Posterity and Prosperity: Genesis in The Tempest

1.

The Bible opens with the image of a stormy sea: "In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth, the earth was without form and void, with darkness over the face of the abyss, and a mighty wind that swept over the surface of the waters."(1:1-3) Upon this buzzing blooming confusion appropriately called "Tohuvavohu" in the original Hebrew, the speech of the creator first imposes meaning: the polarities of light and dark, day and night, sea and land. Shakespeare's first words in the First Folio are: "A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard." The universe of his collected plays comes into being as confused and desperate shouts hardly separable from the deafening roar of wind and sea out of which they arise. In the next scene a magical creator appears to give them meaning. Though the parallel may be accidental, it points to some essential similarities between The Book of Genesis and The Tempest.

Both are cosmic creation myths, stories of the emergence of complex, articulated being from nothingness or chaos. Just as the Bible's God makes the world he populates and then interacts with it, Prospero's world begins as the product of his magical utterances and is peopled by his own offspring, along with the demons over whom he has taken control. This is at least strongly suggested when he explains to his daughter that the "direful spectacle of the wreck" which she and the audience have observed with horror, "I have with such provision of mine art/So safely ordered that there is...not so much perdition as an hair...betid to any creature in the vessel.."(1.2.26-31) Not only has the cataclysmic event been completely under his control, but his reassurance is phrased in the words of Paul--"Remember not a hair of your heads will be lost,"(Acts 27:34)--and Jesus: "...even the hairs of your head have all been counted. Have no fear..."(Luke 12:7)

Creation myths, like the Big Bang theory, tell of the beginning of time and usually imply its Apocalyptic end. Though the notion of a start and finish of time is difficult to imagine for reality, it makes clear sense when applied to stories, which are narrative representations of reality structured by beginnings middles and endings. In the Bible's last book, where chronicle dissolves into vision, time folds up into eternity. In the Bible's first book, eternity unfolds into time as its stories progress from the opening demarkation of day and night to the creation of matter, life, consciousness, and then via Adam's dream, to the birth of Eve, the activation of human freedom and the beginnings of family, society and history.

The Tempest, whose title signifies time in Latin, also progresses into temporality from a beginning which is both the timeless chaos of the storm and an Edenic preserve where father and child have remained in idyllic stasis. "The hour's now come..." says Prospero, for him to retrieve the story of his past from "the dark backward and abyss of time." From then on he continually watches the clock. His daughter's awakening to the temporal process begins with repeated lapses into sleep, but leads to a strong sense of her previous lineage and her future destiny. As they both become involved with the many characters swept up on the shore of their island, their story merges with a historical chronicle of two large ducal dynasties. By the end of both works, as the creation comes to maturity, the extratemporal creators are absorbed into time. God's role as provider, teacher and governor is passed to the human leader Joseph; Prospero divests himself of magic powers and takes on the mortality he shares with those he has ruled. As time unfolds in a creation myth, so does space. In Genesis the setting expands from the pastoral confines of the Garden of Eden through the Canaanite desert to the epic vistas of the Egyptian empire. In The Tempest the setting expands from the domestic compound of Prospero's cell to the island's varied landscapes and then to all of Mediterranean Europe.

Situated at the beginning of a body of stories, creation myths are seminal. Just as Genesis functions as a seed containing the germinal patterns of most later stories in the Bible, so The Tempest, it has often been observed, contains in concentrated form many of the plots and themes of Shakespeare's other Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. These seminal elements deal directly with fundamental human functions--what Northrop Frye calls "primary concerns": "food and drink, along with related bodily needs; sex; property (i.e. money, possessions, shelter, clothing, and everything that constitutes property in the sense of what is 'proper' to one's life,) liberty of movement. The general object of primary concern is expressed in the Biblical phrase 'life more abundant.'" Another word for this is "prosperity."

The creation at the opening of Genesis leads to an ongoing process of procreation denoted by its cognate word, "generation." Generations result from the effects of time, mortality and continuity, manifested as the aging and dying of individuals and the passage of their genetic material to children. J.P. Fokkelman observes that the first book of the Bible's "overriding concern [is] life-survival-offspring-fertility-continuity." Generation is thus linked to family, the seminal cultural institution. The recurrent recording of genealogies in Genesis reflects the theme of family in the accompanying narratives. The "project" that Prospero has long prepared and that he sets in motion at the opening of the play also centers upon founding a chosen family. Like Genesis' God, as the story concludes, he retreats from absolute rule to limited guidance, from creator to procreator, from parent to grandparent, while the next generation advances from children to progenitors. Both God and Prospero bequeath their descendants a promise that temporal evolution is progress, that posterity will inherit prosperity, or "life more abundant." But the promise is conditional because the continuity of generation is unpredictable, the outcome not of a preordained plan but of the struggle for existence.

A creation myth represents genesis at several levels. The myth must both contain and be contained by the originating events it records. The creator it describes is prior to the creation, but also part of it, insofar as he is created by the text which describes him. The creator God therefore must be both the story's protagonist and its author. In its later passages and commentaries the Bible draws attention to this dimension of its opening. "In the beginning was the Word" writes the Evangelist John. The first midrashic comment on the first word of Genesis states that God created Wisdom, meaning the Scripture itself, before he made the world. Psalm 139 implies that his book is a script that exists before it is performed: "Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them."(14-16)

Likewise, there are reasons to believe that the character Prospero is meant to be the author of the script of The Tempest in which he appears. It's hinted at repeatedly within the text--by his proprietory anxiety about each scene, by his explicit role as author of plays within the play, by his farewell to his book in the last act, and by his direct address to reader and audience in the epilogue. This is a central conception of Peter Greenaway's film production, Prospero's Books, which intercuts images of turbulent water with images of a quill pen inscribing the first words of the text and which assigns all the characters' speeches to the voice of Prospero sounding them out as he writes. That this character should be construed both as God and as author seems appropriate to a playwright's playful reflection upon Biblical creation.

The process of growth, articulation and proliferation through time described in Genesis seems to govern its own development as a literary narrative. It begins with the single voice of an author constructing the natural universe in accordance with a simple preordained plan. But after the creation of human characters in his own image, the story takes on a life of its own. It seems to reproduce itself down the generations from Adam to Joseph, evolving from primal myth into longer, more complex, even novelistic units, as if itself driven by an inner principle of elaboration allowing the future to grow freely and unpredictably like an improvisation out of the past while the author's presence recedes and disappears. The same kind of structural change can be discerned in The Tempest, through the increasing length and dramatic complexity of scenes as the play proceeds. It's also highlighted in Greenaway's decision to give the characters their own voices once Prospero abjures his magic powers.

2.

Prospero's retrospective exposition of past events in the second scene of The Tempest,(1.2.1-374) corresponds to the section labelled by the editors of the New English Bible as "The Beginnings of History."(Genesis 2:5-11:10) The protagonist and chief speaker in these sections is not the calm and benevolent creator who fashions the world with words but one locked in violent struggle with subjects who rebel and threaten him The primary concern of these stories is basic survival, which is marginal in the early conditions of a state of nature. This image of the creator may derive from the widely dispersed Near Eastern mythical figure of the conqueror-colonist who first brought the world into being by defeating monsters: "Was it not you who hacked the Rahab in pieces and ran the dragon through? Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great abyss and made the ocean depths a path for the ransomed?"(Isaiah 51:51:10, also Psalms 74:12-17)

In Genesis his antagonists are the ambitious Eve in league with the serpent, who convinces credulous Adam to steal forbidden fruit, Cain, a jealous and murderous brother, the violent contemporaries of Noah affiliated with offspring of the sons of god and the daughters of men, and the aspiring inhabitants of Babel who want to make a name for themselves by building a tower to heaven. In The Tempest, Prospero tells Miranda how his lack of vigilance "...in my false brother awaked an evil nature"(1.2.92-3), who then "...new created/The creatures that were mine, I say, or changed them,/or else new formed them"(1.2.81-2) so that in league with Alonso he took control of the state. Prospero also recalls the island's beastly earlier ruler, Sycorax, and the revolt of her son Caliban, its primitive inhabitant whose brutish nature he had attempted to elevate until the monster sought to retake control by mating with Prospero's daughter and overthrowing his rule.

The ruler punishes the rebels, indulging a vengeful rage and threatening to undo his own acts of creation with reversions to disorder. God drives Adam and Eve out of the garden he planted for them into a barren landscape, he sends Cain wandering, and he returns the cosmos to chaos with the Flood, a forerunner of other tempests he unleashes against those he wants to discipline--at the Red Sea, on the way to Tarsis, at Galilee, and in the final days. He also creates a mental tempest when he renders the universal human language into a babble of incomprehensible dialects. Prospero reestablishes his dominance as "A God of Power"(1.2.10) and "a prince of power"(1.2.55), by throwing Caliban out of his home, forcing him to live by the sweat of his brow, and reducing the language that he taught him into profitless cursing, by repeatedly storming at Ariel that he'll be returned to the oak that imprisoned him, and by tormenting his countrymen with the prolonged ordeal of death by drowning.

The horror of that ordeal is vividly conveyed in one of the Bible's longest episodes, the description of flood waters rising and destroying all life on earth.(7:1-23) This horror is relieved by an equally lively and extended description of the of the chosen remnant's salvation, with its anxious waiting, its raven, dove and olive branch, and its account of debarkation onto dry land.(7:24-8:22) God seals that experience with a statement of regret and a vow to all living things never again to send such destruction (8:21) and marks it with the rainbow to forge a link between heaven and earth.(9:13-14) Prospero likewise relents and shows his mercy as an agent of deliverance, first to Miranda, in the words cited earlier, eventually to all the victims of the shipwreck whom he spares from drowning and other torments, and finally to Ariel and Caliban whom he frees from slavery. Upon sparing Ferdinand and Miranda from his rage in the fourth act, like Noah's God, Prospero presents them with the spectacle of a rainbow and a blessing of fertility.

3.

The Tower of Babel story in chapter 11 marks the end of a major structural division in the Book of Genesis. It corresponds to the shift from Prospero's narration of past events to the beginning of new activity that occurs with entrance of Ferdinand at 1.2.375 in The Tempest. In the next section of both works, the creator moves partly into the background, still retaining control, but no longer the only protagonist. He shows less raw power than in the earlier sections, and behaves in a more deliberate, controlled manner. The narrative units change from short choppy self-contained stories to an interconnected continuous sequence of events. Rather than creating, destroying and recreating by trial and error, the ruler begins to work by breeding, conditioning, and teaching, using longer intervals of time to improve his offspring through the process of evolution. The means of creation changes from magic powers to sexual reproduction. In this section human figures come forward and take on individual, differentiated and self-motivated character, but the "primary concern" most emphasized shifts from personal survival to survival of the family through generation.

The stories of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which occupy chapters 11 through 36 of Genesis, involve both God and human in procreating the one family which will bring forth the tribes, the nation and ultimately the empire of the "chosen" or genetically selected people whose story is told in the later books of the Hebrew Bible. One method of generation, appropriate to their early herding culture, is inbreeding. God distinguishes his preferred line of descent with a kind of genetic marker: "When Abraham was ninety nine years old, the lord appeared to him and said...I will make you exceedingly frutiful;...I will make nations out of you and kings spring from you...For your part ...you and your descendants after you generation by generation...shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin and it shall be the sign of the covenant between us."(17:1-11) The subsequent stories of the patriarchs center on the drama of selecting the chosen over the rejected offspring, largely by virtue of consanguinity. Isaac's line prevails over Ishmael's, whose mother Hagar was of different class and family origin from Sarah, Abraham's step sister.(20:12) Even though he's the younger brother, Jacob is preferred to Esau, an animalistic hairy man who marries a local Hittite woman rather than his own kin. Jacob's mother, Rebekah, steers him northward to mate with a first cousin, daughter of her brother.(28:1-3) And the apparantly unrelated story of the massacre of Schechem by the sons of Jacob for the rape of their sister Dinah reinforces a warning against exogamy.(34)

As Prospero concludes his exposition of past events he too turns to concerns of breeding. He introduces Caliban, who like Ishmael is the offspring of an ignoble mother with rival matrilineal claims. When the proto-sibling attempts to "people...this isle with Calibans,"(348-9) Prospero drives him from the family home and puts him in bondage. Following Caliban's suggestion--"She will become thy bed...And bring thee forth brave brood," Stephano also tries to claim the inheritance: "I will kill this man. His daughter and I will be king and queen." But Prospero foils this second upstart servant, and after assurances of the purity of both Miranda's mother and her grandmother, in prince Ferdinand he finds a scion of close and distinguished lineage, one whose sister Claribel's competing claims of inheritance have been disposed of by marriage to the heathen King of Tunis.

Within the framework of "primary concerns" defined by the patriarchal project of establishing a familial line, love and romance function like evolutionary sexual selection. Abraham is tough enough to defeat four kings in battle when he first arrives in Canaan(14) and Sarah is so beautiful that Pharaoh and King Abimelelch court her. The fact that this couple have their first child together in their nineties makes their offspring particularly precious as the distillation of a lifelong love. Stories of love at first sight recur in this section. With Isaac, the lengthy discovery of the beautiful bride occurs through the eyes of Abraham's anonymous servant(24:10-60), but Jacob's first meeting with Rachel at the well evokes the power of physical passion within the framework of family continuity: "While [Jacob] was talking [to the herdsmen] Rachel came up with her father's flock, for she was a shepherdess. When Jacob saw Rachel... he stepped forward, rolled the stone off the mouth of the well and watered Laban's sheep. He kissed Rachel, and was moved to tears. He told her that he was her father's kinsman and Rebecca's son; so she ran and told her father."(29:9-13)

Ferdinand's first encounter with Miranda produces a heavenly sensation in both of them--"I might call him/A thing divine, for nothing natural/ I ever saw so noble." "Most sure the goddess/On whom these airs attend,"(1.2.418-22)--before the conversation also quickly turns to fathers. These love-scenes recall the innocent sexual encounter of Adam and Eve--"Now they were both naked, the man and his wife, but they had no feeling of shame towards one another."(2:25) That first experiment in perfecting humanity set the pattern of triangular tension among parents, child and spouse: "that is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and the two become one flesh."(2:24) In order to compensate the parent for loss, the children must subordinate their desires for one another and for children to their obligations to the parents who fostered them. The aged thereby retain some control over the vigorous young and protection from Oedipal threats like those of Caliban or Stephano. God drives this lesson home with Abraham by demanding Isaac back after they have bonded.(Gen. 22) This cruel trick intensifies Abraham's love for his son, it reinforces his fear of God's authority, and it reassures the deity that his chosen successor is not a rebel like so many of his predecessors.

In the case of Abraham's grandson Jacob, God challenges him directly only with a brief wrestling bout, but the young man's father-in-law Laban takes over the role of patriarchal tester. After welcoming his nephew with open arms, he too plays cruelly with his nephew's emotions, demanding seven years hard labor for Rachel's hand in marriage and then substituting his older daughter Leah in the wedding bed.(29:20-28) Jacob works another seven years to get his choice, but Laban cheats him out of the flocks he has rightfully bred for himself. Only by proving that he has the patience and restraint as well as the cleverness, mettle and generative prowess to overcome these obstacles--including the ability to do his own selective breeding of goats--does Jacob gain his father in law's blessing and his right to go home with his beloved to become his nation's founder.

Ferdinand too must yield to his prospective father-in-law. Unlike Caliban, he willingly performs the servile labor of moving logs to acknowledge Prospero's control. This discipline also corrects Ferdinand's misstep in prematurely anticipating his own father's death leading along with his early, easy accession to the throne.(1.2.429-431) The spectacle of Ferdinand's suffering causes Miranda to transfer her love from her father to him. Like Rachel, who steals her father's gods and escapes with Jacob in secret, Miranda repeatedly violates Prospero's precepts(3.1.36-7; 58-9) and takes the initiative to propose marriage herself. Her father also imposes the ordeal on Ferdinand to test the prince's commitment to the girl he compares to the prince's many previous flirtations, "... lest too light winning make the prize light."(1.2.453) Like Laban when he catches up with the couple(31:39-41), he expresses concern about the future treatment of his child, but also the need for compensation that later surfaces in his shared grieving with Alonso for the daughters they both have lost to sons-in-law.(5.1.146-8) Accepting the pain of this loss is a parental test, shared by God with all mothers and fathers in the Bible.

God and Prospero both offer those who successfully pass their qualifying tests--the selected or "chosen" ones--a vision of the future with a promise of fertilitity and prosperity as a reward for distinguishing themselves from those who are rejected. Because Abraham has been willing to sacrifice his son, God says "I will bless you abundantly and greatly multiply your descendants until they are as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the sea-shore."(22:15-17) Jacob's courtship of Rachel is framed by visions at Beth-El: "This land I give to you and your descendants. They shall be countless as the dust upon the earth....( 28:12-18)...Israel shall be your name...Be fruitful and increase as a nation; a host of nations shall come from you/ and Kings shall spring from your body."(35:10-11)

Prospero apologizes for his severe treatment of Ferdinand and offers compensation: "All thy vexations/ were but trials of thy love, and thou hast strangely stood the test. Here, afore heaven, I ratify this my rich gift." The gift is his daughter but also the vision of deliverance, fertility and prosperity in the masque, linked by a rainbow to Jacob's ladder and Noah's flood. Following the vision of parental acceptance and bounty, the young man wishes to go no further: "Jacob woke from his sleep and said, 'Truly the Lord is in this place...this is no other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven.'"(28:16) Ferdinand says: "Let me live here ever/So rare a wondered father and a wife/Makes this place paradise."(4.1.122-124)

The end of Jacob's personal quest arrives when he is renamed Israel, the progenitor of the future nation. His story concludes the patriarchal section of Genesis. From here on God recedes further from his creation, removing himself completely from the narrative as speaker and player and standing outside of events as Providence. Though Joseph is the protagonist of the longest story in Genesis, God never addresses him directly. Instead, Joseph becomes a kind of God-human, a stand-in, following his own lights but mysteriously linked to the deity, a brother of other humans, but one who lives on a higher level.

As his daughter and future son-in-law sit enthralled by his wedding gift Prospero's project in relation to breeding concludes. The finale of the masque states his wish for an eternal happy ending for the new couple complete with the banishment of winter and the reconciliation of peasants and noble ladies. But before he can join them in dancing with the masquers, they are interrupted by two disturbing realities which keep both the masque itself and the play from reaching closure. A tempestlike "hollow and confused noise" reminds Prospero that he has unfinished business with the rebellious faction of the clowns and with his brother's conspiracy. It also tolls the onset of retirement, old age and death. While Ferdinand and Miranda take on the world, changed from naive romantics to chess players who can "wrangle for a score of kingdoms and still call it fair play,"(5.1.174-5) he must relinquish it. Coming in a flash, this realization about genesis and generation, fulfillment and completion, nevertheless is disorienting for young and old alike: "Sir I am vexed./ Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled./Be not disturbed with my infirmity."(4.1.148-58)

The transformation from creator-god-father to prospective grandfather leads to Prospero's abjuring his magic, freeing his slave-spirits, and releasing his hold on the humans under his spell. This completion of the Ferdinand and Miranda romance plot in The Tempest parallels the silent retreat of God once Jacob has become Israel at the end of the patriarchal chapters of Genesis.

4.

Resemblances between Genesis' Joseph and Shakespeare's Prospero are detailed and striking. Linguistically they are linked by the word "prosperity"--"And the Lord was with Joseph and he was a man that prospered...And his master saw that ...the Lord made all that he did to prosper in his hand."(39:2-3)[ Prosperity can emanate from two sources--an external benefactor like mother earth or father god, or a self supporting community of people led by an effective leader, first among equals. The process of selection, a zero sum game, depends on sibling rivalry. The process of cooperation--the strengthening of a "band of brothers" forming the basis of a nation--must suppress that rivalry. The stories of Joseph and Prospero the Providers overlap the stories of Joseph and Prospero and their brothers.

In the last section of Genesis the focus of primary concern within the family shifts from paternity, or the relations of parent and child, to fraternity or the relations between siblings. This shift is predicated upon the disappearance of God, but the theme has been present from the earliest chapters in the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael and Jacob and Esau. According to Fokkelman: "Finally in the last cycle of the book the psychology of crime, guilt, remorse and compunction among brothers is worked out much more thoroughly, under the direction of the master manipulator Joseph....the theme of brotherhood, a metonymy for the bond that links humanity, is handled with growing complexity from the beginning of Genesis to the end.(53)"

Prospero is not only a patriarch. His project of breeding optimal progeny shares priority with his project of working out his troubled relationship with his brother Antonio and his future in-law Alonso. Sibling rivalry--what Hamlet's father calls the "primal eldest curse"--drives Antonio to plot with Alonso to kill the rightful Duke Prospero and drives Sebastian in turn to plot with Antonio to kill his brother Alonso, just as Joseph's brothers plot to kill the distinctively robed brother favored by his father. Resolving sibling rivalry requires somewhat different strategies than resolving generational conflict. The chosen brother like the parent first needs to establish dominance, but in order to succeed he must also appear to relinquish it, acknowledging as Prospero does, that he is not father or god, but "one of their kind."(5.1.23)

Joseph starts out as "that dreamer,"(37:19) a person with true visions but lacking enough prudence to anticipate the resentment of those who dont share his gifts. Like Prospero, who, "neglect[s] worldly ends, all dedicated/To closeness and the bettering of my mind" "rapt with secret studies" in the liberal arts(1.2.89-90), Joseph is at first oblivious to the reality of his political situation. Both he and Prospero "awaked an evil nature"(91-3) in their brothers and as result, suffered usurpation, exile and imprisonment. Joseph's brothers steal him from his father's favor, plan to kill him, end up imprisoning him in a pit and then selling him into slavery and exile in Egypt. Prospero's brother and his cronies remove him from his dukedom, try to kill him and allow him to be abandoned at sea in a leaky boat which ends up marooned on the island.

Rudely awakened from innocence and forced to cope for survival in their places of exile, both Joseph and Prospero learn some practical wisdom. As a convict in Pharaoh's jail, Joseph goes from a dreamer to an interpreter of dreams, using his intelligence as well as his intuition. Though he insists that interpretive power comes from God(40:8), in proclaiming that Pharaoh's two dreams of the fat sheaves and cows being devoured by the lean are really one(43:25), he uses human analytical skill to penetrate surfaces by discovering abstractions. By predicting that lean years will consume fat ones he expresses the homespun foresight of the ant to the grasshopper. Prospero has fewer books after his sea voyage, those discreetly selected for him by his counsellor Gonzalo, and once outside the precints of his library, he finds enough applicable information in those to gain some control over his environment.

Wearing his robe and consulting his books, Prospero teaches the ignorant Caliban to speak and releases Ariel from imprisonment. At the same time he subdues and enslaves them and their fellow native spirits, appropriating their power to rule the elements. After Joseph bests Pharaoh's magicians and sages(41:8), he is entrusted to rule over all Egypt. Dressed in fine clothing and signet ring, he delivers the people from hunger while divesting them of their wealth. By the time fate--in the form of famine and storm--lands their lost brothers in their places of exile, both have exercized their acumen long enough to have risen to the status of "Prince of Power."

Having attained power, each pursues the god-human's fraternal initiative to right wrong with vengeance, instruction and forgiveness. Jacob's sons arrive in Joseph's Egypt desperate for grain and disoriented by travel. Prospero's brother and his companions wander the island, waterlogged, bereaved and exhausted. Both parties have been partially rescued by the exiled brother and find themselves at his mercy--that is, within his power. One source of that power is immediate knowledge. He recognizes them because he remembers the wrong done him. They dont know him because he's disguised or invisible, but also because they've repressed the memory of their crimes long past.

After harshly accusing the ones he spies on of being spies(42:9; 1.2.456), the hidden brother manipulates the others into a replay of their earlier crimes of conspiracy and rebellion, now within his control. Joseph insists they return home and bring him their brother Benjamin who has stayed behind, thereby once again stealing a youngest preferred son away from their father. He does this, one may infer, to enjoy the revenge of inflicting pain on them, but also to determine whether they have spared his mother's other son and are capable of repentance. If so, reenacting the old crime can remind them of what they've forgotten and teach them about the pain it inflicted. Prospero similarly works on the lords by setting up a situation in which the treasonous coup which exiled him is now reenacted by Antonio and Sebastian against his brother, King Alonso. The pain of being betrayed by his own brother--though only half-conscious--and of apparently losing a son awakens Alonso's memory of having betrayed his brother monarch.

In a comic replay of another element of their crime--selling him for silver and sneaking him into the caravan of the Midianites--Joseph tricks his brothers with an apparent gift of silver in their bags--which will then serve as false evidence of theft. Both elements of this trick recur in The Tempest's subplot of Caliban and the clowns, who are first manipulated into hatching a new conspiracy to overthrow Prospero to gain wealth and power, and then entrapped with the false delights of a royal wardrobe.

Joseph's methods of interrogation activate his brothers' consciences and soon elicit a confession that he overhears:"They said to one another, 'No doubt we deserve to be punished because of our brother, whose suffering we saw; for when he pleaded with us we refused to listen. That is why these sufferings have come upon us.'"(42:21) T his encourages him to take the cat and mouse game further with what may be termed a "banquet trick." When the brothers return to Egypt with Benjamin as hostage a few years later, he offers them a resplendent meal, and while their defenses are lowered he hides a silver goblet in Benjamin's pack. After they depart, "Joseph said to his steward, "Go after those men at once, and when you catch up with them, say 'Why have you repaid good with evil? ..You have done a wicked thing.'" When the packs are opened, Benjamin's is found to contain the goblet, and he and his brothers must return to Joseph who accuses him of the theft and threatens to keep him as a slave. Similarly, Prospero surprises the the hungry nobles with a lavish buffet after having them led blindly around the island in search of the King's lost son. Watching their approach to the meal from an invisible vantage point above, he arranges for Ariel to spoil the dinner and to deliver a tirade expressing Prospero's wrath, exposing the lords' original guilt, threatening eternal perdition and demanding full contrition.

This device produces the desired effect of repentance in both stories. Joseph's oldest brother Judah is willing to sacrifice himself for the release of Benjamin: "Now my lord, let me remain in place of the boy as your lordship's slave, and let him go with his brothers. How can I return to my father without the boy? I could not bear to see the misery which my father would suffer."(44:33-34) Alonso falls to the ground acknowledging his crime and willing to give up his own life to return the life of the son that he believes has been taken from him as punishment: "Methought the winds did sing it to me; and the thunder.../The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass./Threefore my son I' the ooze is bedded; and/I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,/And with him there lie mudded."(3.3.96-102)

At this turning point in both stories the focus shifts to the hidden controlling brother. Each has forced his antagonists to experience the suffering of the victim of fratricide. Each now feels compassion for the repentant criminals. After dismissing his servants, for the moment abjuring his royal powers and distance, Joseph breaks down crying, discloses himself to his brothers' wonderment, forgives them fully and arranges for them and his father to take up residence in Egypt where they will be reunited and provided with land and wealth. So too, after Alonso's repentance, Prospero acknowledges his common humanity with those he has dominated and offers them forgiveness: "...shall not myself/One of their kind, that relish all as sharply/Passion as they, be kindlier moved.../

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th' quick,/Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury/Do I take part...They being penitent/The sole drift of my purpose doth extend/Not a frown futher."(5.1.22-30) At the final moment, even Caliban is transformed in Prospero's designation from an "abhorred slave" who will "not any print of goodness take"(1.2.350-352) to a "thing of darkness I/ acknowledge mine." Once so acknowledged and pardoned Caliban too repents: "I'll be wise hereafter and seek for grace."(5.1.294-5)

These revelations, recognitions, restorations and reconciliations produce an ecstatic happy ending. They also produce a retrospective vindication of all previous confusion and suffering as purposeful contributions to the positive outcome--a theological assertion of the fortunate fall: "Now do not be distressed...that you sold me into slavery there; it was God who sent me ahead of you to save men's lives...to ensure that you will have descendants on earth, and to preserve you all, a great band of survivors,"(45:5-8) says Joseph. Gonzalo concludes,"Was Milan thrust from Milan that his issue/Should become kings of Naples? O rejoice/Beyond a common joy and set it down/with gold on lasting pillars. In one voyage/...Ferdinand...found a wife/ Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom/In a poor isle, and all of us ourselves/When no man was his own."(5.1.206-213)

5.

Shakespeare liked to write deflating parodies of his own grandiose productions, as for instance in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the rude mechanicals' rendition of "Pyramus and Thisbe" parodies Romeo and Juliet. In The Tempest, the clown scenes parody the archetypal cosmic creation myths of the Prospero plot as well as its Biblical source. Act 2 scene 2 begins again with the unformed chaos of a storm dissolving the borders between classes--"misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows"(39)--as well as between species and individuals--"this is some monster of the isle with four legs."(63) The drunken butler Stephano gives coherent shape to the chaos as well as healing deliverance with the magic brew stored up in his homemade cedar-bark bottle: "here is that which will give language to you cat. Open your mouth--this will shake your shaking."(79-81) After giving birth to Trinculo from under the gabardine, he accepts the worship of Caliban, "a most poor credulous monster," whose visions of divinity are inspired by the colonizer's firewater:"that's a brave god, and bears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him."(112) "Kiss the book," says Stephano repeatedly, referring to the ritual of swearing by the Bible as he commands the native inhabitant's worship by bottle feeding him dry sherry, profanely suggesting an analogy between it and communion wine or Holy Writ.

Shakespeare translates the mythic discourse of the Bible into still another register, following the lead of Genesis itself. Moving further into time as the stories unfold, its final narrative fills in many particulars of the Egyptian setting, especially of economics and government Such realism draws attention to the likelihood that the whole of Genesis was probably first codified and written down during the Judaic dynasty of David around 1000 BCE, and that it functioned as an introduction to a national history of the Jews. The idealistic celebration of the founding of a nation is an appropriate mythic conclusion for a political text. But the authors of Genesis, like the author of The Tempest, also observed history through a more materialistic historian's eyes, following the trail of the money and the power.

After the recognition-redemption scene and the Pharaoh's welcome of Jacob to Egypt, the earlier story(41:46-57) of Joseph's deliverance of the land during the lean years by distributing grain stored in the fat ones is repeated. But this time the account is more detailed, plausible and ironic. After having accumulated a huge surplus by taxing the peasants during the period of glut, Joseph sells it back to them during the famine--first for all their silver, then for their herds. Finally, "...they came to him again and said, 'My lord, we cannot conceal it from you; our silver is all gone and our herds of cattle are yours. Nothing is left for your lordship but our bodies and our lands... Take us and our land in payment for bread, and we and our land alike will be in bondage to Pharaoh. Give us seed corn to keep us alive, or we shall die and our land will become desert.' So Joseph bought all the land in Egypt for Pharaoh...Pharaoh set them to work as slaves from one end of the territory of Egypt to the other."(47:18-22) Joseph's ruthless transformation of Egypt from a feudal to a mercantile society makes it possible for his descendants to expand their numbers at a rate that could never be supported by the nomadic subsistence conditions they lived under in Canaan. His centralization of authority also guarantees the privileges now granted by the Pharaoh, at least for the forseeable future.[27]

The last chapter of Genesis contains an equally cynical rerun of the earlier story of fraternal reconciliation: "When their father was dead, Joseph's brothers were afraid and said, "What if Joseph should bear a grudge against us and pay us out for all the harm that we did to him?" They therefore approached Joseph with these words: "In his last words to us before he died, your father gave us this message for you; 'I ask you to forgive your brothers' crime and wickedness; I know they did you harm.'...But Joseph said to them, "Do not be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You meant to do me harm; but God meant to bring good out of it by preserving the lives of many people as we see today. Do not be afraid. I will provide for you and your dependants."(50:15-21) Given their persistent mistrust and the narrator's tacit but unmistakeable disclosure of their bad faith, and given Joseph's canny strategy toward the Egyptians, this repetition of forgiveness might well be uttered with a touch of irony as well as threat.

The final reconciliation in The Tempest is similarly qualified. Apart from all the celebration stand Antonio and Sebastian. These unregenerate schemers never apologize, and retain their witty cynicism to the last. In his final judgement scene, Prospero distinguishes "holy Gonzalo/honorable man...a loyal sir" from the forgetful and frail Alonso who is capable of contrition, and from Antonio, "most wicked sir, who to call brother/ would even infect my mouth..."(5.1.130-1) Though he forgives them all, he recognizes that there are people in whom self-interest, cruelty and power-hunger remain ineradicable. His forgiveness of Antonio involves no expectation of redemption or improvement. He, and others like him, must be continually watched and controlled with tactics that appeal to their limited motives.

Before he relinquishes political power, Prospero appropriately greets each of these three: he embraces Gonzalo, he commiserates with Alonso, and he frightens Antonio with a crafty display of force and fraud: "Welcome my friends all!/ (Aside to Sebastian and Antonio) But you my brace of lords, were I so minded,/I here could pluck his highness' frown upon you,/And justify you traitors. At this time/I will tell no tales..../I do forgive/Thy rankest fault--all of them--and require/My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know/thou must restore."(5.1.124-30) By retaining the threat to expose their conspiracy to Alonso, he keeps them in his debt, and as a result of marrying his daughter to the prince of Naples, "his death will remove Antonio's last link with the ducal power." "The devil speaks in him!" says Sebastian.

Political realism goes together with the prophetic vision of an expanded community tracing itself to an originating family. The nation of Italy, which Prospero foresees through the union of his daughter and Alonso's son, is analogous to the nation of Israel envisioned by Joseph and Jacob on the father's deathbed. Jacob's benediction of his progeny is shadowed by power struggles which surface at the moment of blessing, as the son unsuccessfully tries to control his father's determination of precedence among his grandsons, Manasseh and Ephraim.(48:17-20) The grandfather's projection of their return to the promised land is filled with predictions of war and fraternal strife. Prospero promises "calm seas and auspicious gales" for the voyage home, but it is clear that the new kingdom will experience continuing tensions, not only between aristocratic factions, but also as a result of the class hatred between courtiers and mariners loudly voiced by the utopian socialist Gonzalo, both at the moment of death in the first scene's storm, and at the concluding moment of miraculous resurrection: "O look, sir, look, sir, here is more of us!/ I prophesied if a gallows were on land/This fellow could not drown."(5.1.216-220) As is appropriate for works which stand at the beginning, the endings of Genesis and The Tempest introduce a continuing history, the genre of discourse in which time bears absolute sway.