Okay, brace yourselves for this one. Are you seated? Here’s my latest discovery: I think Prospero is a very complex character. Shocking, right?

I’ve been going through the text, paying much attention to the verse. It seems obvious that the way a thing is said can affect the meaning – it can give context clues, for example. In analyzing things that are written in verse, though, there’s another layer of meaning. The rhythm of a speech can give clues as well. More on this in a minute, because I’m going through my weekend of “discoveries” in chronological order.

I’ve mentioned that Prospero seems very self-centered and appears to have a need to dominate. Keeping that in mind as I was working through the rest of the text, I came across one passage that I thought unlocked everything. Once Ferdinand and Miranda meet, Prospero says, in an aside, “The Duke of Milan / And his more braver daughter could control thee / IF NOW ‘TWERE FIT TO DO’T.” Well, that’s it, I thought. That’s the plan – all of the action of the play is set up so that Prospero can control Ferdinand, and by extension, Naples AND Milan. Perhaps the profit which Prospero has made as Miranda’s schoolmaster involved reading The Prince, and so on… But, after more reflection, I don’t think it’s that simple, because I believe Prospero really does love Miranda. She’s more than a tool to be used to dominate others.  When Prospero turns his attention from the brace of lords after the illusory feast appears to them, and turns his attention back to the young lovers, he says, “and in these fits I leave them, while I visit / Young Ferdinand, whom they suppose is drown'd, / And his AND MINE LOVED darling.” This last line could have been written, “and his beloved darling,” and would scan in perfect iambic, as the previous two lines do. As it is, I read it as, “and HIS and MINE LOVed DARling.” Whether or not the –ed at the end of Loved is sounded, I think you still have “mine” and “loved” together, both stressed, after several lines of regular verse - to me, that says so much. Serious emphasis is being placed on Prospero's love for Miranda in this passage.

Much more work to do.

Prospero: Kind of a dick.

Saturday, we had our first read-through of The Tempest. I’d already started learning some of my lines, but then I decided to wait until we got the final script. No sense learning lines that had been cut – mostly because it’d simply confuse me.  Incidentally… according to the online public domain version of The Tempest, the play contains 17,462 spoken words. Of those, Prospero says 4,786. That’s a little over 27%. I have enough work ahead of me without learning lines I’m not going to say in the production.

Nevertheless, when I got the script and started looking at the cuts, I was a little disappointed. Some of the earliest exchanges between Prospero and Miranda were cut – the business about what Miranda could remember before they came to the island – I felt there were some golden opportunities to show the affection between the father and daughter.

But then I realized that Prospero is really kind of a dick. Maybe we aren’t supposed to feel sympathetically toward him. After all, when he first appears, Miranda thinks she’s witnessed a few dozen people killed by Prospero’s magic. He tells her to calm down, because EVERYBODY IS TOTALLY SAFE. Well, that’s a lie. When Ariel first appears, shortly thereafter, he asks the spirit if everyone is safe. He actually had no idea whether those people were killed or not, but he told Miranda everything was fine. He also tells Miranda he has done nothing but in care of her. That’s a lie, too. He’s plotted out a big revenge strategy. Although there’s a component of it that MAY be in care of Miranda, even that seems questionable. His motivations for arranging the marriage to Ferdinand are as likely to be to profit himself as for Miranda’s well-being.

Then comes the issue of Caliban. So, let’s say you’re a Gandalf-level wizard. You’re alone on an island with your only daughter. You find a horrible creature there, a thing of darkness. And then it tries to rape your daughter. What do you do? Obviously, you keep the thing around, right? Because it makes the fire and fetches in wood. Things a wizard can’t do. Right? Obviously, I’m just at the beginning of this process, and I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts about this later, but it seems that Prospero has a need to dominate. He keeps Caliban around because he wants someone he can boss around. This fits with the more recent criticism of the play which suggests that it’s really about imperialism, but I feel that’s grafting an idea onto the play that didn’t even exist when it was written.

Anyway, with all of Prospero’s lies and self-centeredness, I’ve started to question many of the things he says. When Miranda asks why they were exiled instead of killed and Prospero replies that the schemers DARE not, because the people loved him so – really? Prospero didn’t give a shit about the people. He couldn’t be bothered. He didn’t have any interest in running the government. He skulked off to the tower to read. He abdicated his power to govern and improve matters for his people so that he could further his own personal interests.

Later in the play, he mentions that he forgot about Caliban and the plot to kill him. I suppose it’s possible that he isn’t a complete bastard, he’s just completely self-absorbed. At any rate, though – not exactly a warm, cuddly dude. He’s the kind of guy who would make you walk all the way to Mordor, while he rides a giant eagle everywhere. 

Prospero, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the verse (I hope)

I recently read an essay by David Tennant about his work as Touchstone in As You Like It. Excited about the chance to work with the RSC, he showed up expecting to audition for the role of Orlando. Instead, he was asked to read for Touchstone, a role he hadn’t prepared for. In the essay, he discussed some of the difficulties he faced with the character, and frankly admits there are some things he never felt he got right. It’s very heartening to know that other actors struggle like this, particularly ones whom I respect so highly. I think about that every time I get stumped.

I mention this because I’m working through something right now, something I hope will not stump me completely. I’m gearing up right now to play Prospero in The Tempest.  There is a basic rule in dealing with Shakespeare’s verse that when a line of verse can be delivered in iambic pentameter, it should be. The actor is supposed to go through his or her text and see if it can be made to fit the pattern. This is much more of an art than a science. Read a few books on the subject, and you’ll see disagreement on how different lines should be scanned. One thing seems really clear to me, though. In Act I, scene ii, when Prospero begins his long exposition to his daughter, Miranda, about how they came to be stranded on the island, the verse gets extremely difficult to scan. This isn’t unusual in a later play, as Shakespeare’s use of verse really changed over the course of his career. But there are passages that are simply unnecessarily difficult. Here’s a prime example:

Out of the dukedom and confer fair Milan

I start to scan this, and at first I think it looks simple. It starts with a trochee, “OUT of,” and then goes back to iambic; “the DUKEdom AND conFER,” and then lo, and behold. “FAIR MiLAN?” The rest of the line would scan perfectly if it simply said “Milan.” The last foot could be an anapest (unstressed, unstressed, stressed) or a cretic (stressed, unstressed, stressed), but the point remains – the meter is irregular because of the inclusion of a word that doesn’t need to be there. Since the meter is so uneven, it suggests to me that Prospero is pretty agitated. It may seem obvious that he would be upset as he relates how he was deposed as Duke, but I don’t really think it’s that obvious. I could see an argument that since he planned out so many of the details of what is to befall his brother and the others on the ship, that he’s already planned to forgive them, too, but that doesn’t seem to work with the verse in the speech.

Which brings me to another problem. The story Prospero tells Miranda is a long one. I mean, the guy goes on for PAGES about this – a really long time – so long that he keeps asking Miranda if she’s paying attention. It’s going to be a challenge to find levels in the speeches, to pace it all, so that it keeps the audience’s interest.

But here’s the real goocher, the thing that really concerns me – from Julius Caesar on, Shakespeare started to use a LOT of shared lines. Sometimes shared lines are easy to deal with. If the line obviously has ten syllables, it’s pretty easy to deal with them. There’s either a caesura in there, or not, which means the other actor should generally pause, or pick up the line without a pause, respectively. But when the verse is as choppy and uneven as it is in I.ii. of The Tempest, it poses problems. I’m going to have to work with the other actors on how we’re going to scan these lines. But I don’t want to seem like a dick. It’s not my job as an actor to tell the other actors how to say their lines.

When I start working on an early modern English play, the first thing I do is see if my lines are in verse or prose. I make a prompt script for myself. I type all of my lines out into a word document. For the lines that are in verse, I create a table with ten columns, and try to scan the verse into the table, one syllable per cell. This process has been a huge pain in the ass so far, with the verse being so irregular. I’m going to actually try something else for this play, copying all of the text over and then scanning it by hand, drawing the little stress marks out and isolating the feet, so I can really look at the endings that may be three syllables and give them more thought.