The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Ninety-Four A word about John Spencer Stockfish

The Tempest, the late Mr Shakespeare's last play, seems to me as perfect in its kind as almost anything we have of his. One may observe that the classical unities are kept here with an exactness uncommon to the liberties of his writing. It is a play about magic, and that magic has in it something very solemn and very poetical. I would draw your attention in particular to the character of Caliban. It is certainly one of the finest and most uncommon grotesques that ever was seen, but what is then remarkable is that it is to this uncouth, wild figure that Shakespeare gives the most delicate poetry in the play - I mean the speech beginning Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises ... Only a writer at the very top of his powers could have dared to do this. It seems to me that Shakespeare not only found out a new character in his Caliban, but also devised and adopted a new manner of language for that character.

The name Caliban is a phonetic anagram of CANNIBAL. Mr Shakespeare pointed that out to me himself, one day when showers had ruined our rehearsal. As for the name Ariel, he took that from his friend Thomas Heywood's rhymed catechism of the occult, the Hierarchy of Blessed Angels. In that work Ariel is named as the spirit who commands the elements and governs tempests. As for Setebos, the god adored by Caliban, that name was printed first in Thevet's Cosmographie, but I think it more likely that WS got it from a popular source, probably Eden's History of Travayle (1577). He only ever needed a few bits and scraps like this to set his mind in motion. And of course once he got going the whole play became profoundly autobiographical. In Prospero we look on Mr Shakespeare's likeness. The magician breaking his wand and retiring to Naples is the poet breaking his pen and retiring to Stratford.

We had a great metal bowl with a cannon ball in it. This was our thunder for The Tempest (and King Lear). Ben Jonson makes fun of our effects in the prologue to his Bartholomew Fair, offering ironic excuses for not having sought applause by staging monsters (an allusion to Caliban), and for hesitating to unleash nature, 'like those that beget Tales, Tempests'. Mr Jonson missed the point, as usual. It was not the stage properties that made The Tempest so moving and so memorable. It was the words.

Too old for Miranda, I took the part of Ariel. But there was more to this casting than the matter of my age. I think that Shakespeare wrote the part of Ariel for me, since Ariel is a spirit, something beyond man or woman. I had served my master well, and I had gone for him through the female and the male. In Ariel he recognised and rewarded my service in the sexual journey, the ways in which I had enacted on the stage the secret dreams and dramas of his heart. He set me forth now as a creature neither male nor female, and beyond either condition. Then, at the play's end, he set me free, even as he freed himself in the person of Prospero. No doubt it was his recognition that he had ruined my life, even as he had also made me.

If I could, would I fly backwards from the garden and up onto the wall, and unsing Polly Dear, and never know him?

I would not.

I am happy enough to be Ariel.

Call me a little epitome of the leavings of Dame Nature's workshop, a compound of all sorts and sexes, a wheyfaced hermaphrodite. I shall not care to quarrel with those callings. I am what I am, and William Shakespeare made me.

Note Ariel's last words to Prospero, my words to Mr Shakespeare in that part:

Was't well done?

That is the only question I care to ask. His answer to it, spoken aside, still more than contents me:

Bravely, my diligence. Thou shalt be free.

I always took that for my approbation. My master's approval of my career in his service. Not that I am free, not yet, not quite. Nor shall be till I have finished with this my book.

John Spencer Stockfish played the part of Miranda. John Spencer Stockfish had several qualities in common with Susanna Shakespeare, so shall we say that this part suited him down to the ground?

John Spencer Stockfish was my Caliban, madam.

John Spencer Stockfish was a shit, sir, yes.