A Masque of Revelation: The Tempest  as Apocalypse

1

The Tempest is generally thought to be the last complete play Shakespeare wrote, the final chapter in his book.  It certainly is his most mysterious and sublime.  Whether or not he intended it as a farewell to his audience, its magicianÐplaywright protagonist prophesies his own death and the dissolution of his world.  For those familiar with the Bible, such a strong 'sense of an ending' would suggest the 'Last Things' of its most mysterious final book, The Revelation of John the Divine, often called the 'Apocalypse'.

The strong influence of the first book of the Bible on The Tempest, explored in Chapter 2, does not preclude an equally significant link to the last.  Rabbinic authors of the Midrash as well as St Augustine and other patristic commentators held that multiple interpretations of the same text gave evidence of the divine fertility of the original. [158]    Genesis relates to Revelation as Alpha to Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet in which the Apocalypse was written and by which God defines his own totality at its opening and close (Rev. 1: 8, 22: 13).  Stanley Wells notes that The Tempest  is distinguished by 'a structure which looks kaleidoscopically different from every angle . . . we can follow one strand through the work, but only by shutting our ears and eyes to the others'. [159]

The Tempest was first presented at court on the first of November 1611 as part of the Hallowmas celebrations following Halloween, the day of the dead, one of only two days on which passages from the Apocalypse were read.  As a work about endings rather than origins, providence rather than progeny, The Tempest  enacts a plan long-hatched to correct what has been mistaken, restore what has been usurped, perfect what has been incomplete.  This is the story of Revelation, of creation absorbed back into the creator, of a return to Eden where history is concluded.  From the vantage point of Revelation, and that of the New Testament in general, everything that happened earlier leads to the conclusion prefigured and premeditated by the Bible's author.  Paul says of the events of the Old Testament: 'Now all these things came unto them for examples, and were written to admonish us, upon whom the ends of the world are come' (1 Cor. 10: 11).

As final books in the larger collections they conclude, Revelation and The Tempest share a retrospective and epitomizing role in relation to earlier works.  The Apocalypse has been called a 'palimpsest' that 'condenses a series of episodes from the history of God's appearance to his people into a single image of this relationship beyond historical time and space'. [160]   The Tempest  takes a similar retrospective stance: it re-stages events occurring before the first scene and it 'reconsiders issues that had occupied Shakespeare's mind from the earliest history plays'. [161]

2

In many of his earlier plays Shakespeare made allusions to the book of Revelation.  In The Tempest  itself, one passage contains an unmistakable quotation of the Apocalypse's strange image of earth swallowing the sea in order to deliver its victims: 'And the serpent cast out of his mouth a flood that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood.  But the earth holp the woman and the earth opened her mouth and swallowed up the flood which the dragon had cast out of its mouth' (Rev. 12: 15Ð16).  This is Miranda's plea to her father: 'Had I been any god of power, I would | Have sunk the sea within the earth, or ere | It should the good ship so have swallowed and | The fraughting souls within her' (1.2.10Ð13).

The words of The Tempest identify Prospero with the God of Revelation in language that refers to him, in the powers and behaviour ascribed to him, and in utterances he makes.  Miranda most likely means Prospero when she speaks of 'a god of power'; he alludes to himself as more than merely her fatherÑ'I am more better | Than Prospero . . . And thy no greater father' (1.2.19-21)Ñand Ariel addresses him, 'All hail, great master' (1.2.190).  Prospero manifests the powers of creator and destroyer, punisher and deliverer, that define the biblical God:

I have bedimmed

The noontide sun, callÕd forth the mutinous winds,

And twixt the green sea and the azurÕd vault

Set roaring warÑto the dread rattling thunder

Have I given fire, and rifted JoveÕs stout oak

With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory

Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up

The pine and cedar . . .

(5.1.41Ð8)

Like 'the image of the risen Jesus as keybearer' in Rev. 1: 18  'derived from Hellenistic conceptions of Hekate', Prospero holds the power to raise the dead: 'graves at my command | Have waked their sleepers, oped and let Õem forth | By my so potent art' (5.1.48Ð50). [162]    Prospero has hosts of spirit messengers at his command, and, like his human children and subjects, he addresses them sometimes with 'lovingkindness' and at others with irritation and anger, like the Jesus of Revelation addressing his followers in the seven churches of Chapters 2 and 3.  And when the invisible Ariel speaks Prospero's condemnation to the lords in his control, his language is that of prophets and of Jesus speaking the words of God (3.3.53Ð82).

Shakespeare could find precedent for mounting the book of Revelation on stage in the medieval cycles of Corpus Christi plays, which typically had seven installments, culminating in a final play called Antichrist or Judgement, dramatizing the tribulations of the damned, the punishment of demons often portrayed like clowns, and the debate before God of the conflicting claims of Justice and Mercy.  These medieval mystery plays also provided a model for representing God as a human character and actor.  He is usually referred to as 'Salvator', the Saviour, but at the end of the play, like the protagonist of The Tempest, he is acknowledged by the actor playing the role and by the designation in the script as 'Figura'Ñas a metaphor rather than a representation. [163]

3

To readers or viewers expecting a story of events that unfold sequentially within a stable representation of the world, Revelation and The Tempest present similar difficulties.  Instead of proceeding from beginning to middle to end, events are predicted, enacted, recalled, broken off, and often duplicated.  One climactic series of the Apocalypse's plagues is succeeded by two others, the enemies of God are conclusively defeated and yet continually return, the saved are separated from the damned on several occasions.  Prospero twice starts and stops the storm, and repeatedly punishes and forgives, removes and replaces his robe, and bids farewell to his art.  From their outset both works insist that the end is at hand, that the final hour has come, but the ending of the ending is continually deferred.

With respect to space, settings are otherworldly and discontinuous; one place can turn into another.  John moves from the Island of Patmos to the court of heaven and from there into spaces that emerge from opening scrolls as meaning from a text.  The Tempest  begins in a storm on board ship then moves to an uninhabited island where the storm appears as an illusion and where different groups of characters have different perceptions of the same landscape.  In this universe, the polarity of sameness and difference is superseded by displacement, recurrence, and metamorphosis.  As in Dante's Paradiso, another final work patterned upon Revelation, 'the poet . . . manages . . . to represent non‑representation . . . [in] the form of a "command performance" . . . the whole . . . has no existence, even fictional, beyond the metaphoric . . . paradise and the poem are co-extensive, like the terms of a metaphor . . . there is no reality that is not a sign, pointing to another level of meaning'. [164]    Like that of the Apocalypse, 'the unreality of The Tempest  contributes towards the play's high suggestive power', [165]   but that sense of unreality keeps both works from comfortably fitting into any category of narrative.  Instead of presenting a story, they are experienced by viewer or reader as a sequence of moving tableaux, animated emblems, text illustrations, or dream visions.  Such experiences belong to the genre of masque.

Edgar Alan Poe suggested a connection among masque, Apocalypse, and The Tempest when he named the protagonist of his story, 'The Masque of the Red Death', Prince Prospero.  Masques are grandiose dramatic spectacles staged for special occasions by aristocracy and royalty in which members of the audience also participate as performers.  They eschew realistic representation, translate contemporary political persons, issues, and events into mythological allegory, and make use of music, dance, lighting, and a shifting framework of sets to convey didactic messages.  According to Enid Welsford, 'the masque deals . . . with a moment of transformation; it expresses . . . expectancy, crowned by sudden revelation. . . . The Tempest like the masque presents a moment of revelation'. [166]   The word 'apocalypse' derives from Greek roots signifying the removal of a veil or a mask. Apocalypses claim to reveal the hidden meaning and outcome of history as a vision bestowed by God upon their speakers.  The vision is conveyed as a pageant of emblematic spectacles of catastrophe and deliverance performed for the seer, often within the confines of a heavenly court to which he has been magically transported.

Stephen Orgel notes that

Masques were essential to the life of the Renaissance court; their allegories gave a higher meaning to the realities of politics and power, their fictions created heroic roles for the leaders of society. . . . appearing in a masque . . . was not merely playing a part. . . . a deep truth about the monarchy was . . . embodied in action, and the monarchs were revealed in roles that expressed strongest beliefs about . . . obligations and perquisites of royalty. [167]

Biblical scholars have found a similar link between the masquelike spectacles described in apocalypses and the ritual practices that celebrated and authorized the offices of the Roman imperial court:

The twenty four elders are kings with crowns, and they do obeisance before their king.  They acclaim God as king on his throne, present him with golden crowns after the custom of the Roman imperial cult and praise him in the form of an acclamation . . . which probably has its origins in the political arena.  The address 'Our Lord and God' may also resonate the acclamation in the imperial cult of Domitian (dominus et deus noster). [168]

In its original setting, the Apocalypse functions to produce and strengthen belief in a divine monarchy.  Its literary structure is designed for 'the legitimation of the transcendent authorization of the message . . . for an appeal to transcendent authority is necessitated by either the impossibility or ineffectiveness of an appeal to more rational or mundane structures of thought or authority'. [169]

The final advent of God into his city Jerusalem at the end of the book of Revelation is patterned after such political masques, as was observed by the early Christian theologian Athanasius: 'As when a great king has entered some great city and dwelt in one of the houses in it, such a city is then greatly honoured and no longer does any enemy or bandit come against it . . . So also is the case with the king of all'. [170]    England's King Richard II encouraged enactments of Revelation's royal advent.  During his coronation procession in 1392, a heavenly castle came down out of heaven on ropes, he was welcomed as the bridegroom, and London was envisioned as the bridal chamber and its populace as his betrothed. [171]   James I carried on these traditions when he entered London in 1604 and the recorder of the city welcomed him 'with a . . . trope drawn from Revelation, inviting him to "come, therefore , O worthiest of Kings as a glorious bridegroome through your Royall chamber"'. [172]

Like King James, Prospero is a ruler who uses masques to express, display, and strengthen his princely power.  Prospero's ability to produce effective masques is associated with the power to create wonderÑa common objective of politics, art, and religion.  Wonder was defined by Renaissance writers and their classical predecessors as 'a systole of the heart'Ña unique reaction of soul, mind, and body combining both fear and joy and resulting from an encounter with something uncanny and sublime. [173]   Manifestations of God in the Bible are often reported to produce wonder of the sort that makes John 'fall at his feet as though dead' (Rev. 1: 17).  'Miranda', the name of Prospero's daughter, like 'Miracle', the fourteenth‑century word for plays about the Bible, signifies wonder.  When she is first observed by Ferdinand, he equates wonder with an experience of the divine: 'Most sure the goddess | On whom these airs attend. Vouchsafe my prayer . . . O you wonder' (1.2.424Ð5, 9). When Miranda sees her first young man, she says, 'It carries a brave form.  But Õtis a spirit. . . . I might call him | A thing divine' (1.2.414, 420Ð1).  Even cynical Sebastian cannot hide his wonder at  Prospero's last masque, as he blurts, 'a most high miracle' (5.1.180).

In drama as well as in religious ritual, wonder is promoted by a design principle labelled the 'reveal/conceal dialectic'.  The presence of curtains, proscenium arches, and layered backdrops in the indoor theatres for which masques and masquelike plays were written imitates the architecture of cathedrals and temples housing a series of holier and more secret chambers masked by portals, screens, curtains, and cabinets, whereby 'an initiant makes his way through various cultic barriers into the adyton [holy of holies] where the focal religious experience will be staged'. [174]    Such nested discovery spaces appear frequently in the book of Revelation, as a door in the heaven opens in 4: 1, the scroll is opened in 6: 1, the temple in heaven is laid open and the ark of the covenant is seen inside it in 11: 19.  In The Tempest, Prospero has the imprisoned lords taken from a grove of trees surrounding his compound into a charmed circle inside it, where they are released to regard the vision of Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess, which he discovers from behind a curtain (5.1.57sdÐ73sd).

The use of theatrical point of view to suggest divine omniscience is similar in apocalypse and masque.  The location of the throne of God in the middle of the space of the heavenly vision of Revelation makes him the primary object and the audience of the vision.  At masque performances,

the monarch became the centre of the theatrical experience . . . there is only one focal point . . . this is where the king sat and the audience around him at once became a living emblem of the structure of the court . . . the central experience of drama in court then involved not simply the action of a play, but the interaction between the play and the monarch, and the structured organization of the other spectators around him. [175]

Unusual mirroring and framing devices also typify apocalypse and masque.  Revelation is itself a vision and it contains visions within it.  The Tempest  is a masque and contains masques.  The climactic moment of unmasking, 'when the solution of difficulty, the conquest of adverse powers . . . marked by the sudden appearance of the masquers', transforms the relationship between audience and performers. [176]    'At the end, the stage opened out to include the court, and the noble dancers chose partners from the audience to dance out the revels of earthly and heavenly order in the ultimate theater of the court.' [177]   In both Revelation and The Tempest, such a transformation occurs twice: first, when the lamb of God comes down from heaven and takes 'his dwelling among men' in the New Jerusalem (21: 3) and when Prospero comes out of hiding and reveals himself to his countrymen (5.1.161), and second, when, after John's vision has concluded, God speaks directly with the members of John's audience (22: 6Ð7, 12Ð16), and when, after all the characters have left the stage, the actor who played Prospero addresses his audience directly in the epilogue in the personae of both the character and its author.

4

In setting out to write a masque with a godlike central character as a concluding work for a large collection of earlier books, it is likely that Shakespeare had Revelation close at hand.  Juxtaposing it with The Tempest displays systematic parallels of incident and a reciprocal midrashic flow of inspiration and interpretation between them.  These parallels themselves unmask dark passages, hidden patterns, and obscured rapturous effects.

The book of Revelation and The Tempest  share a four-part structure consisting of (a) an introduction of setting and participants and movement to another world, (b) a pageant of battles in which good triumphs and evil is defeated, followed by images of resurrection, judgement, and the dissolution of the world, (c) a new pageant combining re-creation with marriage, and (d) the closing of the vision and a return to the setting of this world.

(a) John and Miranda are initiates situated on an island.  Jesus/God and Prospero are their fatherÐinitiators.  The first event is a storm.  When John is caught up by the Spirit, which appears to him like a roaring wind, he falls 'at his feet as dead' (1: 17).  When she first appears, Miranda is horrified by the tempest (1.2.5Ð13).  Each of them is reassured by the father's self-identification: 'Fear not; I am the first and the last' (1: 17), says Jesus. 'Be collected. | No more amazement.  Tell your piteous heart | There's no harm done . . . I am more better . . . [than] thy no greater father.' (1.2.13Ð15, 19Ð21), says Prospero.

John is transported to the divine court, where he sees God sitting on a bejeweled throne that flashes thunder and lightning while four cherubic beasts and twenty-four elders offer tribute and praise (4: 4Ð11).  Prospero puts Miranda to sleep, dons his magic cloak, and is approached by his angelic servant and surrounded by attendants: 'All hail, great master, grave sir, hail. . . . To answer thy best pleasure . . . to thy strong bidding task | Ariel and all his quality' (1.2.190Ð3).  In the heavenly court a sealed scroll appears in the hand of God.  The Lamb breaks its seal, and, as if they were walking off the page, a series of spectacular tableaux unfolds before the audience of God and his court.  Prospero and Ariel move into a space apart from the rest of the characters, visible only to the audience, and here the master devises the scenarios that his minister enacts and reports.

(b) In both works the pageant of battles has ten parts.  In the first, plagues are loosed.  Four horsemen inflict catastrophe upon the inhabitants of the earth below: thunder and lightning, earthquakes and hail, mountains falling into the sea, men making war on one another, 'kings of earth, and the great men and the rich men and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman and every free man hid themselves in dens and among the rocks of the mountains' (6: 15).  Ariel describes the similar plagues he has inflicted earlier at Prospero's behest:

Jove's lightning, the precursors

O'th' dreadful thunder-claps

The fire and cracks

Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune

Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble,

Yea, his dread trident shake.

(1.2.202Ð7)

Prospero's enemies experience a sky that seems to 'pour down stinking pitch' (1.2.3), class conflict, howling within 'louder than the weather', prayers of repentance and curses of defiance, and 'a fever of the mad' infecting all their reason (1.2.210).  This pageant of disasters brings pleasure to the spectators.  In Revelation, 'we give thee thanks . . . that thou should give reward unto thy servants' (11: 17Ð18).  In The Tempest, Prospero glories, 'My brave spirit. . . . Why that's my spirit' (1.2.206, 217).

The second part depicts perils and battles from the distant past. In the Bible they appear as what John calls 'portents'. The first two describe a pregnant woman, undergoing a difficult labour and being threatened by a dragon who tries to catch and devour her male child as soon as it is born.  God snatches the child up to heaven and protects the fleeing woman with a place prepared for her in the wilderness.  Later the frustrated dragon tries to drown the woman with a flood, but she is again saved. [178]    This tale resembles that of Miranda's deliverance from flood waters under her father's care.  They were left 'To cry to thÕ sea that roared to us, to sigh | To the winds' (1.2.149Ð50), but then were rescued 'By providence divine' (1.2.160).  Miranda is a female rather than male child, but, like the threatened babe in the Revelation portent, she too is 'destined to rule all nations', and is for that reason hunted by the tyrant.  Prospero adopts the part of the birthing mother: 'When I have decked the sea with drops full salt, | Under my burden groaned; which raised in me | An undergoing stomach, to bear up | Against what should ensue' (1.2.155Ð8).

The crowned dragon that persecutes parent and child is identified as 'that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, [which] was cast out, which deceiveth all the world' (Rev. 12: 9).  The adversary of The Tempest, who usurped the dukedom, who sought to kill parent and child, and who leads others astray, is Prospero's brother, Antonio.  Revelation reports that the dragon and his angels lost the battle with the angel Michael in heaven and 'was thrown down' onto the earth (12: 9), just as Antonio and 'All but mariners | Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel, | Then all afire with [Ariel]' (1.2.211Ð13).  After failing to capture the mother with his flood, the dragon 'went and made war with the remnant of her seed' (12: 17), just as Antonio and 'the men of sin' land on the island and conspire to bring it under their control.

The third part of the battle pageant introduces more monsters.  In Revelation, the beast and its offspring, who resemble the dragon and are subject to him, crawl out of the sea, reproduce, 'mouth . . . blasphemy against God' (13: 6), seek wealth and power, conspire against God, and gain considerable influence over the world.  In Chapter 17, one of the beasts returns, bearing on his back the ugly but alluring witch named 'the Whore of Babylon'Ñ'mother of whoredoms and the abomination of the earth' (17: 5Ð6).  She resembles Prospero's old antagonist, Sycorax, who was banished from Algiers to the island for being a 'damned witch . . . For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible | To enter human hearing' (1.2.264-6), who issued 'earthy and abhorred commands' (l. 274), and who mated with the devil to conceive a monstrous son, Caliban (ll. 321Ð2).  After the story of their rescue, Prospero tells Miranda to look upon this 'freckled whelp, hag-born--not honoured with | A human shape' whose ambition, lust, and proclivity for drink are inherited from his mother (ll. 284Ð5).  In both Revelation and The Tempest, good and evil families are symmetrical.  The dragon and the beast parody the father and the son, just as Sycorax and Caliban parody Prospero and Miranda.

In the fourth part of the battle pageant, the saved appear and are tried.  After the beast in Revelation marks his followers with the number 666, the saved enter amid 'the voice of harpers harping with their harps.  And they sung as it were a new song' (14: 2Ð3) and are marked with the name of the Lamb.  They are those men 'which are not defiled with women: for they are virgins' (14: 4), contrasted to those with the appetites and lusts of the beast.  In The Tempest, upon Caliban's exit, Ariel's song, 'Full fathom five thy father lies', accompanies the entrance of Ferdinand, who wonders, 'Where should this music be? IÕthÕ air or thÕearth? . . . sure it waits upon | Some god oÕthÕisland' (1.2.390Ð2).  He and Miranda are the saved in The Tempest; their sexual restraint, once proven, will elicit the father's blessing.  The celebration is short lived.  Next, in Revelation three angels fly in to warn against worship of the beast and threaten dire punishments.  Another voice assures the righteous that their torments will be rewarded: 'Blessed are the dead, which hereafter die in the Lord . . . for they rest from their labours, and their works follow them' (14: 13).  Similarly, Prospero interrupts the blissful meeting, accuses Ferdinand of treason, storms at his daughter, and imposes a test of endurance and restraint upon the lovers, while in asides assuring the audience that he means them well: 'It goes on, I see, | As my soul prompts it . . .this swift business | I must uneasy make, lest too light winning | Make the prize light' (1.2.422Ð3, 453Ð5). At the end of this part, victories are again trumpeted: 'those who had won . . . were singing the song of Moses' (Rev. 15: 3) and 'It works . . . Thou hast done well, fine Ariel' (Tempest 1.2.496Ð7). [179]

The fifth part of the battle pageant elaborates the crimes and the punishments of the evil ones:  'The sanctuary . . . was thrown open, and out of it came the seven angels with the seven plagues' (Rev. 15: 2Ð6); 'Follow me; | Hark what thou else shalt do me' (Tempest 1.2.496Ð7).  Like the torments of Dante's Inferno, these punishments combine vengeance with warning and symbolic statement by mirroring the sins that brought them on.  Just as Revelation's dragon is separated from his offspring the beast for trying to destroy the babe, so Alonso is marooned and deprived of his son in retaliation for exiling Prospero and threatening his daughter. [180]    Overly eager Antonio and Sebastian are repeatedly frustrated by the disappearance of their quarry at the moment before capture, and Caliban, Trinculo, and Stefano pay the drunkards' price of falling into a cesspool with terrible hangovers.  The antagonists of God and Prospero continue to rebel, even in defeat.  After the fifth plague, 'They gnawed their tongues for sorrow, and blasphemed the God of heaven for their pains, and for their sores, and repented not of their works' (Rev. 16: 10Ð11).  Similarly, despite the torments of storm, shipwreck, ague, fatigue, hunger, thirst, disorientation, and internal dissension, both sets of The Tempest's conspirators continue to marshal their forces and prepare for a final confrontation.  Revelation's God makes the wicked sin: 'For God hath put in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to do with one consent for to give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God be fulfilled' (17: 17). [181]    By putting Alonso and his counselor and guardians to sleep, Prospero arranges for Antonio and Sebastian to conspire once again against their rightful ruler (2.1.196Ð304), and he facilitates the efforts of Caliban, Trinculo, and Stefano to usurp his rule (2.2; 3.2).

The sixth part of the battle pageant elaborates on the Whore of Babylon. 'Drunken with the blood of the saints' (17: 6), after having committed fornication with the kings of the earth, she rides a scarlet monster and bears a large chalice of wine.  Stefano comes upon Caliban bearing a wine bottle he has made out of bark and sings of his fornication with Moll, Meg, Marian, and Margery (2.2.45Ð55).  Stefano says 'kiss the book', while offering Caliban a drink from his bottle, mocking the Eucharist as well as the royal pageant in which Queen Elizabeth received the English Bible from the allegorical figure of Truth, kissed it, and promised to read therein daily. [182]    Caliban responds to Stephano's 'celestial liquor' by worshipping him as a god, mirroring the biblical equation of whoredom, drunkenness, and idolatry. [183]   The account of the demise of the Whore of Babylon begins with a description of internal dissension: 'they . . . shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire' (17: 16). [184]    Prospero arranges for the allied sinners to fall into faction: Antonio and Sebastian cruelly torment Alonso, while Stefano, Trinculo, and Caliban begin cursing one another (3.2.42Ð87).

The seventh part of the pageant subjects the enemies to judgement and sentencing in the midst of their pleasures.  In Revelation, 'another angel came down from heaven, having great power, so that the earth was lightened with his glory' (18: 1).  In The Tempest, stage directions state 'Thunder and lightning.  Enter Ariel, like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table, and . . . the banquet vanishes' (3.3.52).  Then the indictment is read.  In Revelation, 'It is fallen, it is fallen, Babylon the great city, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of all foul spirits, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird . . . and the Kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich of the abundance of her pleasures' (18: 2Ð3).  In The Tempest,

You are three men of sin, whom destinyÑ

That hath to instrument this lower world

And what is inÕtÑthe never-surfeited sea

Hath caused to belch up you

__.__.__.__.__.

Being most unfit to live

(3.3.53Ð6, 58)

Next, the sentence is pronounced.  In Revelation, 'In the cup that she hath filled to you, fill her double.  Therefore shall her plague come at one day, death, sorrow, and famine, and she shall be burnt with fire' (18: 6, 8).  In The Tempest,

I have made you mad',

__.__.__.__.__.

The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have

Incensed the seas and shores . . .

Thee of thy son, Alonso,

They have bereft, and do pronounce by me

LingÕring perdition

(3.3.58, 73Ð7)

This is accompanied by a reprieve offered to any who will repent.  In Revelation, 'Go out of her my people, that ye be not partakers in her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues' (18: 4).  In The Tempest, 'whose wraths to guard you from . . .  is nothing but heart's sorrow | And a clear life ensuing' (3.3.79, 81Ð82).  Finally, the grief of the punished is displayed.  In Revelation, 'the kings of the earth shall bewail . . . saying, Alas, alas the great city. . . . the merchants of the earth shall weep and wail. . . . And every shipmaster. . . shall cast dust on their heads' (18: 9, 10, 11, 17).  In The Tempest  Alonso moans,

O, it is monstrous, monstrous,

Methought the billows spoke and told me of it

The winds did sing it to me

__.__.__.__.__.

Therefore my son iÕth ooze is bedded, and

I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,

And with him there lie mudded

(3.3.95Ð97, 100Ð02).

The eighth part of the battle pageant shifts to a wedding feast of the saved.  After yet another throne-room victory vauntÑRevelation's 'Hallelujah, salvation and glory, and honour, and power be to the Lord our God' (19: 1), and The Tempest's 'My high charms work | And these mine enemies . . . now are in my power' (3.3.88Ð90)Ñthe heavenly chorus anticipates marriage: 'Let us be glad and rejoice . . . for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. . . . Blessed are they which are called unto the Lambs supper' (19: 7Ð9).   Prospero does the same: 'In these fits I leave them, while I visit | Young Ferdinand . . . and his and mine loved darling' (3.3.91Ð3).  He congratulates them for passing his tests and in the form of an extended masque (4.1.59Ð138) presents them with a vision of the greater joys they are promised.

During the ninth part the celebration is interrupted and the battles are concluded.  In the heavenly court the wedding festivity is shattered by a new portent: 'I saw heaven open, and behold a white horse, and he that sat upon him was called, Faithful and true.  And the warriors which were in heaven followed him upon white horses . . .' (19: 11, 14).  The masque in Prospero's court is broken off by a resumption of the hostilities with the rebels (4.1.143), and Ariel is dispatched to lead the battleÑ'Spirit | We must prepare to meet with Caliban | Ay my commander' (4.1.165Ð7).  Jesus' forces defeat the armies of the beast and the false prophet, who are 'cast into a lake of fire, burning with brimstone' (19: 20), while Stefano, Trinculo, and Caliban, whom Prospero again calls 'A devil, a born devil' (4.1.188), are thrown into a 'filthy-mantled pool . . . dancing up to th' chins that the foul lake | O'er-stunk their feet' (4.1.182Ð4).

The tenth part concludes this pageant with confinement, release, and judgement.  In Revelation, the dragon is chained up in an abyss for 1000 years (20: 1Ð3).  In The Tempest Antonio and the men of sin are 'Confined . . . prisoners, sir | In the line-grove . . . They cannot budge till your release' (5.1.8Ð11).  In Revelation, the dead are awakened and quickly sentenced:

And I saw the dead, both great and small, stand before God: and the books were opened, and another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged of those things, which were written in the books, according to their works.  And whosoever was not found written in the book of life, was cast into the lake of fire.

(20: 12, 15).

The Tempest's action follows suit. At Prospero's behest, 'the mariners asleep | under the hatches' (5.1.100Ð1) are brought before him amazed to have returned to life: 'We were dead of sleep, . . . We were awaked; straightway at liberty; | Where we, in all her trim, freshly beheld | Our royal, good and gallant ship' (5.1.233, 237Ð40).

Alonso and the royals who were confined in madness and catatonia are placed in a charmed circle Prospero has drawn in front of his seat, and, as they gradually come to, they are judged on the basis of their deeds.  First Gonzalo, like the martyrs who 'reigned with Christ' because they 'did not worship the beast' (20: 4), is promised his reward: 'O good Gonzalo, | My true preserver, and a loyal sir | To him thou followÕst, I will pay thy graces | Home both in word and deed' (5.1.68Ð71).

Next Alonso is reprimanded for cruelty in exiling the Duke.  Then Sebastian is sentenced to tormenting pinches for complicity in the plot (5.1.74).  Finally Antonio, 'brother mine that entertained ambition, | Expelled remorse and nature, [who] Would here have killed your king' (5.1.75Ð6, 78), is condemned to 'inward pinches . . . most strong' (5.1.77).

(c) The end of the judgement sequences in Revelation and The Tempest marks a major structural division in both works.  At this moment, all that precedes is to be superseded, all that has remained hidden is to be disclosed, all that has been promised and deferred is to be fulfilled.  In the first verse of Chapter 21, the current framework of John's vision dissolves.  Ever since the door of heaven opened in Chapter 4 and he was transported upwards by the spirit, he has resided in the heavenly court, looking out at the masquelike visions presented before him and down at the earth below as it is blasted by wars and natural disasters.  But now, both heaven and earth vanish, along with the sea. 'Behold I make all things new' (21: 4) calls a voice from the throne.  A similar dissolution of heaven and earth is envisioned by Prospero in his speech at the end of the wedding masque:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

                                                                       shall dissolve;

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.

 (4.1.148Ð56)

The dissolution of heaven and earth makes way for a new order, which is also a restoration.  The God who withdrew to heaven after his dispute with Adam and Eve now 'will dwell with them: and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be their God with them' (21: 3).  The one on the throne who throughout Revelation has spoken only through the intermediaries of Christ and the angels now speaks for himself: 'Behold, I make all things new . . . I am the beginning and the end' (21: 5Ð6).  Prospero creates a new reality with similar gestures of self-disclosure and intimacy.  After abjuring his rough magic, breaking his staff, and drowning his book, he removes the sorcerer's cloak and puts on his hat and rapier in order to 'myself present | As I was sometime Milan' (5.1.85Ð6).  As they emerge from the captivity of their fits, he displays his true self to those who have hitherto experienced his presence only in miraculous acts of punishment and deliverance or through the prophetic voice of his angel: 'Behold sir King, | The wrongÕd duke of Milan, Prospero. . . . howsoever you have | Been justled from your senses, know for certain | That I am ProsperoÑ' (5.1.108Ð9, 159Ð61).  Here he follows 'the "I am" self-disclosure formula' conventional in Graeco-Roman as well as Hebrew and Christian apocalypses. [185]   God is the sovereign over the kings of the earth and his people (21: 22) previously under the yoke of the beast.  Prospero 'requires' his dukedom back from his brother.

The once and future principalities are manifested in yet another pageant, which concludes with displays of reconciliation between opposites: power and love, garden and city, Naples and Milan.  In Revelation, the pageant's presenter is an angel who had earlier delivered one of the plagues.  'Come, I will show thee the bride, the Lamb's wife' (21: 9), he says to John, and he takes him to 'a great and high mountain' (21: 10) to watch the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. 'I will requite you with . . . a wonder to content ye' (5.1.171Ð2), says Prospero as he conducts the lords to the threshold of his cell and there 'discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess' (5.1.171 sd).  Alonso refers to this tableau vivant as 'a vision of the island' (5.1.178), Sebastian as 'a most high miracle' (5.1.186).  Both visions are exalted representations of political marriage that brings peace on earth.  In the New Jerusalem, 'the leaves of the tree served to heal the nations' (22: 2) rent apart since Babel, and the nations walk freely through its open gates (21: 25).  In the New Italy, where the bride will 'be' Milan and the groom will 'be' Naples, two rival city states will achieve a union symbolized by Miranda and Ferdinand's love play over the game board.

In addition to its political statement, the concluding conjugal vision of these two divine comedies has theological dimensions stemming from the traditional interpretation of the Hebrew Bible's Song of Songs, whose erotic lyrics were ascribed to the love of God.  The sanctified marriage between the bride of Jerusalem and the lamb contrasts with the illicit union between the Whore of Babylon and the beast.  Though Ferdinand and Miranda burn with ardor, Cupid and Venus are still banned from their entertainments (4.1.84Ð101), and Prospero has come to trust that, when he opens the curtain, the lovers will be observed in honourable play rather than doing what Caliban or Stefano would in 'murkiest den' or 'opportune place' (4.1.25Ð6).  Though Jerusalem's gates are never shut, 'there shall enter into it none unclean thing' (21: 27).  Like the infinitely prosperous winterless world of springtime and harvest that the father conjured up for the bride and groom in The Tempest's wedding masque, Revelation's bride city is also an edenic garden where trees of life growing on the banks of a river yield a different crop every month.

As Prospero's final vision of the lovers is regarded in silent rapture by the lords, Ferdinand and Miranda become aware that they are being watched and watch back with the same wonder they inspire (5.1.181Ð7).  But this zenith of wonder, when all regard one another as divine spirits or as performers on a stage, soon passes.  The lords and the lovers begin to experience each other as real.  This is the masque's climactic momentÑa moment, says Stephen Orgel, that 'was nearly always the same: the fiction opened outward to include the whole court, as masquers descended from pageant car or stage and took partners from the audience.  What the noble spectator watched he ultimately became'. [186]

d) At the conclusion of Revelation and The Tempest, the 'opening outward' from Patmos and Prospero's island dissolves barriers between seer and reader, performer and audience, vision time and 'real' time.  Once the New Jerusalem is reached by John, it immediately fades, and he never returns to the heavenly court.  At the vision's climax God had addressed him directly from within the heavenly city: 'And he said unto me, "Write: for these words are faithful and true"' (21: 6).  In the last chapter, the same words are repeated as a memory of an experience already past and a prediction of one to come: 'And he said unto me, "These words are faithful and true . . . Behold, I come shortly"' (22: 6Ð7).  John reassembles his identity as a person in time and space: 'And I am John which heard and saw these things' (22: 8).  The angel at whose feet he falls lifts him up saying, 'See thou do it not: for I am thy fellow servant, and of thy brethren the Prophets, and of them which keep the words of this book: worship God' (22: 9).  Having completed his passage through a series of trials and revelations, he is now invited to participate in a communion that extends to readers of his book.

Similarly, after the royal party has passed from being one another's visions into one another's reality, Prospero urges Alonso to get up from his knees in a tone of humility expressing his own recently transformed awareness that, like the angel, he speaks not with the voice of God addressing a novitiate but rather with that of a brother and fellow communicant: 'There, sir, stop. | Let us not burden our remembrance with | A heaviness that's gone' (5.1.202Ð4).  As secular time resumes, the vision already past is recollected, reflected upon and written down so that it can be preserved: God says, 'Seal not the words of the prophecy of this book . . . ' (22: 10).  Gonzalo insists that they 'set . . . down | With gold on lasting pillars' (5.1.210Ð11) a record of this occasion of revelation and self-discovery to which 'you gods, . . . have chalked forth the way' (5.1.204Ð6) when 'in one voyage . . . all of us ourselves [did find] | When no man was his own' (5.1.211, 215Ð16).

The masque's transition from presentation to participation is completed in the epilogues of both works.  In Revelation, the union of God and human, speaker and hearer, is expressed with a series of invitations that echo the conjugal exchanges from the Song of Songs and recall the visionary wedding pageants but now are uttered on the old earth and directed to John's audience: 'And the Spirit and the bride say, "Come."  And let him that heareth, say, "Come": and let whosoever will, take of the water of life freely . . . Surely, I come quickly' (22: 17, 20).

With half a turn to the audience in the Banqueting House when the play was performed at court, Prospero says, 'Sir, I invite your highness and your train | To my poor cell, where you shall take your rest | For this one night' (5.1.304Ð6).  The first words of his last speech as Duke of Milan, 'I'll deliver all' (5.1.317), retain the diction of a former God of Power.  But they refer specifically to details of 'the story of  . . . [his] life' (l. 316) that have not yet been told, and to the 'calm seas, auspicious gales' (l. 318) that will carry the king's fleet home.  Prospero's final utterance is 'Please you draw near' (5.1.323).  'You' here again refers not only to the stage lords, but also to the audience.  'Exeunt' directs the characters to disappear.  And yet the speaker of the epilogue remains present, no longer representing only Prospero but the actor who plays him and the creator who made him, addressing people with whom a theatrical revelation has been shared.  He implores them to 'release me . . . With the help of your good hands. | Gentle breath of yours my sails | Must fill or else my project fails, | Which was to please' (Epilogue 9Ð13).  As they 'deliver' applause and cheers, spectators become participants in the fiction while theatrical character becomes actor or author.

In Revelation, the request for involvement also produces a response.  A new voice is briefly but unmistakably heardÑthe voice of the bride just mentionedÑwhich is also the voice of the congregation accepting the invitation with an invitation of its own: 'Amen.  Even so come, Lord Jesus' (22: 20).  After the noise in Shakespeare's theatre died down, Prospero may have gestured in such a way that the audience, their hands still tingling, would have brought and held their palms together as he concluded:

Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

And my ending is despair

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so, that it assaults

Mercy itself, and frees all faults

As you from crimes would pardoned be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

(Epilogue 14Ð20)

If that were the case, his last lines of benediction would have echoed the last line of the Bible as well: 'The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen'. (22: 21)

5

Similarities between The Tempest and the book of Revelation illuminate both texts, but so do their differences.  Three stand out at the end.  Unlike God, who fully realizes his omnipotence, casts out his enemies, and seals up history, Prospero renounces divinity, forgives those who wronged him, and leaves the final outcome of events open.  These discrepancies may signify an intention to critique the ideology of Divine Right Monarchy maintained by King James and other seventeenth-century European rulers. [187]    Some have surmised that they express Shakespeare's repudiation of the biblical idea of an end to history 'in an age too late for apocalypse, too critical for prophecy'; [188] that Shakespeare sought to 'demystify the apocalypse and thereby humanize it . . . to turn responsibility for the shaping of history over to man and thereby secularize the Christian prophecy'; [189] that he was translating the biblical story about underlying metaphysical reality into an early modern story about theatrical illusion 'in an age when Apocalypse was in the air, while the traditional images of it were being recognized as mere images.' [190]

But it also may signify that in his conclusion Shakespeare preferred to revert to the model of Joseph at the end of Genesis or to an identification between Prospero and the Jesus of the gospels whose 'kenosis' or relinquishment of divinity to suffer as a mortal for the sake of his subjects provided a different paradigm for the glorification of rulers. Jesus' willingness to forgive his tormenters expressed in the words from the Lord's Prayer echoed in Prospero's last words was also a model for the administration of royal pardons.

The book of Revelation concludes with its author's assertion of finality.

For I protest unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues, that are written in the book.  And if any man shall diminish of the words of this book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the Book of life, and out of the holy city, and for those things which are written in this book.

(22: 18Ð19)

These words insist on the completeness of the book and therefore of the Bible as a whole.  They claim an eternal stability of the text as it stands, pre-empting both prior claims and future revisions.  The Tempest, by contrast, is not the last piece of writing that Shakespeare producedÑhe collaborated on three later playsÑand some have been struck by its inconclusiveness rather than its finality: 'The sense of unfinished business is finally the life of the play.  Prospero's is a story for which Shakespeare provides no ending'. [191]

But though The Tempest  concludes open-endedly with a human creator's acknowledgement of fallibility, limitation, and mortality, it has been resurrected by its admiring readers and critical redactors into a complete and perennial corpus, along with the big book in which it was placed as a capstone.  Those who assembled the canon of the First Folio, Shakespeare's friends and his colleagues in the King's Men, insisted that it was 'published according to the true originall copies'. [192]    They also insisted, like Protestant biblical commentators, that the text was the source of its own vindication:

Read him therefore; and again and again: And if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.  And so we leave you to other of his friends, whom if you need can be your guides: if you need them not you can lead your selves, and others.  And such readers we wish him. [193]

They countered his acceptance of mortality with apotheosis: 'Thou art alive still while thy book doth live | And we have wits to read and praise to give . . . Stay I see thee in the Hemisphere | Advanced and made a constellation there'. [194]   And they refuted Prospero's admission that the theatre was ephemeral by envisioning an encore in which his author's book of plays itself becomes his Second Coming:

From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room.

We thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth

Tells the spectators that thou wentst but forth

To enter with applause.  An actor's art

Can die and live, to act a second part

That's but an exit of mortality

This a re-entrance to a plaudite. [195]