Scott F. Crider
Scott F. Crider has published extensively on the works of William Shakespeare and maintains the English Renaissance as one of his major research interests.
More About this Author
Scott F. Crider has published extensively on the works of William Shakespeare and maintains the English Renaissance as one of his major research interests.
More About this Author
Scott F. Crider has published extensively on the works of William Shakespeare and maintains the English Renaissance as one of his major research interests.
More About this Author
Prospero and Ariel, Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” William Hamilton, 1797
Ours is an age of fury. Shakespeare’s The Tempest understands why that is the case, and why and how we might remedy it. Let me begin with the play’s end. We know that the Lord’s Prayer was on Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote The Tempest because its Epilogue so clearly alludes to one part of it. Having arranged the engagement of his daughter to his enemy’s son, abandoned his magical powers, and forgiven his enemies, Prospero speaks directly to the reading or play-going audience:
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free. (13–20)1
The final couplet of the Epilogue is a clear allusion to the petition for forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew: “And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors” (6:12).2 I will return to the importance of the Epilogue in the play later, but for now I assume that the allusion lets me read the play by means of the prayer, and the prayer by means of the play, in order to understand forgiveness and why this difficult virtue is so important to the flourishing life. Between strife or war and harmony or peace must come forgiveness, we will see. Shakespeare’s play helps us see why and how.
I will use the play to focus on these questions: What needs to be forgiven; what needs to be done to forgive and be forgiven; what endangers forgiveness; how do we forgive; and what results from forgiveness? But let’s first examine the prayer’s petition for forgiveness.
The Lord’s Prayer is a central text within the Sermon on the Mount, itself the central text of Christian ethics.3 Of the ethical traditions available to Shakespeare, Christian ethics would have to be a contender, and the ideal place to go for that is the Sermon on the Mount and its prayer. There, Jesus explains that one should never pray in order to be seen doing so, and praying in a “closet” (a closed room, where no one can see you praying) will help discourage hypocrisy (6:6). He then prays the prayer that his disciples and the crowd are to pray. Shakespeare probably attended the King’s New School, and if he finished his schooling, he would have learned enough to translate the prayer’s petition from Greek; he certainly knew enough to do so from Latin; most Shakespeareans assume his English Bible was the Geneva:4
Our father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done even in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the
kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever, Amen. (6:9–13)
Here is the petition for forgiveness: “And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors” (6:12). It seeks forgiveness of our debts—a metaphor for sins, or what Shakespeare’s Epilogue calls “crimes”—“as,” or in the same spirit as, we forgive others their debts to (or sins or crimes against) us. The forgiving are forgiven. Because this mandate to forgive comes in a prayer by Jesus, it establishes a mimetic reciprocity between what we hope for ourselves from God and what we do for other human beings. This reciprocal relationship between horizontal and vertical (human and divine) dispositions within forgiveness is confirmed throughout the sermon and the gospel itself.5 In fact, immediately following the prayer, Jesus repeats and augments the petition for forgiveness, with the metaphor for sin no longer “debt” but now “trespass”:
For if ye do forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
But if ye do not forgive men their trespasses, no more will your Father forgive you your trespasses. (6:14–15)
This repetition emphasizes forgiveness, thereby implying that the petition to forgive is the most important one in the prayer. The central ethical teaching of the Sermon, Matthew, and Christianity itself—the double mandate to love God and neighbor (Matthew 22:34–40)—is given greater precision here: forgiveness is the most important form of the most important Christian virtue, love of neighbor. Whether or not this ethic is divinely sanctioned is a question in the play in a way it is not, of course, in Matthew.6
Shakespeare liked the petition so much he entitled a play by it—Measure for Measure—a play that itself interrogates the nature and complexities of that reciprocity, including the question of the ethics’ source, human or divine. Before we consider whether forgiveness is divinely sanctioned or only humanly given in The Tempest, let us, for now, return to forgiveness in that play.
What needs to be forgiven? A serious injustice that arouses righteous indignation. As Prospero, once Duke of Milan, explains in his exposition (1.2.53–186), twelve years previously, his brother Antonio usurped his rule with the help of Prospero’s enemy Alonzo, Duke of Naples, and exiled both him and Miranda, his infant daughter, endangering their lives by putting them out to sea in a “rotten carcass” of a boat, with neither sail nor mast. Through good luck and the ameliorating influence of Prospero’s counselor, Gonzalo, who gave them what they needed, they survived the harsh conditions of their sea journey and the isle where they ended up and now reside. In the next scene, Antonio will confirm the principal accusation (2.1.271–275).
The degree of Antonio’s injustice is great, a sin or crime (“debt” or “trespass”) indebting him to his brother: ethically, Antonio stole from his brother and indirectly attempted to murder both him and Miranda by unjustly exiling them from Prospero’s own kingdom. (He exiled them because Prospero was too popular for him to assassinate them openly.) Politically, Antonio is a rebel against a rightful ruler, albeit a confessedly negligent one. In sum, his soul is vicious, and his rule illegitimate.
Father and daughter use strong moral language to condemn Antonio, expressing their indignation at the perceived injustice. We see here a confirmation of Aristotle’s point that emotions are cognitive, helping us to judge appropriately. As he puts it in the Rhetoric, “The emotions are those things through which, by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgments.”7 Their indignation is not only an emotion but also a judgment. Prospero says Antonio’s nature was “evil” (1.2.94), and his “falsehood” exploited his brother’s “trust” (95–96). Hearing her father’s account, Miranda says,
I should sin
To think but nobly of my grandmother;
Good wombs have borne bad sons. (117–119)
Good manners may be sufficient to overlook a microaggression, but the radical injustice that arouses deep anger requires something greater: forgiveness. That one brother betrays another evokes the specter of Cain and Abel—Shakespeare’s favorite biblical allusion.8
What needs to be done to forgive and be forgiven? In order to forgive, one must sometimes acknowledge one’s own involvement in the injustice at hand. Prospero acknowledges just this in his own case:
I thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind
With that which, but by being so retired,
O’er-prized all popular rate, in my false brother,
Awaked an evil nature, and my trust,
Like a good parent, did beget of him
A falsehood…. (1.2.89–94)
The syntax above might make us miss the confession, so allow me to straighten it out: “I awaked an evil nature in my brother.” Injustice against us may result from our own injustice; after all, Prospero neglected his political duties to undertake his private studies, putting upon his brother duties not rightfully his own; he acknowledges, if circuitously, this tragic error to his daughter.9
To be forgiven, though, one must acknowledge one’s moral culpability for the injustice and suffer accordingly. Antonio suffers, but without acknowledging his fault. When he tries to persuade Sebastian to murder his brother Alonzo and usurp his throne, as Antonio did Prospero’s, Sebastian wonders about Antonio’s conscience: “But for your conscience?” Antonio’s psychopathic response is chilling:
Ay, sir, where lies that? If ’twere a kibe [a sore on the heel]
’Twould put me to my slipper, but I feel not
This deity in my bosom. (2.1.276–279)
This amoral vaunt may be a bluff since Antonio—along with Alonzo and Sebastian—does seem to have a conscience: Prospero, in Act 3, has Ariel pretend to be a harpy, tantalizing them with food and threatening them with hounds, and when Ariel then accuses them of the “foul deed” of Prospero’s overthrow as “three men of sin,” Alonzo admits that the purgatorial experience did “bass [or utter] my trespass” (3.3.72, 53, 99, emphasis mine). Though they do not utter a similar acknowledgment of guilt, both Sebastian and Antonio flee with Alonzo. Gonzalo diagnoses their condition, which may indicate only his own decency, but it helps confirm that they may be genuinely suffering of remorse:
All three of them are desperate: their great guilt,
Like poison given to work a great time after,
Now ’gins to bite their spirits. (105–107)
Prospero is preparing them for his forgiveness by forcing them to acknowledge their injustice.
But that forgiveness is not a foregone conclusion. Prospero may very well revenge himself upon them. He certainly can do so since, as he notes himself, “They now are in my power” (90). What endangers forgiveness? Anger on the part of the one injured; on the part of the injurer, failure to acknowledge moral culpability or to suffer for it. Anger, viewed through an Aristotelian lens, is both a powerful and a paradigmatic emotion. As he explains in the Rhetoric, “Let anger be [defined as] desire, accompanied by [mental and physical] distress, for apparent retaliation because of an apparent slight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or those near to one” (2.2.1). Anger, which begins in an appropriate response to injustice, tends toward a desire for revenge, and because that desire can lead us to vengeance beyond the measure of the injustice, it makes mutual forgiveness difficult, if not impossible. As Hamlet shows, the desire for revenge can lead to further injustice. But Prospero restrains his desire for revenge, and by doing so becomes calm, calmness being Aristotle’s countervailing emotion to anger in the Rhetoric (2.3.1-3). In a very fine production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which I had the good fortune to see live, Simon Russell Beale’s Prospero let out an ungodly sound in between his anger and his forgiveness, enacting the human exertion of letting anger go.10
Miranda and Ferdinand, Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Angelica Kauffman, 1782
The answer to whether Alonzo and Antonio deserve to be forgiven is complex: Alonzo appears to deserve it, since he has shown genuine remorse and suffered accordingly, under the belief that his son was drowned in recompense for his foul deed against Prospero (3.3.96–102). Antonio is more indeterminate: He has acknowledged that he was unjust but claimed a quiet conscience, and his purgatorial torment may have been only suffering, not the particular suffering of remorse. When Prospero does forgive him—“You, brother mine, that entertained ambition, / Expelled remorse and nature…. / I do forgive thee, / Unnatural though thou art” (5.1.75–79)—Antonio does not respond verbally, and he has only one, completely unrelated remark in the rest of the play (5.1.265–266). I leave to the side whether it is prudent of Prospero to leave Antonio forgiven and free, given that Prospero no longer has his powers and that Ferdinand and Miranda may not be fully equipped for the machinations of Italian politics. Alonzo is ready for harmony, but Antonio may very well not be. If so, Prospero’s—and our—hope for the power of forgiveness may be excessive, but it is not necessarily altogether foolish.
How do we forgive? By overcoming our justifiable anger through pity. The moment when Prospero does this comes in a pivotal scene between him and Ariel. Ariel tells him that, were he to see his enemies suffering, his “affections / Would become tender” (5.1.17–18). Prospero questions the prediction, so Ariel explains, “Mine would, sir, were I human” (19). Prospero’s next lines represent a man turning from anger toward forgiveness through pity:
And mine shall.
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself
(One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they) be kindlier moved than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury
Do I take part. The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go, release them, Ariel. (5.1.20–30)
He notes that Ariel, as a purely spiritual being, pities them, not sharing their condition. Aristotle’s definition of pity is helpful here: “Let pity be [defined as] a certain pain at an apparently destructive or painful event happening to one who does not deserve it and which a person might expect himself or one of his own to suffer” (2.8.1). Leaving aside the question of merited and unmerited suffering, one can see that pity requires shared vulnerability. Chastised by the example of pity for human suffering from a Spirit who cannot share such suffering, Prospero commands himself that he pity those who wronged him, forsake his anger, and forgive. Through the exercise of reason, he chooses the “rarer action” of virtue rather than vengeance. Reason mediates emotional judgment and is deeply involved not only in intellectual virtue but also in moral virtue.
Does Prospero forgive through his own agency or through spiritual intervention—through merit or through grace, if you will? Perhaps something of the two. He chooses to forgive, yet he does so under the persuasive example of a spiritual being. Ariel’s exact character is difficult to determine. He is throughout referred to as a “Spirit,” so in that sense Ariel is akin to Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even so, his name is an allusion to Isaiah 29.1, where “Ariel” is a name for Jerusalem. Is Ariel an English, pagan fairy, or a Judeo-Christian angel of some sort? On so many of our most important questions, Shakespeare is ambiguous. Unapologetically Christian readings of the play read the play’s moving act of forgiveness as gospel sanctioned; others are less convinced.11 Be that as it may, this act of forgiveness comes about under the influence of a supernatural entity.