Enter FERDINAND, and ARIEL, invisible, playing and singing.
ARIEL [Sings.] Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands;
Curtsied when you have, and kissed
The wild waves whist;
Foot it featly here and there,
And sweet sprites bear
The burden.
(burden dispersedly)
SPIRITS Hark, hark! Bow-wow,
The watch dogs bark, bow-wow.
ARIEL Hark hark, I hear,
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry cock a diddle dow. (1.2.376-387)
Um. This is the kind of song that always looks much trickier on the page than – one hopes – in performance. So, by way of diversion and delay: that stage direction. Thank you, Ralph Crane (we assume), scrivener or professional scribe to the King’s Men, who is generally assumed to have prepared the text of The Tempest for the printer, and who has a tendency to expand stage directions. Prospero did instruct Ariel to become invisible (to everyone except Prospero), when they reappeared as a sea-nymph – and so the assumption here has to be that Ariel is still dressed as a sea-nymph – and is therefore invisible. That’s the deal. The point is, Ferdinand can’t see them – but he can hear them, it will transpire. If – and what – Ariel plays will depend upon the skills of the actor, but given that they are singing as well, a pipe seems unlikely (unless they play and then sing), and a tabor (drum) probably too reminiscent of earlier fools, like Feste, a bit too rustic and casual. So a stringed instrument of some kind? If this were envisaged as being played indoors at the Blackfriars, a lute wouldn’t be out of the question, or even outdoors at the Globe. (In modern productions, a ukulele is not unlikely.) Ariel’s song, with its vague, yet evocative opening line – come unto these yellow sands – is a dance song, and the words which can look so odd on the page are mostly instructions to dancers – here, perhaps, Ferdinand, depending on whether the spirits appear or not. The dancers are asked to take hands, to curtsy (which can mean bow), and to kiss (common in country dancing) – and so the waves will be calmed and quieted, whist. This is the antithesis of the storm, and indeed Ariel the storm-maker: this is now a beach on which the waves play gently, no longer wild. Foot it featly: dance nimbly, gracefully, lightly. (Florizel to Perdita in Winter’s Tale: ‘When you do dance, I wish you | A wave o’th’ sea, that you might ever do | Nothing but that, move still, still so, | And own no other function’.) The waves and the dancers, whoever they are, are imagined as one. And sweet sprites bear the burden, that is, sing the refrain. They burden dispersedly because they don’t sing in unison, and they might not be grouped together on the stage, which is not surprising, given that they are singing Hark, hark! Bow-wow, a chorus of (tuneful?) dogs. (If they’re not visible, they could be under and behind the stage, like the mysterious music that plays in Antony and Cleopatra.) The effect might be less ridiculous than it appears on the page, but it may well still be comic – madrigals which include birdsong might be one parallel, and bow-wow is no sillier than falalalala. Shakespeare might be echoing himself in Cymbeline, whose most famous song ‘Hark, hark the lark’ is sung as a notably unsuccessful early morning greeting to the unmoved Innogen by the odious Cloten. Cloten could definitely described as a strutting chanticleer, a proud, even ridiculous rooster, but this could simply be the cock crowing to announce the arrival of Ferdinand, who can hear the music but not see Ariel or, presumably, the dancers. (Not impossible that the same actor played Cloten – whether or not he also doubled Posthumus, Cymbeline‘s sort-of not-very hero, as is often suggested – and Ferdinand. And almost certainly Florizel.) He almost arrives as if from the sea, washed up, shipwrecked, imagining himself alone, lost, and bereaved. (The effect is almost certainly not James Bond-like, however.)
