"marvellous and surprizing conduct": The "Masque of Devils" and Dramatic Genre in Thomas Shadwell's The Tempest

The epilogue to one of the most successful plays of the Restoration period, Thomas Shadwell's 1674 adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611), entitled The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island, speaks of poets' ghosts that haunt actors in "Visions bloudier th[a]n King Richard's was" (Epilogue, 9).¹ The epilogue suggests that the famous dream scene from Shakespeare's Richard III (c.1593), in which the king is haunted by visions of the ghosts of those he has murdered, would have been recognizable already to the first generation of theatergoers after the bard's own.² This says something important about the attractiveness of staged dreams and visions at that time, not least because Shadwell's Enchanted Island is itself full of strange visions, including the "Masque of Devils" in 2.4, set to music by Pelham Humfrey and Pietro Reggio, in which Prospero's spirits appear onstage as devils and terrify Alonso, Antonio, and Gonzalo.

Even though it took the Restoration theatre companies some time to turn to The Tempest—John Dryden and William Davenant did not revise it until 1667—Shakespeare's play is exceptionally well suited to the popular semi-operatic performance style of this period, featuring masque-like entertainment, singing, magic, and a tragicomic plot.³ I use the word "tragicomic" here mainly for want of a more appropriate critical term, because there continues to be disagreement amongst scholars over how to categorise The Tempest—as well as Pericles (1607), The Winter's Tale (1609), and Cymbeline (1610), with which it is usually grouped together. The terms "romance," "tragicomedy," "late play," and "last works" are routinely floated, but none of them are universally accepted.⁴ A similar question of genre arises with regard to Restoration drama, despite its neo-classical undercurrents: plays like William Davenant's The Law Against Lovers (1662)—a hybrid of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (1603) and Much Ado About Nothing (1598)—Thomas Killigrew's Pandora (1664), and John Dryden's Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen (1667) combine romantic and tragic or heroic plots.⁵ Most germane to the phenomenon of genre hybridization, however, are the period's so-called dramatick operas. These are a group of plays produced between 1673 and the turn of the century, including Shadwell's Enchanted Island, Henry Purcell's Fairy-Queen (1692)—an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)—and Charles Gildon's Measure for Measure, or, Beauty the Best Advocate (1700). Unlike the continental operas that were entirely sung, the English dramatick operas integrated dialogue spoken by actors and interspersed with songs. Especially through their aurally and visually spectacular offering, these plays challenge dramatic precepts of verisimilitude, unity, and genre, prompting Judith Milhous to differentiate them from the Restoration's "ordinary comedies and tragedies."⁶

Whereas most scholarly work on Restoration Shakespeare has focused on textual changes, on the plays' political contexts, or on their musical settings, this article uses the example of the "Masque of Devils" in the 1674 Enchanted Island to show how Shadwell and his collaborators hybridized dramatic genre through spectacle. Furthermore, it argues that the integration of semi-operatic spectacle and generic innovation in the "Masque of Devils" was not purely a Restoration invention, but something that Dryden, Davenant, and Shadwell—with their aesthetic nous and political awareness—developed from Shakespeare's original Tempest.⁷ Rather than being a Restoration addition to the play, Shadwell's "Masque of Devils"—like Dryden and Davenant's shorter equivalent masque in the 1667 version (published in 1670)—is in fact a subtle iteration of a moment in 3.3 of Shakespeare's play, where Ariel appears as a harpy, accompanied by thunder and lightning.⁸ Intriguingly, 3.3 marks one of the most generically indeterminate episodes in The Tempest, because even though it belongs to a play that the 1623 folio identifies as a comedy, it relies heavily on devices derived from tragedy.⁹ The present article sets out to explore how Shadwell and his collaborators used a combination of spectacle and textual as well...