A Masque of Revelation: The Tempest as Apocalypse

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 magician-playwright 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, also known as "The Apocalypse."

The Tempest was first presented at court on November 1, 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, 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.

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."(12:15-16) 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."(1.2.10-13)

The words of The Tempest identify Prospero with the God of Revelation in language which refers to him, in the powers and behavior 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 father--"...I am more better/ Than Prospero.../And thy no greater father." (1.2.19-21), and 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, call’d forth the mutinous winds,/...to the dread rattling thunder/Have I given fire." (5.1.41-48)

Shakespeare could find precedent for mounting the book of Revelation on stage in the medieval cycles of Corpus Christi plays, which typically had seven instalments, culminating in a final play, called Antichrist or Judgment, 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"--as a metaphor rather than a representation.

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." Like that of the Apocalypse, "the unreality of The Tempest contributes towards the play's high suggestive power," but that sense of unreality keeps both works from comfortably fitting into any category of narrative. Instead of a story, they are experienced by viewer or reader like 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. 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." 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.

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." 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, London was envisioned as the bridal chamber and its populace as his betrothed. 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."

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 wonder--a common objective of politics, art and religion. Wonder was defined by Renaissance writers and their classical predecessors as "a systole of the heart"--a unique reaction of soul, mind and body combining both fear and joy and resulting from an encounter with something uncanny and sublime. 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."(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."(1.2.425-430) When Miranda sees her first young man, she says "It carries a brave form. But tis a spirit... I might call him/A thing divine."(1.2. 415, 422-3) Even cynical Sebastian cannot hide his wonder at Prospero's last masque as he blurts, "a most high miracle."(5.1.180)

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."

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... is marked by the sudden appearance of the masquers"-- transforms the relationship between audience and performers. "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." 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 concludes, God speaks directly with the members of John's audience(22:6 ff.), and when, after all the characters have left the stage, the actor who played Prospero addresses his audience directly in the epilogue in the persona of both the character and its author.

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 displaying a series of battles in which good triumphs and evil is defeated, followed by depictions of resurrection, judgement and the dissolution of the world C) a new pageant combining re-creation with marriage 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 father-initiators. 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.(1.2.5-13) 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… The direful spectacle... I have ... So safely ordred..."(1.2.12-29) 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 "living creatures" and twenty four elders offer tribute and praise.(4:11) 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."(1.1.190-193) 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 unfold 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) The battle pageant has ten parts. In the first, plagues are loosed upon world. 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.(6:15). Ariel describes the similar plagues he has inflicted 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."(1.2.202-207)

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. This tale resembles that of Miranda's deliverance from flood waters under her father's care. They were left "To cry to th' sea that roared to us, to sigh/ To the winds,"(1.2.149-50) but then were rescued "By providence divine." (1.2.160) Prospero adopts the part of the birthing mother: "...I 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."(1.2.155-8)

The third part of the pageant of battles introduces more monsters. In Revelation 13, the beast and its offspring, who resemble the dragon and are subject to him, crawl out of the sea, reproduce, "mouth unto blasphemy against God,"(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--"mother of whoredoms and the abomination of the earth"(5-6) She resembles Prospero's old antagonist, Sycorax, who was banished from Algiers to the island for being a "foul witch...damned for mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible to enter human hearing" who issued "earthy and abhorred commands," and who mated with the devil to conceive a monstrous son, Caliban. After the story of their rescue, Prospero tells Miranda to regard this "freckled whelp, hag-born--not honoured with/A human shape" whose ambition, lust and proclivity for drink are inherited from his mother.(1.2.285-6) In both the Apocalypse 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, the saved appear and are tried. They are those men "which are not defiled with women: for they are virgins,"(4) contrasted to those with the appetites and lusts of the beast. Ferdinand and Miranda are the saved in The Tempest, whose sexual restraint once proven, will elicit the father's blessing.

The fifth part elaborates the crimes and the punishments of the evil ones. 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. Overly eager Antonio and Sebastian are repeatedly frustrated by the disappearance of their quarry at the very moment they think they have got it, and Caliban, Trinculo and Stefano pay the drunkards' price of falling into a cesspool with terrible hangovers.

The sixth part elaborates on the whore of Babylon. Having committed fornication with the kings of the earth and "drunken with the blood of the saints,"(17:6) she rides a scarlet monster and bears a large chalice of wine. Stefano comes upon Caliban bearing a wine bottle he's made out of bark and sings of his fornication with Moll, Meg, Marian and Margery.(2.2.45-55) 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. Caliban responds to his "celestial liquor" by worshipping Stefano as a god, mirroring the Biblical equation of whoredom, drunkenness and idolatry.

The seventh part of the pageant subjects the enemies to judgement and sentencing in the midst of their pleasures. 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."(18:2-3) In The Tempest, "You are three men of sin, whom destiny--/That hath to instrument this lower world/And what is in it--the never surfeited sea/ Hath caused to belch up you.../.../Being most unfit to live."(3.3.53-8)

The eighth part shifts to a wedding feast of the saved. After yet another throne room victory vaunt--Revelation' "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,"(3.3.88-90) the 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..."(19:7-9) Prospero does the same: "In these fits I leave them, while I visit/Young Ferdinand...and his and mine loved darling."(3.3.91-3) He congratulates them for passing his tests and presents them with a vision of the greater joys they are promised in the form of an extended masque.(4.1.59-138)

In the ninth part the celebration is interrupted and the battles are concluded. 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."(4.1.182-4)

The tenth part concludes this pageant with victory, resurrection and final judgement. In Revelation, a separate accommodation is prepared for the dragon, who is chained up in an abyss for 1000 years(20:1-3), while Antonio and the men of sin in The Tempest are "Confined...Prisoners, sir/ In the line-grove.../They cannot budge till your release."(5.1.8-11) Chapter 20 of the Apocalypse concludes with a compact description of the resurrection and last judgment. "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) Prospero also brings on resurrection and judgment. At his behest, "the mariners asleep/under the hatches"(5.1.100-01) are brought before him in disbelief about their rebirth: "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..."(5.1.233-40) 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 are judged on the basis of their deeds.

C) The end of the judgment incidents in chapter 20 of Revelation and at The Tempest 5.1.87 marks a major structural division in both works. 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 upward 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: "...like the baseless fabric of this vision...the great globe itself,...shall dissolve; And...Leave not a rack behind." (4.1.148-56)

The dissolution of heaven and earth makes way for a new order, which is also a restoration.(21:3) The God who withdrew to heaven 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. Prospero creates a new reality with similar gestures of self-disclosure and intimacy. 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 wronged duke of Milan, Prospero. ...howsoever you have/Been justled from your senses know for certain/That I am Prospero" (5.1.108-9, 159-61) Here he follows "the 'I am' self-disclosure formula" conventional in Graeco-Roman as well as Hebrew and Christian apocalypses.

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, God's angel says "Come, I will show thee the bride, the Lamb's wife," to John, and he takes him to "a great and high mountain"(21:9,10) to watch the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. "I will requite you with...a wonder to content ye," says Prospero as he conducts the lords to the threshold of his cell and there "discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess." 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. 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.(5.1.177) 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 moment--a 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."(39)

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."(22:6-7) 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 passage through a series of trials and revelations, he is now invited to participate in a communion which extends to readers of his book.

Similarly, after the royal party have passed from being one another's visions into one another's reality, Prospero urges Alonso 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."(5.1.202-4) 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"(5.1.210-11) a record of this occasion of revelation and self discovery to which "you gods,... have chalked forth the way"(5.1.204-6)--when "in one voyage/.../...all of us ourselves [did find]/When no man was his own."(5.1.211-16)

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."(5.1.304-6) 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" that have not yet been told, and to the "calm seas, auspicious gales" 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 all" 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." 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 heard--the voice of the bride just mentioned, which is also the voice of the congregation accepting the invitation with an invitation of its own: "Amen. Even so come, Lord Jesus."(20) After the noise in Shakespeare's theatre died down, he 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:

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."

Steven Marx

English Department

Cal Poly University San Luis Obispo 93407

Smarx@calpoly.edu