to the director of the film and the author of the text, all begging the audience for the indulgence that will 'set me free' and will set them free as well. Greenaway figures this final liberation visually by having the newly released Ariel run through an applauding audience toward the camera as it retreats from the full screen image of the speaker shrinking into the background. When the three year old child-spirit catches up with the moving camera, he vaults over it out of the frame, and as the screen image decomposes into successive grainy stills concluding with 'The End', viewers may imagine him falling into our laps. (Fig. 6)

Despite this final symbolic birthing, the film still seems to lack the illusion of life that most people expect from the movies. Prospero's Books refuses to create that illusion. Even its musical score and its dances are jerky and repetitive - like a music box's. 29 It has the dead quality of a film considered as such, a celluloid 'print' in a metal box set in flickering motion by the mechanical operation of a projector, each copy and each screening a clone of every other. But this asexual mode of reproduction can also be considered a virtue of the cinematic medium. Deifying the creators, it immortalises the director's plan, the actor's performance, the writer's screenplay. Every detail of Greenaway's baroque texture preserved for minute examination. Gielgud's final performance saved. The works of the Bard once again enshrined. 30 This durability makes all films more like books than like plays.

So far as we know, William Shakespeare never wrote a book. The quartos were produced without his permission, and the folio was assembled after his death. Shakespeare made plays, scripts for live performance, among them The Tempest. A play differs from a film in that its enactment is more like birth than cloning. Each company of players recreates rather than runs the author's original, with unpredictable, sometimes sublime, sometimes ridiculous, results. This nature of his creation is conspicuously excluded from Greenaway's manifold representations of Shakespeare's work. One way he depicts Prospero's liberation - the liberation of his slaves as well as his self liberation - is in the penultimate scene, where 'Ariel passes [his books] to Prospero - who briefly regards them - then...with gestures that are almost non-chalant... hurls them into the sea' as they spectacularly self-destruct. (91.1, p. 161)(Fig. 7) This sequence reverses the opening scenes of creation, as well as the section of the credits noted earlier, where books are passed from one spirit to another symbolising intertextual reproduction. At this point Greenaway may be expressing an impulse to break free from the constraints of bookish scholarship and filmmaking in favour of organic procreation or live theatre.

As the shot continues, Ariel hands Prospero the last two books in his collection - one the large printed folio volume of Shakespeare's plays and the other a thin manuscript of The Tempest in Prospero's own hand. The old man holds them to his chest, hesitates, and then dumps them into the water. 'The books land together on the water andCaliban surfaces - spurting and spouting ...he snatches both books and disappears under the surface'. (91.28) (Fig. 7) In voiceover the narrator says, 'While all the other books have been destroyed we still do have these two, safely fished from the sea'. 31 When he first appeared at the end of Act I, Caliban was pissing and shitting on books because they were the source of power by which Prospero held him in thrall. Now that he's been released, Prospero's Book may serve his ruling interest. A journal of post-colonial studies bears his name.

Although his film can be viewed as a repudiation of textuality and bibliolatry, Greenaway allows another option. Books after all, like Mr.William Shakespere's Tragedies, Histories and Comedies and the Book of Genesis, and bookish films like Prospero's Books, are not necessarily cloned in performance any more than are play scripts. In the minds of those who read with imagination, they procreate sexually, unpredictably, wildly. They age, die and return to life as strange and wondrous progeny.

Notes[Click on pictures to view short film segments,350K to 1.2 M in size]Thanks to Elizabeth Brunner for help with research, editing and html.

References are to the shot numbers in Greenaway's published screenplay (Greenaway 1991).

'Augustine imagines God's Spirit coming as a storm to disturb the darksome deep and raise its spiritual creature to the enlightenment of grace'. (Walter 1983, 63)

Citations of The Tempest are to The Oxford Shakespeare edition by Stephen Orgel, Stanley Wells, general editor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

This observation is owed to Charlotte Putty.

. Donaldson 1996. Although it moves in an opposite direction, my reading is indebted to several of Donaldson's specific insights andhis general discussion of textuality and reproduction.

In the Apocalypse of 4 Ezra, 'God calls Ezra out of a bush...and then dictates twenty four books (Hebrew Scriptures) to be made public and seventy to be kept secret until the last day. Ezra deserves this honour because he has devoted his life to wisdom, to studying the law, and to understanding. Likewise, the books contain the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the river of knowledge; they will be received by the wise among the people'. (Thompson 1990, 22)

They also may figure the angelic spirits surrounding God in Michaelangelo's Sistine creation.

For instance, the crowds of spirits, the metamorphoses, the animation blending with photography in Max Rhinehardt's AMidsummernight's Dream, the metacinematic explorations of film techniques in Olivier's Henry V, the uses of Renaissance paintings as models for sets and costumes in the BBC Shakespeare series and the repeated focus on period books and scientific instruments in Zeffirelli's Hamlet and Otello.

Examples abound in both old and new testaments, e.g. Josh 10:13 'And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher?'; Numbers 21:14: 'Wherefore it is said in the book of the wars of the LORD, What he did in the Red sea, and in the brooks of Arnon'; 1Kgs 14:19: 'And the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred, and how he reigned, behold, they are written in the book ofthe chronicles of the kings of Israel'; Mat 1:1: 'The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham'. The Documentary Hypothesis states that most books of the Bible are compounded of several documents produced by different authors and editors over an extended period of time.

See Frye 1982.

See Bender 1979, 251.

These allusions are briefly noted by Battenhouse 1964, 20.

The 'beginnings of history' model makes a partial reappearance later in Genesis in the story of the catastrophe inflicted on Sodom and Gomorrah and the deliverance of Lot and his daughters (Genesis 18:16-30), but there the emphasis lies on Abraham's intercessive efforts in a competition between divine and human perspectives as proof of his qualification to carry out God's mission.

See Alter and Kermode 1987, 41.

See Friedman 1989, 33-50.

See Kernan 1995, 77-82.

In Prospero's Books, this pledge is presented in a beautiful transition linking it to the Alonso plotline, as Ferdinand appears on the steps of the Library atrium, naked except for a loincloth, exhausted and wounded, and Miranda holds him, her dress exposing her shoulders, in the posture of a Pieta. As she purifies his wounds with a sponge, erotically arousing herself and him, he restrains her from touching him further as Prospero demands that he leave her virginity intact until the marriage is solemnised, while animated pornographic books flash across the screen to illustrate his warning against illicit sexuality

He similarly qualifies Miranda's admiration at the last demonstration of his orchestrating powers - the recognition scene in 5.2 - when she says, 'O Brave New World that has such people in it', and he answers 'New to you'.

The deity's retreat from Joseph and his world is highlighted by God's brief direct address to Jacob, telling him to accept the invitation to join Joseph in Egypt (Genesis 46:2-5). This pattern is not carried forward in the later books of the Bible. God reenters history as the spirit of the nation in Exodus.

To my knowledge, Battenhouse is the only critic to remark upon them. 'Prospero simulating the workings of providence...arranges tempests and trials, deliverances and miracles, in order to teach through his magic-world the truths he has learned from history at large. For how came he to this island in the first place? "By providence divine", he tells Miranda...he was got rid of because his jealous rivals had no sympathy for a studious dreamer. But in faraway Egypt Joseph used his arts to bring benefits - first to inhabitants of that land, and then to his own brother when The Tempests of life brought them to Egypt. When these brothers arrived Joseph's strategy, in fact, was much like Prospero's. First he confounded them with tricks, in order to make them remorseful; and then he revealed himself as miraculously their benefactor. His final message was much the same as Prospero's: Virtue is nobler than vengeance; divine providence has been at work in all that has happened; thereforere joice'. (20)

To capture the verbal echo, this passage is cited from the 1560 Geneva Bible, probably the one Shakespeare was most familiar with.

Greenaway doesn't acknowledge the analogy to Joseph; in fact he says the pyramids '...have a much more exaggerated slope than would be expected of true Egyptian pyramids - like pyramids...that have been constructed by an antiquarian like Prospero who obtained his knowledge from books, not first-hand observation.' (44.1) But in the film, they look Egyptian, as does the obelisk.

See Orgel 1987, 55.

Joseph also displays a shrewd enough understanding of the economic and political role of religion not to alienate the priestsand to use them to balance the power of the king: '...but Joseph did not buy the land which belonged to the priests; they had a fixed allowance from Pharaoh and lived on this, so that they had no need to sell their land'. (Genesis 47:18-22)

The final forgiveness and suppression of Caliban and theclowns corresponds to the brothers' anxiety after the death of their father and Joseph's assurance that he won't punish them further as long as they stay in line. (Genesis 50:15)

See Marx 1995.

Donaldson connects this quality specifically with the appearance of computer animation that he sees alluded to throughout the book and film.

Donaldson reads the shrinking image of Prospero on screen as 'a permanent authorising presence', since he 'seems to suffuse the space; he has become one with the point of origin of the image, the point of convergence of a perspectival space that emanates from his unchanging simulacrum'.

Connecting this voiceover with the fact that 'as Ferdinand and Miranda are joined together just before the final shots of the film, the text of the first Folio Tempest (not the manuscript Prospero has been writing) unscrolls as an overlay on the screen in large gilt letters', Donaldson concludes that 'Prospero's Books ends in a series of powerful images that remystify the book as the inscription of an originating discourse that is both artistic and magical'. I experience the artificiality of the film text, like that of the biblical text, neither as self-undercutting nor as authoritarian mystification, but instead, like a puppet show's, as a prompt to interpretative co-creation.

National and Colonial Education in Shakespeare's The Tempest

In Early Modern England there was an increasing systematization of schools and school knowledge, a process that would, in time, transform a heterogeneous, polyglot population into a self-consciously identified national people. Successfully confronting aristocratic and ecclesiastical anxieties that schooling might be heretical, seditious, or educate people above their 'station,' sixteenth-century education advocates promoted new schools, unified instruction in Latin grammar, and ushered in a new orthodoxy in education. Standardized school books were imposed in the 1540s and, closely corresponding with Shakespeare's lifetime, there was a boom in the founding of schools. Despite a great variety of forms and purposes in the educational life of England, 1560 to 1640 has been characterized as a period of "educational revolution... when the English education system was more vigorous, more purposeful, better funded and better equipped at this time than ever before."[1]

Spurred by the Reformation, education in the period was first and foremost religious, but religious instruction was more and more conceived as necessary to creating a prosperous and loyal citizenry. Protestant reformers connected the ability to read and interpret the Bible to the process of individual salvation and they addressed themselves with vigor to England’s widespread illiteracy. With motives that were ethical as well as religious, education advocates viewed schooling as a pathway to manners, fidelity, and respect for authority. In 1559 Thomas Becon extolled education in the following terms,
Through the schoolmaster the youth of the Christian commonwealth is brought up in the knowledge of God and of his holy word, and also in the science of good letters and virtuous manners; and so trained up in them from their very cradles that as they grow in age so likewise they increase in godliness, virtue, learning, knowledge, good manners and innocency of life, and afterward become the faithful servants of God and profitable members of the commonweal, yea, and good citizens of the country where they inhabit.[2]

Becon was not alone in connecting "good letters" and "virtuous manners," creating "faithful servants of God" and "good citizens of the country." The historian Christopher Hill claims that "The whole trend of educational advance during the century before the Reformation had been towards a more secular, lay-controlled education in the vernacular. The dissolution of the monasteries and chantries gave an opportunity for creating a national educational system"(39). In his comprehensive historical study of the development of national consciousness during the Early Modern period, Nations before Nationalism, John Armstrong argues that educational organization was crucial to England's precocious consolidation and development from feudal monarchy to nation-state (168).[3]

In examining the relationship between English pedagogical practices and the development of national citizens and state sovereignty Shakespeare's enchanting romance The Tempest (1611) is remarkably interesting. His ostensible Italian background notwithstanding, Prospero can be seen as a figure of English sovereignty who shapes the knowledge and develops the obedience of his subjects through a pedagogical process. By inquiring into the language and practices of education that pervade this literary work I want to investigate the connection between schooling and national citizenship, a connection made at least as long ago as the sixteenth century by the educational reformers themselves. Though in his history plays Shakespeare attempts to narrate a common English national past, I believe that it is in the magical, utopian projection of his New World romance that we find best illuminated formal and informal processes of education, processes that have much to do with developing the sense of citizenship and national identity that influences the centuries to follow.[4]

Set on an island off the European mainland, and connected by historical and verbal links to the new English colonies in the Virginias, The Tempest has been recognized as presenting a model of colonial relationships and a metaphor of colonial history. Deriving its plot from letters from the New World, and drawing on European conceptions of "New World" peoples, the play is widely understood to enact a colonial–or as Gonzalo calls it a "plantation"–economy. Indeed, the play has served a pivotal role in the analysis of colonial history by twentieth century intellectuals, from the Uraguaian José Enrique Rodó (Ariel) to the Italian Octave Mannoni writing about Madagascar (Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization) to the Cuban Roberto Retamar ("Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America"). [5] Since at least the mid 1980s, The Tempest has been a focal point for exploring politics and colonial discourse in literature. I do not intend to reproduce those extensive discussions here.[6]

Nonetheless, as I explore the connection between education and nation in The Tempest, it is significant that Early Modern nationhood was modeled on classical empire and an expansionist imposition of language and culture. In a fascinating way this play brings together the practices of schooling in early seventeenth-century England with the conception of the proper relationship between Englishman and colonized natives. Indeed, I want to show that this educational connection makes The Tempest’s colonial metaphor all the more engaging. Colonial educational systems were a formative part of the experience of hundreds of millions of people and spread European languages, culture, economics, and, eventually, nationalism across the world. Many post-colonial educational systems in Africa, Latin America, and Asia continue to follow patterns established during the colonial period.

Any discussion of the relationship between literary or dramatic works and historical processes runs certain risks, which should be recognized from the outset. Literature does not simply reflect political or historical trends. Connections between literature and history are especially tenuous when history (or literature) is understood in purely theoretical or monolithic terms. Political criticism that focuses on the seamlessness of authority can miss a more complex historical reality as well as obscure the subtleties of art. For instance, sixteenth century England's political society was not a simple absolutist tyranny but a complex hybrid of authority where parliament and a developing merchant class tended to resist traditional nobility by supporting the consolidation of power in the monarchy. Thus, if we are to read Prospero as a figure of English sovereignty, it must be in terms of a personal monarchical rule that might aspire to absolutism but never fully achieves it.

Conversely, reading literature without a view to historical trends and the shape of the world as we know it in the present can lead us to underestimate the capability of literary artists and to trivialize the act of literary interpretation. As a case in point, the connection between book-learning, schooling, and the obedience of citizens was an important historical reality before, after, and during Shakespeare’s life; it would be to underrate him to imagine that he would not be aware of or interested in it. Education and the civic effects of educational reform were not topics to be missed by a man as fascinated by history and politics as Shakespeare. Consider, for instance, the way the rebellious tradesman Jack Cade denounces Lord Say in 2 Henry VI :
Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and, contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. Thou hast appointed justices of peace, to call poor men before them about matters they were not able to answer. Moreover, thou hast put them in prison; and because they could not read, thou hast hanged them; when, indeed, only for that cause they have been most worthy to live. (IV, vii, 28-40)
If the references to the founding of schools, printing, and paper mills are almost anachronistic to Henry VI and Cade’s Rebellion (1450), they are perfectly apropos to Tudor and Stuart England. And, as with so many disreputable and even comic characters in his plays, Shakespeare is able to incorporate enough of the truth into Cade’s claims to make them seductive, even credible to his audience.

Just as the connection between education and authority was contemporary to The Tempest, a link between colonial and pedagogical relationships is also not a figment of postcolonial theory. References to Englishmen and Europeans as having responsibility for instructing colonized natives were common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as in later periods. Speaking of an event that took place just two years before The Tempest was first performed, Gilles notes that "In 1609, the Revered William Crashaw, who 'was serving as a sort of director of publicity for the company,' imagined 'Virginea' as a young woman being schooled by an older and male 'England' in... an important sermon to the Counsel" (677). Joan Pong Linton has argued that the intention to educate and Christianize Amerindians was contemporaneous with The Tempest and served to justify English "husbandry" of Virginia, leading to abduction of native children and Amerindian resistance (160-166, 179-180).

In this essay as I examine politics and colonial discourse, I seek to ground them in a lived historical reality, that of schooling and teaching practices. At the same time I remain conscious that even if there was an "educational revolution" in the sixteenth century, the great majority of English citizens remained illiterate and, as a percentage of the population, only a relative few attended the expanding school system. Public spectacle, religious icons and imagery, and the theater itself reached a broader spectrum of the English population than schools or the written word and these mediums also influenced the emergence of modern citizenship. Yet, I am convinced that our understanding of The Tempest is enlarged when we can read it within the historical interplay of conflictive absolutism, schooling, and precocious national consciousness.

PROSPERO AS SCHOLAR-TEACHER

Magician, dramatist, patriarch, island sovereign, and colonial administrator, Prospero is also eminently a scientist, an intellectual, a scholar, and a teacher.[7] Throughout the play Prospero teaches all the characters, and the teacher role could be seen to fit him better than even the customary "playwright." Except for Ariel, Prospero doesn't actually script the other characters. Instead he manipulates, trains, and instructs them. Just as in sixteenth century England where, according to historians, education was more socially mixed than at any time before or after, Prospero develops education for all classes of society, for aristocrats (such as Ferdinand) as well as for commoners (such as Trinculo), an education that internalizes bonds of allegiance that confirm and maintain Prospero's authority. Prospero's "national pedagogy" resituates individuated subjects in a reinforced social order. His ability to contain their movement and his all-knowing, all-seeing observation bring the disparate spaces and times of the play into a single spatial and temporal dimension.[8]

As the play begins we see that Prospero has prepared a "lesson plan" appropriate to all those who land on his island. The nobles Alonzo, Sebastian, and Antonio must learn that their crimes against Prospero cannot be forgotten, and they must be made ready to reinstate Prospero in his position as rightful Duke of Milan. Just as with students new to school, Prospero prepares his "pupils" to gain this knowledge by separating them from the others, disorienting them from their past knowledge, and providing them with knowledge of his role and authority. The supposed "shipwreck," the "loss" of Ferdinand, and the confusing magic of the island dislodge Alonzo, Sebastian, and Antonio from certainties and prepare them for new knowledge. Ariel's appearance as a harpy after the disappearance of the banquet is the critical scene of Prospero's instruction. Beginning by redefining their identity, Ariel challenges their self-understanding: "You are three men of sin. / I have made you mad; / And even with such-like valour men hang and drown / Their proper selves" (III, iii, 53-8).[9] Through the words Prospero puts in his mouth, Ariel informs Alonzo, Sebastian, and Antonio that the storm and the current disruption of their peace is the work of supernatural powers "incensed" over Prospero's "supplanting." Consequently, when Alonzo finally "discovers" Prospero in the final scene, he pronounces "on his own" the words Prospero has trained him to say, "Thy dukedom I resign, and do entreat / Thou pardon me my wrongs" (V, i, 117-8).

The central action of the play could thus be seen as the carefully orchestrated re-education of the principal characters by Prospero. In this period English monarchs ruled not only through their person and the intrigue of the court and parliament, but also through new means that reached an increasingly national audience, both literate and illiterate. Christopher Hill argues that "In the early seventeenth century the king ceased to exhibit himself to his subjects... and royal propagandists began deliberately to use control of pulpit and printing press to project a new image of monarchy (41). Indeed, Prospero's control over the denizens of the island is achieved through magical spectacles, enchanting music, and entertaining masques incorporated into his broader educational scheme.

The wedding masque, the elaborate manipulation of illusion, the disappearing feast, the invisible noises and music, the familiarity with spirits and quasi-humans—all identify Prospero as a ruler patterned on the magus. Stephen Orgel claims that "Prospero's art is Baconian science and Neoplatonic philosophy, the empirical study of nature leading to the understanding and control of all its forces" (20). Though it was sometimes cast into suspicion as anti-religious, in Shakespeare's day magic could also be considered the active expression of formal knowledge and the precursor to experimental science and social reform. According to Alan Smith "Elizabethan and Stuart England was full of astrologers" and "almanacs even more than the Bible were the 'popular press of the day'" (205). In his study of Renaissance magic, John Mebane writes,
Compared to modern scientists, Renaissance magicians operated within a cosmological framework which seems fantastic, and which had to be rejected before genuine science could evolve. Nonetheless, in daring to believe that the human mind could guide and command the creative forces of nature, they asserted important attitudes and values which eventually contributed to the evolution of genuine science. Hermetic magicians and Paracelsians often proclaimed the overthrow of the traditional authorities which had imposed strict limits upon the search for truth; together with the mechanical artisans with which they frequently allied themselves, they are among Bacon's immediate predecessors in emphasizing experience, rather than mere citation of Galen or Aristotle, as the appropriate test of assertions about nature. Perhaps most importantly, they predicted that the imminent renewal of all of human knowledge would bring with it the reform of human society and of human nature itself. (7)
Mebane's analysis of magic underscores Prospero's position as scholar and proto-scientist. Understanding the relation of book learning, science, and magic in Shakespeare's day helps us recognize Prospero's position as Renaissance intellectual engaging in social reform and rationalization of the social order.[10]

Prospero's dilemma, the choice he must make between the study of the liberal arts (including science and magic) and effective management of the state, is one increasingly faced by Renaissance monarchs (and all politicians) in an age of expanding education. It is a theme that is repeated several times in the play:
And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputedIn dignity, and for the liberal arts [included science and magic]Without a parallel; those being all my study,The government I cast upon my brother,And to my state grew stranger, being transportedAnd rapt in secret studies. (I, ii, 72-77)Me, poor man, my libraryWas dukedom large enough; Of temporal royaltiesHe thinks me now incapable . . . (I, ii, 109-11)Knowing I loved my books, he furnished meFrom mine own library with volumes thatI prize above my dukedom. (I, ii, 166-9)

Rather than revealing an incompatibility between liberal arts and public administration, Prospero's reeducation of the other characters puts knowledge into the service of his political power.[11] If books distracted Prospero from his princely duties in Milan, he learns their utility on the island where through his studies he finds the magic he needs to master Caliban and Ariel and control the island and its visitors. Prospero's spectacles intimidate his enemies and allow him to enforce his will. It is only close to the end of the play, when his authority has been assured by their use, that Prospero abjures his magic and "drowns" his books. This abjuration of magic appeals to personal and pre-scientific notions of governance; it is symptomatic, as we shall see, of the social crisis brought about by the imposition of an increasingly absolutist authority.

Prospero plans to perpetuate his authority through a marriage between his daughter and Ferdinand; Ferdinand the future ruler must come to recognize Prospero's magic and Prospero's role as master and teacher. Prospero orchestrates his influence over Ferdinand through Miranda, and Ferdinand's first words to Miranda invoke an educational relationship.
Most sure, the goddessOn whom these airs attend. Vouchsafe my prayerMay know if you remain upon this island,And that you will some good instruction giveHow I may bear me here. (I, ii, 422-6)
When Ferdinand attempts to resist Prospero with his sword, Prospero responds, "My foot my tutor?" (I, ii, 470) The mixed metaphor of the school/body establishes the proper hierarchy between the two men. Drawing on the image of the king's two bodies, Prospero identifies himself as "head of state," and, at the same time as teacher/ruler. Prospero's magic can control Ferdinand (it causes him to drop his sword on their first meeting); however the naked exercise of power is a less effective means of developing obedience than the internalization of hierarchical relations via a pedagogical practice. Ferdinand's respect for Prospero's superior knowledge prepares him for his future son-in-law status. Prospero says that the trials he puts Ferdinand through are meant to make him value Miranda all the more ("too light winning / make the prize light" (I, ii, 452-3)), yet the course Ferdinand must follow serves a pedagogical purpose: by taking Caliban's job of hauling wood Ferdinand (son of the king) accepts an apprentice role that subordinates him to Prospero (outlawed duke).

Apprenticeship was, of course, an important educational practice in Shakespeare's day affecting education both in and outside of school. For girls' education within the family, or for the wealthy, a private tutor in the home such as is comically portrayed in The Taming of the Shrew, presented the most likely pathways to literacy. As responsible patriarch and father Prospero attends closely to Miranda's education. On the island he is her teacher: "Here / Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit / Than other princes can that have more time / For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful" (I, ii, 171-4). It is a parody of teacherly power that Prospero's magic allows him to put to sleep and wake Miranda at his will.

At several points Prospero is insistent, to the point of disconcerting harshness, with Miranda and Ferdinand about the dangers of unrestrained desire and the importance of sexual purity. In this, of course, there is present the psycho-sexual tension of the patriarchal father/daughter relationship. In a broader sense, however, the inscription of a code of propriety can be seen as a way to establish social control and internalize habits of subordination; that such a process is part of the development of modern national authority is an argument put forward by George Mosse.[12] Prospero's inculcation of propriety develops the "internal" policing that locates subjection within the individual. In the sexual desire for Miranda, Ferdinand and Caliban are alike; in their restraint they can be distinguished. Thus education in propriety draws distinctions between "us" and "them," between "civilized" and "savage," separating "our" nation from "theirs."

CALIBAN AND COLONIAL EDUCATION
Caliban is Shakespeare's most exotic character, yet in the context of European travelogues, reports of the "wild man," and New World contacts, Caliban's difference has an uncanny familiarity. This familiarity can be brought even closer to home when the portrait of Caliban is seen as a figure of pedagogical discourse, the reluctant student. The unwilling student is, of course, a familiar image in Shakespeare whether identified by Jaques as one of the stages of man, "Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school," or metaphorically by Romeo, "Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books; / But love from love, towards school with heavy looks..." Pedantic teachers of Latin and the classics were clearly targets of popular derision, as exemplified in Shakespeare's portrayal of the teacher in Love's Labour's Lost.

A rich comparison can be made between Shakespeare's depiction of Caliban's educational reluctance and Thomas Nashe's 1600 portrait of Will Summers, Henry VIII's jester:
Who would be a Scholler? Not I, I promise you: my minde alwayes gaue me this learning were such a filthy thing, which made me hate it so as I did: when I should have beene at schoole construing Bate, mi fili, mi fili, mi Batte I was close vnder a hedge or vnder a barne wall playing at spane Counter or Iacke in the boxe: my master beat me, my father beat me, my mother gaue me bread and butter, yet all this would not make me a squitter-booke. It was my destinie, I thanke her as a most courteous goddesse, that she hath not cast me away vpon gibridge. Oh, in what a mightie veine am I now against Horne-bookes! Here before all this companie I profess myself an open enemy to Inke and paper... Nownes and Pronounes, I pronounce you as traitors to boyes buttockes... (Nashe 279)
Like Jack Cade, both Summers and Caliban are professed enemies of books, which they personify as figures of evil and source of their punishment. Like Caliban, Summers' education is focused on the acquisition of language (for Caliban, English; for Summers, Latin). Like Caliban, Summer would prefer to be out-of-doors, "under a hedge," close to nature. There is a similar patriarchal pattern in the enforcement of learning for both of them. As Summers is beaten by his master and father, so Caliban is beaten by Prospero. Both Caliban and Summers appeal to female goddesses for protection: Summers personifies his "destinie;" Caliban worships the god of his witch mother, Setebos. While both Caliban and Summers are figures from a comic tradition, their outrage against a disciplinary pedagogy is understandable, even convincing.

Caliban's treatment by Prospero and Miranda should not be separated from the larger English discourse on education, yet Caliban is not only Prospero's and Miranda's student and servant, as island native he is also their colonial subject. As part man part beast Caliban is both more and less than Jaques "whinning school boy." As we shall see, an analysis of the training Caliban receives on the island is relevant to the practices and assumptions that will come to underlie European/Native encounters, most particularly European efforts to ‘educate the savages’ in ensuing centuries of English colonialism. In this sense, The Tempest offers one of the earliest representations of English colonial education.

In 1611, colonial education was new only in that it was to be organized by the English in their own vernacular; the ability to impose the learning of one's language onto others had been the hallmark of imperial rule for centuries. While the educated in Renaissance Europe had to learn Roman Latin, the colonized in the New World and elsewhere had to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, or, later on, English. In his discussion of the play Stephen Greenblatt calls this process "linguistic colonialism" and turns his argument on the question of the degree to which the likeness or difference of the native are recognized by the colonizer. He points out that New World tongues were thought barbarian and not even considered by many to be languages.[13]

Indeed, in The Tempest before Miranda teaches Caliban to speak she says he "gabbled like a thing most brutish." Miranda's and Prospero's task, then, is to give Caliban not merely a "civilized" tongue, but language itself. Prospero's and Miranda's intentions in educating Caliban prefigure Macaulay's 1835 Minute on Indian Education where non-European learning is derided and English is championed in order to create a useful class of natives, "Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect" (Macaulay 729). Colonial schools and educational systems in the consequent centuries taught European languages, culture, and administration to non-European subjects. Such schools, much like the schools of sixteenth-century England, brought a multi-ethnic and polylingual youth of indigenous elites of the colonial administrative unit into a single student body and provided them with a uniform and systematized curriculum, instruction in a single language, and an awareness of English (or other European) national histories.

In Shakespeare's day as in other periods, when schools draw their pupils from diverse regions, or when students in different places are trained in a similar curriculum and educational process, they develop a sense of common experience and allegiance. Consider the similarities between the effects of education noted by an Oxford beadle in 1678 with the history of colonial education we have been examining.
Miserable is the face of any nation where neither schools nor universities be frequented: no law, no safe commerce, a general ignorance and a neglect of duty both to God and man. Now that universities flourish and schools are in many populous towns erected, from those places of public education especially, persons are sent into all parts of the land, engaged in the strictest bonds of allegiance.[14]

As the beadle's analysis suggests, Caliban's education as colonial subject is intimately related to the play's own making of national subjects "back home." Moreover, the teaching of language to Caliban holds up to the audience a mirror in which they can recognize their own (London) vernacular English as "national" (in the sense that, unlike Caliban, they understand the language "naturally") and "imperial" (in the sense that Caliban must learn English just as the English learn Latin). In the Globe Theater then, the otherwise diverse audience can see itself as a nation united on linguistic lines, with its own English raised to both national and imperial standards. Viewing Caliban as reluctant student suggests the simultaneity of his role as exotic other and familiar citizen. The juxtaposition of Prospero and Caliban is anticipated by the pairing in Nashe's play of the Renaissance monarch--and Henry VIII was an extensively educated king--with the reluctant Will Summers. Jack Cade's, Caliban's, and Will Summer's defiant rejection of literacy should be seen as one of the key motifs of the period, in both New World and Old.

The relationship between Prospero's tokens of education and magical power is clearly identified by Caliban. "I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island" (III, ii, 40-2), Caliban tells Stephano and Trinculo. Since the contradictions of absolutist rule are sharpest in the relationship of Caliban as slave and as colonized subject, it is he who is best positioned to identify the functioning of Prospero's imperial power. Writing and books are frequently identified as critical technologies in the establishment of colonial authority; Caliban's animosity toward education and the book is paradigmatic of the relationship between colonial subject and colonizing nation. When Caliban plans revolt he advises Stephano and Trinculo to capture Prospero's books,
RememberFirst to possess his books; for without themHe's but a sot, as I am, nor hath notOne spirit to command—they all do hate himAs rootedly as I. Burn but his books.He has brave utensils, for so he calls them,Which when he has a house, he'll deck withal. (III, ii, 90-5)
Caliban emphasizes that without possession of the book Prospero will be "as I am." For Caliban, the book is not the vehicle to knowledge but the tool of the magician that makes possible the performance of authority. Books are "utensils," magical instruments of power, and they are also, in themselves, the legitimization of the right to authority, commodities increasingly on display in the educated, aristocratic household (Smith, 188). At stake in the struggle between Caliban and Prospero is ownership of books, the technology of power/magic and the implements of educational practice.

PEDAGOGY AND PAIN
"As well as grammatical and religious instruction no Tudor or Stuart schoolboy's experience was complete without a measure of corporal punishment."[15] Indeed, the efforts to limit corporal punishment in Shakespeare's time are indicative that "Nownes and Pronounes" really were "traitors to boyes buttockes." Roger Ascham wrote The Scholemaster (1563) after participating in a discussion about scholars at Eton who ran away from the school frightened of physical brutality. Consider one headmaster’s ordinance composed in 1629 about acceptable corporal punishment:
I constitute and ordain that schoolmasters do not exceed in their corrections above the number of three stripes with the rod at any one time, that they strike not any scholar upon the head or the cheek with their fist or the palms of their hands or with any other thing . . . that for speaking English in the Latin school the scholar be corrected with the ferula, and for swearing with the rod . . . [16]

Corporal punishment plays an important part in the discourse of pedagogy in The Tempest. In response to Caliban's cursing, Prospero administers "cramps" and "pinches:"
For this be sure tonight thou shalt have cramps,Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. UrchinsShall, for that vast of night that they may work,All exercise on thee. Thou shalt be pinchedAs thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stingingThan bees that made 'em. (I, ii, 325-30)
Again:
If thou neglect'st, or dost unwillinglyWhat I command, I'll rack thee with old cramps,Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar,That beasts shall tremble at thy din. (I, ii, 367-70)
The spirits Prospero sends to torture Caliban are, apparently, animals themselves, whose purpose is to fill Caliban's head with frightful images and sounds.
[But] for every trifle are they set upon me,Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me,And after bite me; then like hedgehogs, whichLie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mountTheir pricks at my footfall; sometime am IAll wound with adders, who with cloven tonguesDo hiss me into madness. (II, ii, 7-14)

Caliban fears that he may lose his intelligence, that he may turn into a beast. In a warning to Trinculo and Stephano about what may happen if their plot is found out, Caliban suggests that Prospero will transform them into creatures farther down on the natural scale: "We shall loose our time, / And be turned to barnacles, or to apes / With foreheads villainous low" (IV, i, 248-250). Ironically, Prospero's supposedly "civilizing" discipline produces brutish behavior, and Caliban's fear of being reduced to bestiality is justified. When Prospero and Ariel catch Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo they are hunted down, like animals. Prospero's attending spirits recall the hunter's ravenous dogs chasing the rebellious slave.[17]
Fury, Fury! There Tyrant, there! Hark, hark!Go charge my goblins that they grind their jointsWith dry convulsions, shorten up their sinewsWith aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make themThan pard of cat o' mountain.[Ariel] Hark, they roar.Let them be hunted soundly. (IV, i, 257-264)
The final lesson of Caliban's education is an acceptance of the inevitable failure of revolt. In his last scene, Caliban appears in scraping submission to Prospero's authority. Encountering Prospero again after being hounded by the spirits, Caliban exclaims, "I shall be pinched to death!" (V, i, 276). Yet Prospero does not punish him, but, as he does with the Neapolitans, offers his pardon instead. The "generosity" of the disciplinarian in refraining from torture, as with a trained dog, thus inspires Caliban's obedience. Told to go quickly to Prospero's cell, Caliban now responds without the foot-dragging resistance he customarily displays: "Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace" (V, i, 294-5).

In The Tempest pain is administered after demonstrations of disobedience or obstinacy. It is sharp, frequent and enduring, but not disfiguring (beyond "leopard spots") or life threatening. Pain is not administered to extract truth or knowledge or for the sake of sadistic pleasure, but to further subject Caliban to Prospero's rule, to ensure his cooperation and development within the master/slave master/student relationship. The infliction of pain is neither interrogation nor purposeless punishment but part of a pedagogical discipline accepted then and now. (I taught in a public high school in the 1980's where the vice principal went unchallenged in his use of a ferula.) Closer to us, perhaps, is the fact that in all the extensive scholarship on the play–often sympathetic to Caliban–the infliction of pain and Caliban's disciplinary torture receive scant attention.[18]

That such violence was (and is) seen as proper and necessary to the business of civilizing Caliban relates to the role of punishment within the pedagogical structure of Prospero's and English power. Through his knowledge of character and his power/magic, Prospero fulfills the fantasy of the slave master/colonial administrator who can subjugate his charges without diminishing their labor power. Above all, in seeking to tame Caliban's "nature," Prospero's domesticating discipline must not interfere with Caliban's usefulness as a servant.

In a paradoxical way both the successes and failures of Caliban's education serve to legitimate European cultural domination and ratify assumptions about "uncivilized" Others. Once the master's language is learned by Caliban, it becomes evident that his "failure" stems from "deeper" shortcomings. If in the development of modern nationhood education allows the internalization of authority, the incompleteness of Early Modern absolutism is evident in the need for the direct and public use of violence. In the colonial context violence may be particularly brutal. There is that in Caliban's nature which no amount of nurture can cure:
Abhorred slave,Which any print of goodness wilt not take,Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hourOne thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble likeA thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposesWith words that made them known. But thy vile race--Though thou didst learn–had that in't which good naturesCould not abide to be with; therefore wast thouDeservedly confined into this rock,Who hadst deserved more than a prison. (I, ii, 357-9)
In this address Miranda admits that Caliban did learn, but believes that his brutishness stemmed from belonging to a "vile race," one that "good natures could not abide to be with." Described by Prospero as "hag-born," "savage," "brutish," Caliban seeks "to violate the honor of my child" (I, ii, 347-8). The attempted rape invokes fears of racial mixture and savage sexuality that neither begin nor end with the seventeenth century. The implication of such fears is disturbing: Miranda's suggestion that Caliban's race deserves "more than prison," sounds like a racist justification for violence, even genocide.

CONCLUSION
Educational systemization was, of course, only one piece of a broader and not always even process of modernization. Michel Foucault, in his now classic work Discipline and Punish explicity draws connections between prisons and educational instutions as he traces an evolution away from medieval and feudal notions of power to Enlightenment and statist notions of centralized and anonymous control.[19] Drawing on examples from both the Seventeenth (plague quarantine) and Eighteenth Centuries (Panopticon), Foucault makes his famous argument that power increasingly "makes itself everywhere present and visible; it invents new mechanisms; it separates, it immobilizes, it partitions; it constructs for a time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society; it imposes an ideal functioning..." (205). He shows that the state becomes more and more like a laboratory "a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior, to train, or correct individuals... To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek out the most effective ones... To try out pedagogical experiments–and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans" (203-4).

It is not inappropriate to connect Prospero's magical and utopian island to a Foucaultian reading of history. Prospero's island does indeed become a cell/laboratory/classroom, where the isolation and manipulation of characters allows authority to "carry out experiments," "alter behavior," "train" and "correct" individuals. Yet Foucault's analysis can also become monolithic and unidirectional, calling for modification in specific textual and historical contexts. Along with the tendancy toward internalized control, the representation of education in The Tempest suggests an expanding threat of disruption, treason, and rebellion. This should make historical sense to us; though Cade's Rebellion was well in the past, the English revolution, however partial and incomplete, was a mere generation away.

Disruption, treason, and rebellion emerge from a utopian dream of freedom that runs throughout the play. This dream is present in Gonzalo's imaginative utopia, in Ariel's reiterated requests for freedom, in Miranda's and Ferdinand's desire for each other, in the natural beauty of the island, in the relationship of Caliban to nature and in his recollection of pre-Prospero independence (when he was 'mine own king'), and, above all, in Stephano's, Trinculo's and Caliban's treasonous rebellion.[20] Their plans to kill Prospero, burn his books, marry Miranda, take over the island and insure that "thought is free" (III, ii, 121) lead to the interruption of the wedding masque and render Prospero more "distempered" and "angry" than Miranda has ever seen him.

Despite its philosophical or even oppositional possibilities in the English or European context, the vision of Utopia serves to encourage New World colonization and exploitation. As advertising propaganda for settlement the utopian myth is effective in recruiting "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Simultaneously, the fantasy of New World utopia contains within it the inspiration for colonial domination. While the attractive possibility of the utopia depends, in part, on the imagined life of the Native American (Sir Thomas More's 1516 work stages a conversation with a supposed member of one of Vespucci expeditions about natives in Brazil), the reality of New World colonization increasingly demands the reorganization of Native American society in an acceptable, subordinate role. The disappointing discovery that native life does not conform to European notions of utopia provides an insidious justification for European governance of native society. The surprising difficulty of survival in the New World led to desperate conscription first of Native Americans and then African slaves into forced labor. Prospero instructs Miranda that Caliban's services are necessary:
[Miranda] 'Tis a villain, sir,I do not love to look on.[Prospero] But as 'tis,We cannot miss him, He does make our fire,Fetch in our wood, and serves in officesThat profit us. What ho, slave! Caliban! (I, ii, 308-13)
The "failure" of the native to welcome the settlement of the European with open arms leads to the European's vengeful use of force.

Colonial education has contradictory effects, however. From Prospero's view Caliban is congenitally recalcitrant, and his education thus wasted. Acquiring language is not sufficient to alter his supposedly unregenerate nature. And, as subsequent history has shown, racism and colonial exploitation make more likely the native's rejection of colonial tutelage. At some point, then, the native turns the colonizer's language against him and adopts Caliban's stance: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!" (I, ii, 362-4). Even Caliban's awareness of Prospero's presence does not inhibit his rebellious actions. Though he has been schooled to know that Prospero's tortures are waiting for him, he is undaunted: "His spirits hear me, / And yet I needs must curse" (II, i, 4-5).

Caliban's rejection of Prospero's pedagogy points to the subversive danger of the unruly pupil. This reading of The Tempest suggests that the link between education and social control is nothing new: attempts to formulate a disciplinary national pedagogy had analogs as early as the seventeenth century. I close with Thomas Hobbes' 1688 advice to the English crown:

The core of rebellion, as you have seen by this and read of other rebellions, are the universities; which nevertheless are not to be cast away but to be better disciplined, that is to say, that the politics there taught be made to be, as true politics should be, such as are fit to make men know that it is their duty to obey all laws whatsoever that shall by the authority of the king be enacted.


Notes
1. Cressy 9. Subsequent Cressy citations are to a collection of English educational documents from the Tudor and Stuart periods.
2. Cressy 21.
3. For a discussion of the role of educational systems in the formation of national identities see Ernest Gellner. Benedict Anderson makes a similar argument regarding the formation of colonial nationalism, 116-131.
4. In Drama of a Nation (1985) Walter Cohen argues that the national theater in Spain and England was unique in its incorporation of noble and lower-class characters and the staging of tensions between an homogenizing absolutist state and the popular will. In Forms of Nationhood (1992) Richard Helgerson argues that despite this inclusion of the "popular, marginal, subversive, and folk" Shakespeare's history plays contributed above all "to the consolidation of central power, to the cultural division of class from class" (245) that characterized an ambitious generation of Elizabethan writers who sought to elevate English nationalism to a classical and imperial standard. In Making Subjects: Literature and the Emergence of National Identity (1998) I compare the development of national consciousness in sixteenth century theater and twentieth century postcolonial novels.
5. For examination of The Tempest in anticolonial thought see Nixon and Bruner.
6. For discussion of the connections between The Tempest and the Virginia Colonies, see the introduction and appendices of both the 1954 Arden edition of the play edited by Frank Kermode and the 1987 Oxford version edited by Stephen Orgel. See also Brockbank, Vaughn and Vaughn, Hulme, Greenblatt, Griffiths, Brown, Linton, et al.
7. Prospero's role as teacher has not been extensively examined. Hunt and Winson compare Prospero positively to Belarius (of Love's Labour Lost). Hunt finds Prospero self-sacrificing:
A close comparison of Prospero's pastoral instruction with that of his counterpart Belarius not only clarifies the effectiveness of the magician's art but also directs our attention to its best working. When his teaching requires an angry persona, Prospero, after all, self-sacrificially risks his reputation as a kind father. (Hunt 38)
Winson argues that through the character of Holofernes Shakespeare mocks the pedantry of teachers of Latin. Hawkes draws on the Caliban/Prospero relationship in his examination of the early twentieth century national institutionalization of literary study in England. Greenblatt focuses on alterity and language in the colonial context.
8. Homi Bhabha describes the political unity of the nation in this way: "Quite simply, the difference of space returns as the Sameness of time, turning Territory into Tradition, turning the People into One" (300).
9. All references are to the 1987 Oxford edition.
10. Peter Greenaway's 1991 film "Prospero's Books" offers an interpretation of the play that foregrounds the importance of Renaissance science and learning by emphasizing the content of Renaissance books, particularly the development of investigative science. Interspersed throughout the film are illustrations from Renaissance studies of anatomy, architecture, nature, and foreign lands. Prospero is shown teaching Miranda out of a volume on different kinds of plants. Magic and science are richly connected as pages of books blow through scenes with Caliban, as white horses appear in Prospero's library, as anatomical drawings made by the dissection of the human body are juxtaposed with images of four legged creatures and unicorns.
11. By accepting Prospero's separation of knowledge and power (in the abjuration of his magic) some scholars fail to recognize the way in which Prospero's book-learned magic is necessary to his rule on the island. Paul A. Cantor for instance argues in his article "Prospero's Republic: The Politics of Shakespeare's The Tempest" (1981) that Prospero's disinterested separation of knowledge and politics is precisely what makes him an ideal philosopher-king: "His final disposition to philosophy guarantees that he will remain aware of facts of life beyond the political, and this larger perspective helps to moderate whatever ambition he develops" (254). Cantor argues that the play is basically about "Prospero learning to be tough when he has to" (244), and he follows Platonic logic to its Machiavellian conclusion without so much as a wince, approving that "in the deepest sense he [Prospero] has to refrain from sharing the truths he has learned about rule with other men, for these truths, if spread throughout society, would undermine his power to rule" (251).
12. Two centuries later the links between propriety and nationalism were both more explicit and more closely tied to the class antagonism of the industrial era. Nonetheless, Mosse's analysis of respectability and nationalism has resonances with The Tempest:
In order to establish controls, to impose restraint and moderation, society needed to reinforce the practical techniques of physicians, educators, and police. But their methods had to be informed by an ideal if they were to be effective, to support normality and contain sexual passions. In most timely fashion, nationalism came to the rescue. It absorbed and sanctioned middle-class manners and morals and played a crucial part in spreading respectability to all classes of the population, however much these classes hated and despised one another. (9)
13. Greenblatt's important essay examines the relationship between colonizer and colonized demonstrating that either dismissing the native's language altogether or, as was also done, assuming that there was no language barrier, fundamentally denies both their likeness and their difference.
14. Cressy 19.
15. Cressy 90.
16. Cressy 92. "The ferule was a sort of flat ruler widened at the inflicting end into a shape resembling that of a pear... with a... hole in the middle to raise blisters" (OED). In the etymology of the word "ferule" the Oxford English Dictionary quotes Ben Jonson. In 1636 he wrote, "From the rodde, or ferule, I would have them free."
17. Shakespeare could not have known, of course, that the first slave ship would arrive in Jamestown a mere eight years after the writing of The Tempest or that by the time of the French Indian wars, fully as much as two-fifths (40%) of the population of Virginia would be black slaves. Yet he was obviously aware of the slave trade and the presence of slaves, both Africans and Native Americans, in the Caribbean plantations. By 1611 the African slave trade was 170 years old; a million Africans had already been brought to the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese. In The Tempest, Caliban is specifically referred to by Prospero as his "slave" on four occasions.
18. For an exception see Breight.
19. The most extended Foucaultian treatment of Shakespeare is by Christopher Pye. Though Pye doesn't analyze The Tempest, he does make contributions to the understanding of the histories and of Macbeth. While emphasizing the role of spectacle in the exercise of power, Pye does not examine the way in which modern systems of discipline produce individual identity. John Archer has attempted to historically pin down Foucault's concepts in view of Elizabethan and Jacobean court society. He argues that spying and intelligence though not fully systematized were "united in a culture of surveillance" in seventeenth century English monarchy.
20. Beier's argument about masterless men helps situate the rebellion of the jester and drunken butler within the context of the threat of uprising in Shakespeare's England. For consideration of the play in light of a "discourse of treason," see Breight.