John G. Demaray, Shakespeare and the Spectacle ofStrangeness. The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998; xvi+174 pp.; ISBN: 0820702846 (hbk.); LC call no.: PR2833.D46

 

Shakespeare's last major play foregrounds a logic of episodes typical of the Restoration drama, whose untraditional stage harbors forth a new-fashioned dialectic of theatrical representation. Thus, any coherent reconstitution of the Folio's production is equally bound to inquire upon the play's symbolism and to also determine its political relevance within its original settings. So is Demaray's reconstruction, a study that challenges the classical interpretations of The Tempest with a provocative revision of its 17th-century historical and theatrical background.

Demaray's central argument is that, in composing The Tempest, Shakespeare was closing his accounts with the Elisabethan stage, implicitly saying his farewell to the themes of his early and mid-life writing.Instead of partaking from his own glossary of names and actions, Old Will deliberately turns to building a new "theatre of strangeness" illustrated with the new thematic requisites of the Restoration theatre. In evoking Europe's theatrical heritage, such as the romance or the pastoral drama, The Tempest's structural hybridity is a telling proof of the transformations that Renaissance literature was to know in James' England. As a good Neo-Historicist, Demaray points this out several times. Resolutely, his careful reconstitution of the play's milieu stands against impressionist interpretations that are often triggered by the play's misleading esoteric artifice. In the book's Introduction, the author emphatically disavows the postcolonial critique's inclination towards ideological reduction, one that makes Prospero into the epitome of the oppressor, turns Caliban into the centre-victim of the play, and takes Shakespeare for an anti-colonial writer. Conversely, Demaray acknowledges that "the sweeping and very original socio-political-occultist-religious symbolism of The Tempest... can be seen to encompass certain oblique or implied New World references that in text and subtext give further dimension to the play" (7), without, however, abandoning his analysis to the excesses of postcolonialist determinism.

Upon qualifying The Tempest as "a theatrical form of transition" originating in the symbolic reservoir of the Renaissance, Demaray proceeds to give to the First Folio a proper historical contextualization. The rich critical apparatus includes an apt archaeological reconstitution of the epoch. At James' court, The Tempest was first performed in early November 1611, in the Masquing House, "just after the All Hallows Eve, when demonic spirits where believed to roam the earth" (4). The second documented performance took place in front of the same king at Whitehall, in May 1613. Demaray reminds us the reason for which the royal entourage selected The Tempest: Princess Elisabeth's wedding to Frederic Elector of Palatine, a prince well-known in the epoch for his occultist views, that eventually came at odds with James' puritan ideas. Political circumstances is in this case telling for the origin of Shakespeare's aesthetic of the performance, that, being destined to furnish a symbolic allegory of power, accommodates at least four different dramatic genres: the encomiastic Triumph, the European Intermezzo ballet, the pastoral romance, and the English courtly Masque. No less than the erudite symbolism, the original scenic indications (in England Demaray studied Inigo Jones' ground plans and costumes) place The Tempest's scene of choice in Whitehall's select environment, rather than the Blackfriars' and Globe's popular grades. Such annotation was to give James' throne a privileged perspective over Caliban's island, and to analogically make the monarch into Prospero's historical alter-ego. Also, the unprecedented "levitations" of Juno's or Ariel's ethereal masks were shown, which required sophisticated scenic machines, and relied solely on the viewer's astonishment, carried away within the iconographic cosmos of the play - as if by magic. As Demaray proves in his critical reconstruction, the representational techniques first imagined by Shakespeare in The Tempest are to be understood within the greater project of the epoch, which drew upon the splendor of a re-United Britain, absorbed in the project of showing its restored grandeur to the whole world.
The final chapters of the book deal with the hermeneutics of The Tempest; they also contextualize the novelties of the Shakespearian aesthetic within the style of the emerging Restoration heroic drama, always equipped to sacrifice the dramatic force for the sake of stylization. The Tempest's hieroglyphics, the author says in the concluding pages of his study, inaugurated "a work of interspersed spectacles of strangeness and order, a play 'hinged' upon magic, replete with ritualistic action, [...] and climaxed by the 'revelation' and reconciliation of central characters in a new kind of dramatized Spectacle Triumph" (136).
Notwithstanding, the formula of a representative Triumph is given at the Whitehall in the form of an exclusive as if: Prospero's island is both a fiction meant to make visible a new strategy of power for the ruler's "third eye" and, more importantly, a private theatre for the aristocrats, with no other angles for public participation except for the remote gallery. The Tempest's representational effect is meant to embarrass the viewer for trespassing in the sovereign's magic atelier: the intrigue refuses the spectator any possibility of identification with the shipwrecked sailors in the side scenes. Nor would it allow the spectator's identification with Prospero's meta-discourse. The play articulates itself as a comedy of manners at the margins and as a drama of mysteries at the center. The implausibility of Prospero's apparitions could only amplify his mystery as a Hermetic potentate: to the aristocratic beholder, the play furnishes a dramatic model for a renewed mythology of power, based on the remote management of symbolic prerogatives. Demaray's unfinished thought hinges on the political axiology of representation at the turn of the seventeenth century. Alongside, The Tempest may represent far more than a performance of strangeness, literally a new genre, where the Aristotelian postulates are deliberately subverted by Shake-speare's ingenuity. Demaray pays a great deal of attention to Prospero's magic prerogatives, given at the expense of action throughout the play. Moreover, he explicitly connects what he calls the emerging "theatre of strangeness" to a political tendency in the composition - that he attributes to the festive destiny of the play's initial performances.
What Demaray does not say loudly enough, is that The Tempest should be also regarded as a turning point in the evolution of the Western political ima-ginary. Thus is, beyond the introduction of allegorical Masquerades in the text, Shakespeare's eccentric manner to effect the desired reconciliation between the remote parties on stage and to bring under the Duke of Milan's magic umbrella divergent intrigues that otherwise would have been devoid of veracity. What Demaray seems to completely disregard is that Prospero, in embodying two polar voices of the Greek tragedy - Tyresias and Oedipus - unifies narrative functions, those of the prophet and the king, that significantly opposed each other in the classical drama. In linking the traditionally divergent conventions of magic ritual and tragic drama, Shakespeare's last major play is built on a modern and esoteric logic of episodes typical of the theatre of absolution, whose rhetoric address the symbolic needs of political-management-at-a-distance. Hypnosis-centered, the social construction of reality envisaged by the Duke of Milan prefigures the scaffolding of the absolutist monarchies in Europe, together with this period's under-standing of the ways in which collective desires and certainties can be programmed. Yet, The Tempest inaugurates more than a theatre of the sovereign's enlightened justice of absolution: it brings on stage the futuribles, the showings of a representational spaces where future itself can be programmed and channeled through the art of politics. These are the half-answers that one starts grasping upon reading Demaray's condensed work, whose second exposure through New-Historicist lenses would deserve a much welcomed coda.
 
Andrei Zlatescu
University of Toronto