J OHANNES U NGELENK The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest Colonial Climates When on S. James his day, Iuly 24. being Monday (preparing for no lesse all the blacke night before) the clouds gathering thicke upon us, and the windes singing, and whistling most unusually, which made us to cast off our Pinace towing the same untill then asterne, a dreadfull storme and hideous began to blow from out the North-east, which swelling, and roaring as it were by fits, some houres with more violence then others, at length did beate all light from heaven; which like an hell of darkenesse turned blacke upon us, so much the more fuller of horror, as in such cases horror and feare use to overrunne the troubled, and overmastered sences of all, which (taken up with amazement) the eares lay so sensible to the terrible cries and murmurs of the windes, and distraction of our Company, as who was most armed, and best prepared, was not a little shaken. […] For it is most true, there ariseth commonly no such unmercifull tempest, compound of so many contrary and divers Nations, but that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body, and most loathsomely affecteth all the powers thereof […]. [I]t being now Friday, the fourth morning, it wanted little, but that there had bin a generall determination, to have shut up the hatches, and commending our sinfull soules to God, committed the Shippe to the mercy of the Sea: surely, that night we must have done it, and that night had we then perished: but see the goodness and sweet introduction of better hope, by our mercifull God given unto us. Sir George Summers, when no man dreamed of such happinesse, had discovered, and cried Land. (Strachey 1735-37) It is indeed thanks to the “mercifull God[’s]” causing the shipwreck to take place near the shore of an island and delivering all the ship’s passengers to safe ground, that William Strachey’s letter reached its addressee and, via various detours, the modern reader. Its publication history is complicated: It had formed part of Richard Hakluyt’s vast collection of travel narratives but did not find its way to publication. It was eventually acquired by Samuel Purchas after Hakluyt’s death and published in the fourth volume of his Purchas His Pilgrimes in the year 1625. There is, however, persuasive evidence that the letter must have circulated in manuscript long before its publication. Most prominently, The Tempest by William Shakespeare, first played in November 1611, draws on Strachey’s text: The spectacular stage storm and destructive debacle of the first scene are clearly informed by William Strachey’s J OHANNES U NGELENK 86 account of the ‘colonial’ tempest and shipwreck. 1 In other words, we probably owe one of the most daring, in any case, one of the most prominent sea-storm and shipwreck scenes in the history of theatre to the providence of the “mercifull God” who saved the crew of this unlucky colonial passage. The aim of this chapter is to work out a proximity of the discourse on climatic experiences in the colonies and the experiences produced by the relatively new cultural practice of early modern theatre: In The Tempest Shakespeare metatheatrically stages such a proximity as a reflection upon his theatrical art and the manner in which it functions. My paper takes its point of departure in the tradition of reading The Tempest from a postcolonial perspective: Edward Malone’s early discovery of the affinity between Shakespeare’s play and texts that originated in the context of the English settlement in Virginia initiated a well-researched topos in the field of Shakespeare Studies, kindling the fruitful tradition of postcolonial readings of this work. 2 It is the same corpus of texts that will be referred to in my argument about early modern reflections on the climate and its connection to the theatre. A New Historicist approach is used to reconstruct a historical and cultural framework from the most prominent of the texts which were produced in the wake of the colonial project in Virginia, using travel writings collected by Thomas Hakluyt, William Strachey’s “True Reportory,” Silvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Barmudas and a pamphlet known as A True Declaration published by the Counseil for Virginia, all circulating in London at the time when The Tempest was written. The terrible storm William Strachey tells of hit a group of ships on their way from England to Jamestown, a settlement founded in 1607 on the North- American continent. The flagship of the mission, called the Sea Venture, aboard which Strachey happened to be together with eminent figures of the plantation-enterprise run by the Virginia Company, was separated from the rest of the ships, suffered leakage and was wrecked on the rocks of a group of islands. There was no great harm done, the group of about one hundred and fifty people were saved and stayed for ten months on the uninhabited island, building two new ships and gathering provisions in order to finally sail to Jamestown - thereby providing a happy ending for an exotic, miraculous story that could not have been better fabricated. It is no coincidence that this story has survived the course of time, due in part to Shakespeare and Shakespeare Studies. As William Strachey’s letter shows, the endeavor to found a plantation on the River James resulted in some severe problems that threatened the success of the project as a whole: 1 For a good summary of the background of Strachey’s text, its history of publication and the debates about its influence on Shakespeare’s Tempest see Alden T. Vaughan, Strachey. 2 V. Vaughan and A. T. Vaughan give an extensive overview of this topos in their introduction to the Arden 3rd edition of The Tempest. The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 87 Its main marketing strategy of praising the exceptionally temperate climate responsible for the plantation’s abundance, and the huge profits it promised, came under attack, owing to news of miseries and upheavals. When in 1584 the first English explorers approached the shore of the later colony, they were guided by a promising scent, as Arthur Barlowe, a member of the expedition writes: The second of July, we found shole water, which smelt so sweetly, and was so strong a smell, as if we had bene in the midst of some delicate garden, abounding with all kinde of odoriferous flowers, by which we were assured, that the land could not be farre distant. (Hakluyt 728) And indeed, what the English explorers ultimately found there satisfied the keenest fantasies of a golden age and paradise, fostered in addition by earlier travel accounts of Columbus and Vespucci: Wee found the people most gentle, louing, and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age. The earth bringeth forth all things in aboundance, as in the first creation, without toile or labour. (Hakluyt 731) When, however, twenty-six years later the shipwrecked crew of the Sea Venture ultimately made it to the settlement at Jamestown in May 1610, they found, as William Strachey reports, “all things so contrary to our expectations, so full of misery and misgovernment” (Stratchey 1749) that it is hard to believe they were talking of the same ‘paradisiac’ strip of land: Viewing the Fort, we found the Pallisadoes torne downe, the Ports open, the Gates from off the hinges, and emptie houses (which Owners death had taken from them) rent up and burnt, rather then the dwellers would step into the Woods, stones cast off from them, to fetch other fire-wood: and it is true, the Indian killed as fast without, if our men stirred but beyond the bounds of their Block-house, as Famine and Pestilence did within, with many more particularities of their sufferances (brought upon them by their owne disorders the last yeere) then I have heart to expresse. (Stratchey 1749) In short, there was no trace of a golden age or paradise, nor of abundance or an absence of treason and violence. The “disorders” that Strachey alludes to referred to a whole series of riots that threw the settlement into anarchy. Strachey’s report, for strategic reasons, hardly mentions that it was above all the climate that was causing severe problems: The fact that the passengers and crew of the voyage immediately travelled back to England, happily taking provisions from another ship that arrived at Jamestown, may indicate the utter absence of abundance and healthy living conditions. Rumor was spreading rapidly about the miseries of the settlement in Virginia, so much so that the Virginia Company felt compelled to react. The pamphlet that the J OHANNES U NGELENK 88 Company published in a rather desperate attempt to refute these rumors finally called the alleged problems by their climatic name: First the daungerous passage by sea, secondly the barrennesse of the countrie, thirdly the unholesomnesse of the climate: the storme that separated the admirall from the fleete proving the first, the famine amongst our men importing the second, the sicknesse of our men arguing the third. (Counseil 17-18) It is here that the story of the shipwreck and the miraculous saving of the passengers comes into play. The island on whose rocks the Sea Venture was wrecked was just not any island: It belonged to the Bermudas. They were a famously dreaded place: “For the Ilands of the Barmudas,” writes Silvester Jourdain, were “ever esteemed and reputed, a most prodigious and inchanted place, affoording nothing but gusts, stormes, and foule weather” (Jourdain 8). They were, adds William Strachey, “often afflicted and rent with tempests, great strokes of thunder, lightning and raine in the extreamity of violence” (Stratchey 1738), “so terrible to all that ever touched on them, and such tempests, thunders, and other fearfull obiects are seene and heard about them, that they be called commonly the Devils Ilands” (Stratchey 1737). “Yet,” writes Silvester Jourdain, “did we finde there the ayre so temperate and the Country so aboundantly fruitful of all fit necessaries, for the sustentation and preservation of mans life” (9) that the old myth of a paradise on earth is enlivened anew: Wherefore my opinion sincerely of this Iland is, that whereas it hath beene, and is still accounted, the most dangerous infortunate, and most forlorne place of the world, it is in truth the richest, healthfullest, and pleasing land, (the quantity and bignesse thereof considered) and merely natural, as ever man set foote upon. (Jourdain 10) The “mercifull God” has thus not only shown “his goodness” in rescuing more than 150 lives - the shipwrecked party finding themselves stranded on an island famous for its foul, deadly weather turns out to be (some sort of) temperate paradise, instead, that could be marketed as a providential hint. As can be easily imagined, this story of rescue and unexpected paradise was exactly the kind of news the Virginia Company was waiting for. One could not have dreamed of better material for countering the bad publicity circulating in England and threatening the colonial endeavor as a whole. Fortunately, the Company’s pamphlet, promoting the shipwreck and delivery of crew and passengers, has survived: Claiming that God’s providence favored the colonial project, the Virginia Counsell tried to establish the difficult argument that “plenty and famine, a temperate climate, and distempered bodies, felicities and miseries can be reconciled together” (Counseil 33-34). The strategy the pamphlet employs hinges completely on the story of the shipwreck. The aim is to transfer the story’s narrative structure, its movement from misery to bliss, to the settlement. The terror of shipwreck and rumors of a dangerously The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 89 unwholesome climate are thus to be turned into the discovery of a paradisiac, temperate climate that provides the perfect basis for a well-governed, prosperous future colony. The text explicitly calls the disastrous state of the settlement the “greater shipwrack in the continent of Virginia,” a metaphorical shipwreck brought about “by the tempest of dissention” (Counseil 34). All hopes for rescuing the settlement from falling into anarchy and decay were set on the hero of the shipwreck story, Sir Thomas Gates, who organized the stranded community - dealing with several riots - and led the mission back to Jamestown. However, the Company’s argument for his governing as a healing force, potentially solving the problem of sickness and death spreading among the settlers does not seem particularly convincing: “he professeth, that in a fortnights space he recovered the health of most of them by moderat labour, whose sicknesse was bred in them by intemperate idleness” (Counseil 33). Without any doubt, the challenge that Sir Thomas Gates, and with him the colonies (to be) were facing in general was one of climate, and of tempering oneself to the weather conditions. As “the tempest of dissention” in the pamphlet shows, the task of re-establishing a ‘healthy’ balance concerns the individual body as well as the body politic. From our modern perspective this complex of heavy weather, ideas of (individual) sickness and political instability must appear metaphorical and random; however, in the early modern age, this complex expresses the very core of the dominant worldview of analogies: The imperfect, elemental world, in contrast to the perfect heavenly world, is subjected to continuous processes of balances and imbalances. The paradigm for these processes is the weather. Incidents of imbalance, sickness or political crises are therefore associated with, or, better, seen as analogous to incidents of heavy weather, as the Latin word tempestas, signifying both ‘a storm’ and ‘a riot’ exemplifies: Lat. Tempestas, atis, f.g. Time, a seasonable time and faire weather, a faire or good season: a tempest or storme, a boysterous or troublous weather, be it winde, haile, or raine: commonlie it signifieth a tempest or storme of rain & haile together. also great trouble, busines or ruffling in a common weale, a storme or trouble of adversitie, daunger or perill, a commotion. (Thomas, s.v. Tempestas, atis) As heavy weather was in the early modern age still widely understood as a divine intervention, God punishing mankind for their irreverence and sinful lives (Höfele 25-38), Sir Thomas Gates’s suggestion of a Protestant working ethic as a cure for the disastrous climate of the colonies does make some sense. However, his attempt at re-establishing the paradise in Virginia, “[t]he fertility of the soyle, the temperature of the climate, the form of government, the condition of our people, their daily invocating of the name of God, being thus expressed” (Counseil 52) also suggests its limitedness: The paternalistic comment that “Adam himselfe might not live in a paradice without dressing J OHANNES U NGELENK 90 the garden” (Counseil 36) threatens to backfire, for the simple reason that Adam’s garden is very likely to have been planted with more providence regarding the factual choice of its geographical location: How is it possible that such a virgin and temperate aire, should work such contrarie effects, but because our fort (that lyeth as a semy-Iland) is most part invironed with an ebbing and flowing salt water, the owze of which sendeth forth un unwholesome & contagious vapour? (Counseil 33) The marketing experts of the Virginia Company resort to an interesting tactic to counter this weighty argument against the wholesomeness of their colonial project: “No man ought to judge of any Countrie by the fennes and marshes (such as is the place where James towne standeth) except we will condemne all England” (Counseil 32). With this argument the debates about the climate abroad return to the soil where the dreams and fantasies of paradise, of abundance and temperate air and of “people most gentle, louing, and faithfull,” living together in harmony, “void of all guile, and treason,” are fostered. It underlines and makes explicit a dimension of the discussion about the colonial climate and also of the colonial enterprise itself that might remain latent, that might be concealed behind the company’s economic interest and the advertising character of their intervention. However, at this early stage, with the obvious insignificance of the project, economically still a disaster, with a negligible number of people involved, the huge public interest testified by the circulation and ‘consumption’ of texts covering the colonial enterprise point to the fact that the colonies, at least in these early stages, primarily fulfill a different function: they offer a way of engaging with ‘their own,’ of taking an unfamiliar view of the familiar, following a very special, new mode. What the Londoners found and probably enjoyed in the stories brought back from the “new world” were their own utopian hopes and their own reality of misery and political violence, in an intensified, more extreme form: The colonies open up a hyper-space of climate and processes of temperance, not different from their own reality, but more delicate, with more to win and more to lose. Although these colonial events are taking place far away, in an ‘other’ place, seemingly unconnected to their own reality, they nevertheless always comment and recur to the current status quo at home. Theatrical Climates: The Tempest The Tempest by William Shakespeare, first performed probably late in the year 1611, tells the story of the very special climate of an island. The play opens, as already mentioned, with the staging of a sea-storm, a revolutionary, unheard of dramatic spectacle in the early modern age. It then uses the chaos of the situation to spread the shipwrecked cast in groups around The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 91 the island so that the audience can watch them exploring it, encountering its few inhabitants - and, what will be the focus here, experiencing its strange climate. The biggest group consists of the courtiers assembled around the king of Naples, Alonso, and the illegitimate Duke of Milan, Antonio. Both are Prospero’s enemies, since they usurped his dukedom and sent him to sea in a small boat, a “rotten carcass of a butt” (1.2.146). They could not know that they would be facing him later, on this very island. It does not take long for this group to start debating about the island’s climate: ADRIAN. Though this island seem to be desert - […] Uninhabitable and almost inaccessible - […] It must needs be of subtle, tender and delicate temperance. ANTONIO. Temperance was a delicate wench. SEBASTIAN. Ay, and a subtle, as he most learnedly delivered. ADRIAN. The air breathes upon us here most sweetly. SEBASTIAN. As if it had lungs, and rotten ones. ANTONIO. Or, as ’twere perfumed by a fen. GONZALO. Here is everything advantageous to life. ANTONIO. True, save means to live. SEBASTIAN. Of that there’s none, or little. GONZALO. How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green! ANTONIO. The ground indeed is tawny. SEBASTIAN. With an eye of green in’t. ANTONIO. He misses not much. SEBASTIAN. No; he doth but mistake the truth totally. (2.1.37-59) In a paper called “Shakespeare’s Virginian Mask,” John Gillies has proposed linking this discussion to the debates about the Virginia settlement’s climate: Is it paradisiac, “of subtle, tender and delicate temperance,” does the “air” breathe “most sweetly,” is everything “lush and lusty” and “green” - or, rather, “tawny,” barren, not providing “means to live,” as a result of the rotten ooze of the “fens”? The details of allusions to the controversial discussion prevailing in London at the time The Tempest was written and first performed is indeed striking. All the more so, since, only a few lines later, the talkative Gonzalo even tells us about his utopic dream of founding a settlement on the island where they have just landed: “Had I plantation of this isle” (2.1.144), he says, using the term plantation (cf. OED, s.v. plantation def. 2.b.), current for describing colonial enterprises in Ireland or Virginia, “I would with such perfection govern, sir, / T’excel the Golden Age” (2.1.168- 169). The vision he elaborates is more or less copied verbatim from Montaigne’s “Of the Caniballes,” where an encounter with Brazilian natives is depicted, their living harmoniously in abundance, “Without sweat or en- J OHANNES U NGELENK 92 deavor; treason, felony” (2.1.161), as Gonzalo would have it. John Gillies’s reading, following this thread of Virginia and (colonial) temperance through the play with special attention paid to the depiction of temperance in the mask performed for Ferdinand and Miranda in act four is extremely interesting; it only raises one, decisive question: How can an unrigged bark, set to sea somewhere between Milan and Naples, be washed ashore on an island ‘in the middle’ of the Atlantic Ocean? Can a ship sailing from Tunis to Naples, troubled by a storm find itself shipwrecked thousands of miles away, in the middle of nowhere on a course to the “new world”? Something seems to be essentially wrong with Shakespeare’s geography, which is a problem when talking about climate: In early modern English this term was still closely connected to the late ancient and medieval notion of a region of the earth, a belt, defined by its latitude (cf. OED, s.v. climate def. 1.a.). Since, unlike Shakespeare’s usual working routine, the play’s plot is not based on a literary or historiographical source, his re-locating of the shipwreck he borrows from Strachey and others is highly significant. We do not know where exactly to locate the island the play is set upon; the only explicit information we get is that it is not the Bermudas - Ariel relates, in half a sentence, that he was once asked to “fetch dew / From the still-vexed Bermudas” (1.2.228-229), implying that he had to travel there. As Shakespeare’s relocating of the island, his consciously disassociating it from historical and geographic references shows, he is doing more with the debate about climates and temperance than merely depicting specific cultural events of the time. In order to answer the main question of what Shakespeare is making of this debate on climates and temperance, it seems to be sensible to start with the easiest question of all: What is it actually like, the climate of Shakespeare’s isle? Is it temperate and healthy, or rather devilishly sickening? Are Adrian and Gonzalo right, is the grass “lush and lusty,” does the air breathe “most sweetly,” or is it Sebastian and Antonio who are pointing to the ‘true’ state of things by calling the ground “tawny” and the air “rotten”? For the early modern audience in the Globe Theatre, the ground the actors are standing on may indeed be called “tawny”; the stage was made of wood, yellowish-brown. And, to be sure, the air ‘breathed’ towards the stage from the pits, crowded by all sorts of ‘simple’ people, was unlikely to be “sweet”; the description of the place as a “fen,” breathing out rank air, “as if it had lungs,” “rotten ones,” being, in a way, more true than Sebastian could have known it to be. Nevertheless, the conventions and habits of the early modern platform stage, without scenery, which to a very large extent relied on the audience’s imagination would perfectly well have allowed the island to be as green and lush, and abundantly fruitful as is, literally, imaginable, and without any conflict arising. The fact that a conflict does arise in the scene in which the shipwrecked noblemen explore the island is therefore significant: The The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 93 party’s argument about the state of the isle turns out to be a metatheatrical commentary. Their exploring of the stage/ island mirrors the audience’s position in early modern theatre: The audience finds itself and its viewing position represented on stage. Due to the absence of dramatic text giving the onstage audience’s imagination sufficient clues, the onstage theatrical situation does not quite work, and conflict arises. It is this dysfunction that is used to exhibit the conventions of the early modern stage. The way theatre works is brought before the eyes of the ‘real’ audience that is not only watching a theatrical spectacle but also watching representatives of themselves observing the effect that theatre has on its audience. In short, in being induced to discover the island’s climate, we are induced to discover early modern theatre as well. This reflective pragmatic, metatheatrical structure of having both the spectacle and an audience for this spectacle on stage is typical for Shakespeare’s Tempest. Prospero’s enemies, the audience and the ‘victims’ of his metatheatrical manipulations, arrive on the island as early as the second scene so that everything that is to follow has to be watched by the ‘real’ audience as a sort of play-within-a-play. Only the first scene escapes this special pragmatic structure and can, and has to be, viewed by the audience, without the theatrical illusions being broken, in all its intensity. Here the characters on stage, not knowing that they are in fact also already being spectators for an impressive theatrical spectacle, behave the way a ‘good’ audience is meant to behave: by taking the spectacle for real and being moved by it. It is no coincidence that this scene is the famous tempest scene that lends the play its title. Despite its not being metatheatrically reflective, it develops the central analogy between theatre and weather that the rest of the play will then unfold. In the passage of his letter describing the shipwreck, William Strachey had already noticed the strange proximity of tempestuous weather and a certain sort of human ‘utterances,’ speaking of “terrible cries and murmurs of the windes,” which affected the listeners’ bodies in an intense way: So much the more fuller of horror, as in such cases horror and feare use to overrunne the troubled, and overmastered sences of all, which (taken up with amazement) the eares lay so sensible to the terrible cries and murmurs of the windes, and distraction of our Company, as who was most armed, and best prepared, was not a little shaken. […] For it is most true, there ariseth commonly no such unmercifull tempest, compound of so many contrary and divers Nations, but that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body, and most loathsomely affecteth all the powers thereof […]. (Stratchey 1735) It is this analogy that Shakespeare exploits in his metatheatrical use of the storm: this whistling, roaring and murmuring of the troubled sea - and of the passengers on board. “You do assist the storm” (1.1.14), the boatswain accuses the courtiers that did not follow his commands to retreat to their cabins J OHANNES U NGELENK 94 - that is to say, to leave the stage. He proves unable to silence them (“To cabin! Silence! Trouble us not! ” (1.1.17-18)) just as the courtiers are incapable of commanding to silence the roaring elements: BOATSWAIN. […] What cares these roarers for the name of king? […] You are a councillor; if you can command these elements to silence and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more. Use your authority! If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap. (1.1.16-26) What are the courtiers doing other than what we expect characters on stage to do: speaking and acting? In this they are “assist[ing] the storm,” breathing forth anxious words, troubling the boatswain just as the heavy weather is: “A plague upon this howling. They are louder than the weather or our office” (1.1.35-36). “Nay, good, be patient” (1.1.15), Gonzalo tells the Boatswain, who is complaining about their marring his labor - “When the sea is! ” (1.1.16), the Boatswain tellingly answers. It is the effect of the “terrible cries and murmurs of the windes” that William Strachey speaks of that proves to be interesting for metatheatrical reflections. Shakespeare uses the enormous power of the weather on the bystanders that Stratchey relates, the fact that “who was most armed, and best prepared, was not a little shaken,” “that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body,” for claiming an analogy of weather and theatre. All this would probably sound utterly constructed, for a paper on climate and early modern theatre, if the play itself, in its second scene, did not explicitly stage these metatheatrical reflections. This occurs two times: Firstly, in a dialogue between Prospero, who confesses to have been the stage-master (director) of this tempest, and Miranda, his daughter, a viewer of the scene, who is deeply moved to pity and amazement by it (1.2.1-20). Secondly, when Prospero speaks to Ariel, the main metatheatrical actor: PROSPERO. Hast thou, spirit, Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee? ARIEL. To every article. I boarded the King’s ship: now on the beak, Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin I flamed amazement. […] PROSPERO. My brave spirit, Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil Would not infect his reason? ARIEL. Not a soul But felt a fever of the mad and played Some tricks of desperation. […] (1.2.193-210) The intemperate climate of the ‘island’ has thus literally “worke[d] upon the whole frame of the body” - causing “distempered bodies” (Counseil 33) as The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 95 the medical vocabulary, “infect[ing]” and “fever,” indicates. Prospero and Ariel will even increase this “fever of the mad” by exposing their victims to further spectacles - this time not featuring the weather but harpies, banquets and that kind of ‘fantastic’ stuff - until their “brains [are] / (now useless) boiled within their] skull[s]” (5.1.59-60), their fancy so “unsettled” (5.1.60) that they are, in the end, unable to move or react. However, there is also “sweet air,” or “solemn air” on the island, not only finally curing, and re-tempering “brains,” “unsettled fancy” and passions, but also “allaying” the fury of the waters: FERDINAND. Where should this music be? I’th’ air, or th’earth? It sounds no more, and sure it waits upon Some god o’th’ island. Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father’s wreck, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air. […] (1.2.388-394) Although these airs are primarily thought of as music, which re-introduces harmony amongst the troubled elements and humors, these “sweet airs” are an important part of the island’s climate, as Caliban’s famous line - that has even made it into the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in London 2012 - states: “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (3.2.135-136). Thus in a way, on this odd island, we do in fact find “plenty and famine, a temperate climate, and distempered bodies, felicities and miseries […] reconciled together” (Counseil 33-34). This fact may account for the observation that all the characters coming to this climate, like Ferdinand, suspect there is “Some god o’th’island” in charge of its weather, some higher authority responsible for its climate, no matter whether “sweet airs,” as here with Ferdinand, or in Miranda’s invoking a “god of power” in the earlier scene directly after the tempest. Prospero’s island is, as Silvester Jourdain reported for the Bermudas, “a most prodigious and inchanted place” (Jourdain 8), or as Gonzalo conclusively puts it in the end: “All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement / inhabits here” (5.1.104-5). The play introduces a ‘master’ of the island who is indeed powerful enough to make its weather: Prospero. He has “by [his] arts,” as Miranda calls it, “Put the wild waters in [the first scene’s] roar” - and allayed the fury of the waters afterwards. Shakespeare’s Tempest is, however, not a fantasy of total, immediate power, of a superior authority that would even have brought the weather under its control. On the contrary, the analogy the play establishes between Prospero as stage master and God (in early modern thinking the provident and punishing master over the weather) aims precisely at the medium through which these interventions are taking place: As the J OHANNES U NGELENK 96 first scene emblematically stages, the masters (of stage and weather) remain absent (“Where is the Master? ” (1.1.9) - “Do you not hear him” (1.1.13)). What is present and produces effects on the bystanders’ bodies is the medium: the weather, the weathery spectacle. In Shakespeare’s play the character of Ariel stands for this intermediary position in-between master and audience. As we have seen in his post-performance dialogue with his master Prospero, it is he who performs, who is present and who has to inform the absent master about the spectacle. With regard to the climate of the island, his name is no coincidence: “Ariel”, an “airy spirit,” as the folio list of characters tells us, is a personification of the weathery character of theatre. The etymology of spirit, deriving from lat. spiritus, the Vulgata term for the biblical pneuma (cf. OED, s.v. spirit) signifying both a gust of wind and breath, points to the central analogy of weather and theatrical speech that Shakespeare’s play exploits - in order to emphasize the fact that weather and theatre bring forth similar effects on the bodies subjected and exposed to them. Following this weathery, metatheatrical reading of The Tempest provides us with a simple answer to a much-discussed question in criticism of the play: Why does Prospero abjure his magic before returning to Milan, and not just govern Milan with the help of his “arts,” which have proved so efficient during the last three hours? Simply because his “arts” are theatrical: they are bound to a specific place and to a certain length of time: the audience arrives at “his island,” the court party of the play and the London audience alike - and will leave after two or three hours. The “quality of th’climate” on this theatre island appears to be unique - is it? Here, in the early modern theatre, “plenty and famine, a temperate climate, and distempered bodies, felicities and miseries can be reconciled together” (Conseil 33-34). Shakespeare’s theatre is, despite Gonzalo’s vision, surely not a place where paradise can be found for some hours in the midst of early modern London, not a tropical island of perfect temperature, not an oasis depicting perfectly governed states and ideal human beings. It is, rather, a weathery place: a tempestuous place, where one is shaken and moved by the weather, where one tempers oneself to that weather and its stormy gusts or solemn sweet airs blowing from the stage - and back. And it is exactly here that the colonial and the theatrical meet. It is here that they come together: through the weather and the climate of the colonies and the stage. A Politics of Intensity: Critical Climates To summarize what the political and dramatic tempests examined here share and what their interaction produces, I would like to return to a sentence of Strachey’s report already quoted in the very beginning of this paper: The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 97 For it is most true, there ariseth commonly no such unmercifull tempest, compound of so many contrary and divers Nations, but that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body. (Stratchey 1735) Without trying to offer an exhaustive interpretation of these dense, and somewhat dark words, many of which would deserve their own close reading, this sentence is definitely valid for both the (imaginary and the experiences of the) colonies and the early modern theatre. It is the deviation from the “commonly,” the fact that “there ariseth commonly no such unmercifull tempest” that approximates colonial and theatrical experiences. The parallel between the two is however not established by what we get to see and experience in the theatre, not by the representation of the hitherto un-seen, not by the contact with the ‘other.’ Despite the harpies and the vanishing banquet, Shakespeare does not call his play The Enchanted Island, as Dryden and Davenant would later do, but simply The Tempest: aiming not at the exotic, the unfamiliar, but referring to a weather phenomenon more than familiar to the London audience. It is, however, the intensity that makes the difference: “there ariseth commonly no such unmercifull tempest.” It is this intensity that accounts for the weather’s and thereby for the theatre’s effect: “that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body.” Like the “unmercifull tempest” in the colonies, Shakespeare’s theatrical Tempest does not only affect the audiences’ individual bodies and their healthy balance: it also touches upon the harmony of the body politic. For the London discussions on the Virginian weather as for Shakespeare’s theatrical practice it is the intensity of the tempests that offers a central political perspective. I therefore would speak of a politics of the weather: The uncommon intensity (also always) ‘comments’ on, perhaps temporarily troubles the ‘familiar’ status quo; it tests the common. The discussions about the Virginian weather/ climate, as the circulation of letters and the number of publications show, was obviously of great interest for London society, despite the relative smallness of the enterprise. The question of the climate in Virginia, the tempests there - that are also political tempests in the sense explained above, with their riots and a body politic close to anarchic failure - are not only of pertinence with regard to the uncommon climate far-off, but always also comment on the ‘common’ state of things at home in London. 3 Against this background the suggestion of a Protestant working-ethic as a solution to the climatic problems in Virginia, readable also as a political comment on quarrels ‘at home,’ may even lose some of its oddity. 3 The reign of James I, and especially the first decade of the seventeenth century, was a time of political tension: the religious quarrels between Protestants and Catholics as well as James’ problematic relation to parliament proved a continual source of instability and conflict. ‘Mutiny’ and ‘upheaval’ was not foreign to this era: the so-called ‘Gunpowder Plot’ stands emblematically for a whole series of religiously motivated ‘plots’ against James and the Protestant rule that shaped this decade. J OHANNES U NGELENK 98 It is not a coincidence that Shakespeare borrows this ‘colonial’ tempest, this uncommon “unmercifull tempest, compound of so many contrary and divers Nations” for reflecting on his own theatrical practice. Historically speaking, Shakespearean theatre emerges as a sister of English overseas colonial enterprises. The two might also in fact be related in some respects, as cultural, even as ‘political’ practices. Formulated more carefully, they may be invested with a similar, a very complex cultural, perhaps even ‘political,’ or at least ‘critical’ function. They provide the English public with a new space for experience and reflection, a space that is characterized by its uncommon intensity. With theatrical as well as colonial experience, it is the characteristic intensity that on the one hand differentiates it from our own ‘common’ reality and on the other hand brings about a new political perspective on what seems familiar and ‘common’ - without giving answers, always ambiguous but still troubling, unsettling, opening up questions. If we are to believe in what Shakespeare’s Tempest tells us metatheatrically about the climate of the island theatre, there is no need to trot around the world, to expose our bodies to all kinds of climatic experiences. For experiences that are brought home and are made to circulate in order to be reflected on and discussed, amongst other issues, about the state of things ‘at home,’ there was an island available, a Globe on the banks of the Thames, a hyper-space of climate and processes of temperance, not different from our own reality, but a more ‘delicate’ staging of the world between Paradise - and Hell. Works Cited “Climate.” Def. 1.a. The Oxford English Dictionary. 3 rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Counseil for Virginia. A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia with a Confutation of Such Scandalous Reports as Haue Tended to the Disgrace of So Worthy an Enterprise. London, 1610. Dryden, John and William Davenant. The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island. London, 1670. Gillies, John. “Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque.” ELH 53.4 (1986). 673-707. Hakluyt, Richard. The Principall Nauigations, Voiages and Discoueries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Ouer Land. London, 1589. Höfele, Andreas. “Raising Tempests: Religion, Science, and the Magic of Theatre.” Magic, Science, Technology, and Literature. Ed. Jarmila Mildorf, Hans Ulrich Seeber, and Martin Windisch. Berlin: Lit, 2006. 25-38. Jourdain, Silvester. A Discovery of the Barmudas. London, 1610. Montaigne, Michel de. The Essayes. Trans. John Florio. London, 1603. The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 99 “Plantation.” Def. 2.b. The Oxford English Dictionary . 3 rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes in Fiue Bookes. Vol. 4. 5 vols. London, 1625. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011. “Spirit.” The Oxford English Dictionary . 3 rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Strachey, William. “A True Reportory of the Wracke, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight.” Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Bookes. Ed. Samuel Purchas. London, 1625. 1734-58. Thomas, Thomas. Dictionarium Linguae Latinae Et Anglicanae. Cantebrigiae, 1587. Vaughan, Alden T. “William Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’ and Shakespeare: A Close Look at the Evidence.” Shakespeare Quarterly 59.3 (2008): 245-73. Vaughan, Virginia Mason and Alden T. Vaughan. “Introduction”. The Tempest. By William Shakespeare. Ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011. 1-138.