PROSPERO [aside] I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life. The minute of their plot
Is almost come. [to the Spirits] Well done. Avoid, no more!
[Spirits depart.]
FERDINAND [to Miranda] This is strange. Your father’s in some passion
That works him strongly.
MIRANDA Never till this day
Saw I him touched with anger so distempered! (4.1.139-145)
We might think of the strange hollow and confused noise into which the music collapses as being like the needle scratching across vinyl on a turntable, or like the terrible screech of car brakes as the play unexpectedly halts and changes direction. It’s a bit … artificial? Prospero, the great mastermind of everything, interrupting his own spectacular show because he forgot about something, that something being a conspiracy to murder him? But actually, the psychology of the moment, and the astonishing lyricism which is about to unfold, means that we will probably not notice or at least overlook and forgive the massively clunky plot swerve. More charitably, Prospero has been so carried away by the beauty of his own creation, and by the happiness of Miranda and Ferdinand, that he’s genuinely forgotten about the assassination plot. Whatever, it all has to change, and quickly, because the minute of the plot is almost come; this is a play which keeps time, and which is obsessed with calibrating its passage. In the heat of his anger and anxiety, Prospero describes Caliban unequivocally as a beast, behaving in an inhuman way, if not actually an animal; his conspiracy is foul, and Prospero implies that he is the ringleader. (We might not be so sure, seeing the selfishness and cynicism of Trinculo and Stephano, and their willingness to exploit him. The play, I think, leaves it nicely ambiguous.) There can be something touching, perhaps, in Prospero’s care to thank the Spirits as they leave the stage, mid dance, dejectedly: Well done! Avoid – go away (literally make the place empty, as in evacuate) No more of your celebratory dancing, of the music and singing and the goddesses in peacock-drawn chariots and rhyming couplets and haute couture. The kids are touchingly concerned: your father’s really upset about something, says Ferdinand; yes, says Miranda, I’ve never seem him look so troubled, so angry. So in this handful of lines their relationships, old and new, are deftly contoured. Ferdinand cares about Prospero as well as Miranda, and is concerned. Miranda has never seen Prospero lose his temper quite like this. And this concern for the feelings of others is what frames the scene’s next movement, as Prospero tries to explain to them what has just happened, and why. Deep breath…
For Tempest spectacle of a different kind, and partly as a reminder that opera is a descendant of the masque: here is the trailer for the Vienna State Opera production of Thomas Adès’s opera The Tempest, directed by Robert Lepage… (Adès doesn’t set Shakespeare’s text). An image is below; the same production also played at the Met.
