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EIGHT The Magician’s Garden: The Tempest and Comus
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325 EIGHT The Magician’s Garden: The Tempest and Comus With Wittipol in The Devil Is an Ass we perhaps find the closest approximation of an acceptably modern, or postmodern, construction of masculinity in a magical context, where, significantly, the magical aspiration, completely debunked, is superceded by an intellectual and psychological maturity constituted by humane and increasingly flexible modes of identification. I turn now to consider the most famous magician play in English literature, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in light of Milton’s Comus, one of the last dramatic treatments of magic in the Renaissance. The affinity between Comus and The Tempest has long been recognized but, it seems, never satisfactorily explained. In the context of this study, the poetic greatness of both might politically seem to represent a psychological and ideological regression from the (poetically inferior) The Devil Is an Ass, whose “humaneness” they hardly equal. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s culminating masterpiece and Milton’s remarkable masque reflect many of the tensions that characterize the problematic masculinity in the early modern period, with its key issues of sexual and religious control. And they do so by integrating, or at least attempting to come to terms with, the power of the irrational. 326 Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama In Philip Brockbank’s 1978 essay on Marvell, “The Politics of Paradise: ‘Bermudas,’” which explores the social and political context of Andrew Marvell’s beautiful but highly ironic lyric, the politics in question, and their relation to Shakespeare’s Tempest, become evident in Brockbank’s (now critically familiar) summary of the historical events surrounding the accidental discovery and colonization of the Bermudas: “Expecting ‘the most dangerous, unfortunate, and forlorne place in the world’”—it was reputedly “given over to devils and wicked spirits”—the Virginia-bound colonists “found it ‘the richest, healthfullest and pleasantest they ever saw.’”1 Ironically, however, according to the account of William Strachey, this island paradise was soon spoiled by the dissension and lack of discipline of its new inhabitants: In these dangers and devilish disquiets (whilst the almighty God wrought for us and sent us, miraculously delivered from the calamities of the sea, all blessings upon the shore to content and bind us to gratefulness) thus enraged amongst ourselves to the destruction of each other, into what a mischief and misery had we been given up had we not had a governor with his authority to have suppressed the same?2 Brockbank is probably better known to readers of Shakespeare for his seminal reading of the colonial context of The Tempest, which no doubt led him, with similar thematic concerns, to his later analysis of Marvell. But if the essay on The Tempest may be regarded as seminal, its particular emphasis has, recently, been far less influential than the approach taken by Stephen Greenblatt in Shakespearean Negotiations.3 There has arisen (it seems) a whole critical industry devoted to analyzing the sea-change in critical approaches to this play.4 Nevertheless a brief comparison between how Brockbank and Greenblatt read the same “source” material is highly instructive with respect to the changing prejudices of critical readers over the last 40 years. Greenblatt relies primarily on Strachey’s letter, unpublished until 1625 in Purchas his Pilgrimes, but read by Shakespeare in manuscript form, as assumed by many commentators of the play’s [3.144.124.232] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 04:05 GMT) The Tempest and Comus 327 cultural context.5 For Greenblatt, the “deepest fears” of the authorities “lie not with the human or natural resources of the New World but with the discipline of the English colonists and common seamen.” Since Bermuda was such an “extraordinarily pleasant surprise” there was increasing reluctance among the “luckily” shipwrecked inhabitants to move on to their original destination in Virginia: “There is, at least as Strachey reports it, virtually no internalization of the ideology of colonialism.” (Greenblatt implies here, not surprisingly, that this is a good thing, although one wonders if some sense of responsibility toward the remainder of the colonists who had arrived safely in Virginia would therefore be a bad thing.) After sympathetic descriptions of two of the more educated dissenters, one who tearfully repented, and the other who went recalcitrantly to his execution, Greenblatt relates how the group finally reached Jamestown aboard newly constructed ships and found the other colonists, who had passed almost a year without their governors Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Summers, in a “desperate...