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COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
Why, in 1667, did John Dryden and William Davenant choose to revise Shakespeare's The Tempest, and what do their revisions signify for literary and cultural history? (1) Their play is usually described as an attempt to neutralize various threats to contemporary patriarchal orders--an attempt often seen as unsuccessful by modern readers. I will argue instead that Dryden and Davenant aim to problematize the too easy attribution of qualities of savagery and ungovernability to the play's gallery of "others" who are the nominal threats to Prospero's control and to direct audiences to reconsider where the real threats lie and what orders are worth preserving. This argument requires an overview of the play's cultural context, a summary of the ways in which the play has been seen to assuage various contemporary anxieties, and, finally, a demonstration of how Dryden and Davenant prompt reevaluation of political, domestic, and religious assumptions underlying these anxieties. Shakespeare's play is too well known to require a summary here, but any analysis of Dryden and Davenant's must begin with a summary of their extraordinarily convoluted and innovative tragicomic plot.
I. The Plot in its Ideological Context
The changes to Shakespeare's play begin immediately with the cast of characters: Prospero is, in Dryden-Davenant, the Duke of Mantua, whose kingdom was usurped by his brother Antonio with the help of Alonzo, Duke of Savoy, and who was set adrift to arrive on a supposedly deserted island. On the island, Prospero has raised two daughters, Miranda and her younger sister Dorinda, neither of whom has seen any man but their father. Also on the island are the monstrous orphaned offspring of the witch Sycorax, who was, like Prospero, marooned on the island. These are Caliban and his sister, also called Sycorax, both now enslaved by Prospero. Prospero has also raised Hippolito, proper Duke of Mantua, who was set adrift with him, and whose kingdom was usurped by Alonzo. Prospero's astrological forecasts had indicated that the sight of a woman would for "some time" (2.4.7) be fatal to Hippolito, so he has been raised in a cave, ignorant of the female sex. With the shipwreck on the island of Alonzo and Antonio (both of whom are already penitent and have been on a crusade in expiation), along with Alonzo's son Ferdinand, his counselor Gonzalo, and his sailors, Prospero plans to avenge himself. When Ferdinand meets Miranda and Hippolito meets Dorinda, both couples fall in love. But once Hippolito learns from Ferdinand that there are other women besides Dorinda, he plans to possess all women--including Miranda. Ferdinand, reluctantly, "kills" Hippolito in a duel, and is summarily condemned to death by Prospero. But Ariel, acting without Prospero's knowledge or orders, revives Hippolito, who decides that monogamy is, in fact, desirable. Antonio and Alonzo renounce their usurped titles and all sail home happily. So much for the "high" plot.
In the "low" plot, Stephano, the ship's master, believing the dukes drowned, declares himself master of the island and his sailors Mustacho and Ventoso viceroys. Boatswain Trincalo, meanwhile, gains the allegiance of Caliban and proposes to declare himself master of the island by marrying the younger Sycorax, thus aligning himself with the island's hereditary monarchy. After their alcohol, the main instigator of the power struggles, runs out, all the comic characters renounce their "claims" to sovereignty and join in the general reconciliation.
The changes Dryden and Davenant made in adapting The Tempest for the Restoration stage amount to some striking additions and subtractions from Shakespeare's original. Among the subtractions are, first, the reduction of Prospero's powers and of the threats to it (in the ready repentance of the usurpers and the omission of the low characters' plot against his life); second, Gonzalo's speech on the virtues of a "natural" or "anarchic" state; and finally, Prospero's renunciation of his magic and his resolution to "think on death." Among the additions are the island's population explosion--a peculiarly female one, in that it includes Dorinda, Sycorax, and, problematically, Hippolito, since this male character is designated to be played by a woman. Also added are Prospero's plan to execute Ferdinand and Ariel's averting this potential tragedy.
For the last thirty years, most critics have accounted for these revisions by placing the play in the context of the embattled status of several contemporary ideologies: faith in patriarchalism--both political and domestic; faith in the more fundamental idea of any wholly stable model of civil government; and, finally, along with faith in magic, faith in an active, sentient, and mystical Providence. Let me briefly review the backgrounds of these three issues.
First, faith in the patriarchal model of hereditary monarchy, which would be best articulated in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarchia in 1680, had, of course, been eroded by the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the ensuing Commonwealth, and the altered terms under which the monarchy was established with the Restoration--with much pomp but a real attenuation of the monarch's autonomous power. Moreover, Charles II's failure to provide an heir, and the impeachment of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, father-in-law of the heir apparent James, on October 10, 1667, would eventually lead to the Exclusion Crisis and the ultimate ejection of the Stuart dynasty in 1688, an outcome foreseen, at least by Samuel Pepys, as early as 1667, the year of Dryden and Davenant's play (Foster, 9).
The domestic analogue to the political model was the patriarchal family, as Filmer outlines, and that too was a site of contention. As Susan Staves has put it, "At or about the same time subjects asserted their right to elect a sovereign in the Glorious Revolution, women acquired an analogous right to elect husbands" (189). The shift, politically and domestically, from Filmerian patriarchalism to Lockean contract was, of course, well under way before 1688, and anxiety resulting from the erosion of patriarchal authority in both the state and the home was staged in the playhouse.
A broader anxiety about the prospects of any stable civil order may be discerned in the expansion of travel and colonization, with the accompanying fascination with what Earl Miner calls "The Wild Man Through the Looking Glass." In the seventeenth century, travel narratives included "naturalistic descriptions of savages, whether abroad or at home: dirt and darkness, bestial appearance, sexuality, and especially cannibalism [...]"; and, "as if viewing himself in the looking glass of art, a cultivated European [...] saw in himself the savagery he feared to encounter [...]" (189-90). Bridget Orr has amplified:
England's expansion into the Caribbean, North America, and the East Indies brought wealth but also a host of constitutional and cultural problems[....] The external threat presented by exotic or savage cultures to English colonies both legally and materially was matched in metropolitan eyes by the colonials' tendency to degenerate, far from the centres of civility and in dangerous proximity to unbridled savagery. (190)
The testimony of travel narratives and colonial accounts was theorized for English minds in the work of writers like John Calvin, Sir Walter...
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