PROSPERO Being once perfected how to grant suits,
How to deny them, who t’advance and who
To trash for overtopping, new created
The creatures that were mine, I say, or changed ’em,
Or else new formed ’em; having both the key
Of officer and office, set all hearts i’th’ state
To what tune pleased his ear, that now he was
The ivy which had hid my princely trunk
And sucked my verdure out on’t. Thou attend’st not!
MIRANDA O, good sir, I do.
PROSPERO I pray thee, mark me. (1.2.79-88)
This is really getting down to the nitty-gritty of exposition, and it’s knotty, contingent stuff, quite hard to follow as the grammar and syntax twist and digress and delay. Miranda is a slyly performed audience-surrogate here, as Prospero repeatedly asks, are you listening? Are you really listening properly? It’s supremely confident writing, this, because it’s almost a parody of a clunky exposition, far too much tell and not enough show. It seems to be one of the games that Shakespeare plays in the late plays: how much being told can an audience tolerate, how much back-story? (Compare the similar, albeit less extreme openings of Winter’s Tale and, especially, Cymbeline, with the plunging into crisis of Hamlet, or Lear, or Othello.) This is a playwright who is teasing, and utterly assured, and showing off. Because this isn’t the opening scene, it’s 1.2: we’ve very much had the immersive crisis to end all crises, in the form of the eponymous tempest, and the shipwreck which turns out to have been staged, doubly, all along. But it’s not yet clear what this scene has to do with that…
What do we learn? A crash course in court politics and the dark arts of government: that being a monarch, a prince, a duke is about how to grant suits, how to give suitors, people seeking favours, what they ask for – or not. Who to show favour to, promote, and who to knock back for getting above themselves (over-proud courtiers are a recurrent gripe in books about government). Prospero’s brother Antonio learned these lessons very well, became perfect in them – and once he was, he took over all the people, supporters, counsellors, who had previously been Prospero’s creatures, his creations, loyal to him, made (and potentially unmade) by him and remade them into his own creatures. Antonio turned Prospero’s court and people against him. And there’s a neat little bit of wordplay: he had the key of officer and office, that is, he had control of both the people in charge, the chief courtiers and counsellors, and the office of duke, as if he had the key of a door. Keys are a sign of power, of officialdom, of control: the keys of papal authority; the keys of a housekeeper or porter; and also the sense of a key for cracking a code or cipher which is just starting to emerge at this time. But that key also slips into a musical conceit, because once Antonio is effectively in charge, it’s as if he retunes all hearts i’ th’ state– makes them dance to his tune, one might say, or forms Milan, its court and people, into an ensemble or a musical composition from which Prospero is excluded and which he can no longer control. (The Tempest is a play full of music.) And, most bitterly: the relationship between the brothers, Prospero and Antonio, should have been like a tree supporting a vine, a relationship of balance and symbiosis and mutuality. But instead Antonio has been like rampant ivy, choking the tree and sucking its verdure, its greenness, its power and vitality.
Miranda, you’re not listening! Yes, she is, she promises, and we’re reminded to keep listening too.
