This conversation prompted me to go back and reread Kott's essays on
The Tempest, in _The Bottom Translations_. I'd forgotten how
interesting they are; among other things he unearths the long
forgotten relationship between The Tempest and The Aeneid. Kott's
reading of politics of The Tempest is situated in his wide reading of
contemporary Elizabethan documents (well, he seems to have read
everything); and his understanding of theatre is inflected through
Bakhtin. It's a bleak interpretation of the play, which he reads as
ultimately a bitter renunciation of the power of art to change
anything. I thought I'd post a couple of snippets, in case anyone
else is interested.
He talks of the play's "brutal dramatury", in discussing how often
Prospero is called "Tyrant", and how Ariel and the spirits transform
into hunting dogs after the masque. (This made me think, also, of
how the Conquistadors used mastiffs to hunt Indians, tearing them to
pieces).
"In this brutal dramaturgy arguments are actions and oppositions.
The evocation of a utopian community ends in an attempt to murder the
sleeping rulers; the vision of a harvest without human toil ends in a
manhunt. By the end of act 4, Prospero's plantation [which Kott
explains earlier is a new word in English vocabulary, used for the
first time by Shakespeare in this play] has become Circe's island
where Odysseus' companions were turned into hogs. But this island of
the new Circe appears at the end of the Renaissance, when the "brave
new world" turns out to be a repetition of all the crimes and madness
of the old. ... The dramatic innovation of The Tempest is to set the
old feudal drama on one of the islands of the New World. Not only do
the great myths of paradise lost and the golden age come to the
"uninhabited island" [terra nullis] but Shakespeare's tragic themes
of the Lord's annointed and the usurper are reenacted here.
...
Macbeth and Hamlet are more cruel than The Tempest. King Lear is a
tragedy without hope: the world has fallen to pieces and will never
grow back together again. Yet The Tempest has always seemed to me
the saddest of Shakespeare's plays. There is in it, even more than
Doctor Faustus, the bitter taste of lost hope. There is a
metaphysical uneasiness in both of these dramas that eludes
interpretation and is difficult to name. Yet one cannot free oneself
from Prospero's despair any more than one can elude the memory of
clinical death. No one can avoid reading The Tempest as the story of
his own defeat."
(From The Tempest, or Repetition)
Later in the same essay, Kott discusses how real time and dramatic
time intersect in The Tempest, and the significance of its
neoplatonic numerology (three and 12, which recur constantly), some
of the symbology of the teatro mundi, the theatre of the world, and
of the play's repetitions, both verbal and actions, which he says
work like music. All of which is most interesting: but of most
significance is the three hours during which the play takes place, as
a time of transformation between the past and the future, both
literally and metaphorically in the play.
"In this theatrical time, which suddenly and unexpectedly becomes the
time of the spectators, the entire past in the play is both the
history of the world and the past of the audience, from the journeys
of Aeneas to the voyage to the Burmudas and Virginia. Prospero's
future ('and time/goes upright with his carriage") is the future of
the audience, our future and our own fate, chosen or imposed.
In the epilogue, in its sudden narrowing, as in the stresso of a
fugue, all the themes return. But now the signs are literal. When
the storm of the prologue ends, the scene changes into a "bare
island". In the epilogue, when Prospero speaks directly to and
perhaps even walks down into the audience, the island changes back
into a bare stage."
Well, this is already too long, and leaves far too much out.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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