May Your Indulgence Set Me Free: Shakespeare’s Farewell
Lantern Artistic Director Charles McMahon on THE TEMPEST and what it tells us about Shakespeare’s career.
Originally produced during Lantern Theater Company’s 2017/18 season and streaming May 4–30, 2021, as part of our new Plays from the Lantern Archives series, The Tempest is one of just a few Shakespeare plays characterized as “romances.” Neither comedy nor tragedy, the romances be might characterized as plays that begin as tragedies, but end in forgiveness and hope rather than in despair. Just what are these hybrid plays, and why does Shakespeare turn to them at the very end of his writing career?
“The romances really defy categorization. They don’t fall into the standard comedy, tragedy, history categorizations by which we usually define his plays,” says Charles McMahon, the Lantern’s artistic director and director of The Tempest. There are four Shakespeare plays in this unique genre: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. They were the last four plays Shakespeare wrote on his own, and all four were written within a three-year period.
These plays all feature tragic or potentially tragic events at their start, which resolve into something more forgiving by the end. Highlighting similarities between The Tempest and King Lear — which hinges on a former ruler and his fraught relationship with his daughter —McMahon notes that “later on in Shakespeare’s career he’s really veering more into fairy tales. Lear is still much closer to the form of classic tragedy, and I think Shakespeare feels released from the need to do these classic forms.”
In addition to their gentler resolutions, the romances all call for magic and spectacle onstage in ways Shakespeare’s earlier plays do not: Pericles starts with an onstage storm, The Winter’s Tale includes a statue coming alive and an onstage bear, and Cymbeline features a god descending on an eagle amid thunder and lightning. The Tempest is no exception: in addition to the storm that gives the play its title, its central character of Prospero is an accomplished sorcerer, and his chief helper is a powerful spirit. According to McMahon, “These are really bold formal experiments for Shakespeare. He’s trying something new.”
It is not only spectacle and wonderment that defines the romances, however. There is a psychological thread being pulled in each as well. These plays are characterized by the reunion of family members thought lost, and often feature a father-daughter relationship in which the daughter motivates the father to become a better, more forgiving version of himself.
“The romances all hinge on daughters that go on these extraordinary journeys. The daughters are really the heroes in the play. Again, it’s sort of a theme that he’s pulled out of King Lear and treating again and again. But you see it certainly in The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale and Pericles, and Imogen of course has got an extraordinary journey in Cymbeline.”
— Charles McMahon
As The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last solo play, written so closely to the other romances, these common themes take on deep meaning. The Tempest might be seen as a valedictory for Shakespeare’s career, a spiritual summation of the work he has been reaching for. Prospero plans and enacts the drama on the island, then lays down his craft, bidding farewell to magic at the moment his child is settled and ready to carry his lessons forward into the world. His work — and Shakespeare’s — is done, and he can ask his audience to release him from the stage before retiring.
“One gets the sense that Shakespeare is using the form of theater to work out some sort of personal psychological struggle,” McMahon says. “And I think that’s one of the things that really informs the work. It feels like some kind of cosmic question, some kind of spiritual question is being worked out that gives them an extra resonance.” In The Tempest, perhaps that cosmic question is laid to rest for the writer. In the fantastical and forgiving world he creates, conjuring magic — or drama — can be a means of making what is broken whole again.
Related reading: Shakespeare’s Tempests and the Sea Venture: The real events that inspired Shakespeare’s shipwreck in The Tempest. Plus: a Shakespeare quiz!
The Tempest is part of Plays from the Lantern Archives, a new series celebrating some of the finest productions from recent Lantern seasons, brought vividly back to life on screen. This performance was professionally filmed with a live theater audience in April 2018, and is streaming May 4–30, 2021. Visit our website for tickets and information.
