Ariel and Allegory in The Tempest Essay examples -- Tempest essays

Ariel and emblem in The tempest The temptation to regard The storm as an emblem has proved irresistible to critics, although opinions differ on what it might be an allegory of, and what the booster cable figures might repre move. In this essay I wish to demonstrate the character of Ariel, who has received less attention than either Caliban or Prospero. If The Tempest is an allegory then each of its characters should fulfil some representative function. Prospero is for the most part associated with the playwright (or even, which amounts to much the same thing in some views, with God) as he rules the action on stage. Caliban is taken to represent the physical formula of humanity, or the will, his uncivilised condition making him close to the beasts. In this view, Prospero represents understanding (in seventeenth-century terms wit, or reason). The opposition of infected will and perfected wit is a common trope of Protestant discourse, as in Sir Philip Sidneys Defense of Poes ie. FN1 Ariel, then, (an airy spirit in the Names of the Actors) might represent a third part of the self, the soul or spirit, but at this blockage the allegory seems to break down, in that Ariel is clearly not Prosperos immortal soul, or the divine part in man, as he is under the control of Prospero as intellect, and in fact performs the action of the play just as Prospero directs it. Frank Kermode, in his introduction to the Arden edition, criticises the tendency to allegorical interpretation, and seems to have imbibed something of the lately Shakespeares insistence on the importance of Chastity. It is not surprising that The Tempest has sent people whoring after strange gods of allegory (p.lxxx) and most modern attitudes to the play ar... ...s the barrier. If The Tempest is an allegory, then Nora Johnson is probably closest in describing Ariel as a delicate agency spirit a figure representing the essence of theatre. If performing Ariel must have presented extensive technic al challenges on the Jacobean stage, the problem for a modern ware is to encourage the suspension of disbelief in the audience whilst avoiding comparison with the fairies and principal boys of Pantomime. NOTES 1. Sometimes called Apology for Poetry. 2. Nora Johnson, Body and Spirit, Stage and Sexuality in The Tempest (in) Political Shakespeare, (eds) Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen, Volume 9 of Shakespeare, the Critical Complex, Garland Publishing, New York and London, (1999), pp. 271-290. 3. Horace Howard Furness (ed.), The Tempest, A New Varorium Edition, J.P. Lippincott, Philadelphia, (1895).