Book Reviews and More: The Tempest Pelican Shakespeare

The Tempest

William Shakespeare

Peter Holland (Editor)

The Pelican Shakespeare

Penguin Classics

ISBN 9780143128632

eISBN 9780698410831

ASIN B01BK0SQ1S

The Tempest Pelican Shakespeare - William Shakespeare

Six years back I started reading Shakespeare again, as my children were being introduced to it in High school. Then four years ago my son who is now 18 found he had a love for the Bard and for his plays, much as I did at that age. We had been sticking to the Oxford School Shakespeare editions as those were the versions they were reading in school, but my son decided to collect these Pelican editions because they are all available as individual volumes. We loved that the Pelican has the complete works of Shakespeare in individual volumes, and we have been picking those up to read, he gets the physical and I grab the eBooks. I loved that there are eBooks for all volumes in this series, because of a dual form of dyslexia. This year we picked up tickets for three Shakespeare plays at The Stratford Festival, including this play, we did three of the Bards plays each of the last few years well.

The Pelican Classics were among my favourite editions of the plays when I was a youth myself. I often hunted used bookstores for the hard cover edition. I think the last time I read this would have been about 35-40 years ago. And even though I have not yet seen a production it came back fairly quickly. The description of this edition states:

“This edition of The Tempest is edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Holland and was recently repackaged with cover art by Manuja Waldia. Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series.

The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.”

Based on the commonly accepted chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays this usually ranked as one of the last written believed to have been written in 1610-1611. The sections in this volume prior to the text of the play are:

Publisher’s Note

The Theatrical World

William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon, Gentleman

The Question of Authorship

The Texts of Shakespeare

Introduction

Note on the Text

The publishers note states:

“THE PELICAN SHAKESPEARE has served generations of readers as an authoritative series of texts and scholarship since the first volume appeared under the general editorship of Alfred Harbage over half a century ago. In the past decades, new editions followed to reflect the profound changes textual and critical studies of Shakespeare have undergone. The texts of the plays and poems were thoroughly revised in accordance with leading scholarship, and in some cases were entirely reedited. New introductions and notes were provided in all the volumes. The Pelican Shakespeare was designed as a successor to the original series; the previous editions had been taken into account, and the advice of the previous editors was solicited where it was feasible to do so. The current editions include updated bibliographic references to recent scholarship.

Certain textual features of the new Pelican Shakespeare should be particularly noted. All lines are numbered that contain a word, phrase, or allusion explained in the glossarial notes. In addition, for convenience, every tenth line is also numbered, in italics when no annotation is indicated. The intrusive and often inaccurate place headings inserted by early editors are omitted (as has become standard practice), but for the convenience of those who miss them, an indication of locale now appears as the first item in the annotation of each scene.

In the interest of both elegance and utility, each speech prefix is set in a separate line when the speakers’ lines are in verse, except when those words form the second half of a verse line. Thus the verse form of the speech is kept visually intact. What is printed as verse and what is printed as prose has, in general, the authority of the original texts. Departures from the original texts in this regard have the authority only of editorial tradition and the judgment of the Pelican editors; and, in a few instances, are admittedly arbitrary.”

And the introduction begins with:

“IN 1616, Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson published a large volume containing his own collected works, the first time an English playwright had made such an emphatic statement about the worth of his writing. At the head of the volume he placed the earliest of his plays that he was prepared to acknowledge, Every Man in His Humour. Seven years later, in 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors, collected together Shakespeare’s plays and published Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, the book now known as the First Folio. The first play in the volume is The Tempest, probably the last play wholly written by Shakespeare.

When Jonson’s play was first performed in 1598, it was set in Italy. But in his Works he printed a revised version, with the action transposed to London. Shakespeare’s play is set, according to his editors, on “an uninhabited island.” The revised Every Man in His Humour reflects the teeming density of life in a great city, finding there the versions of human behavior that Jonson wished to display in the theater. If Jonson’s characters are often derived from comic stereotypes and classical comedy, they live in a London that is bursting with the details of the streets just outside the theaters where the play was performed. The Tempest seeks to examine human behavior in a world that proves, with increasingly dizzying paradoxicality, to be both real and unreal, actual and artifice. For the world through which the characters move is both a creation of Prospero’s magic art and something beyond that art, in exactly the same way that their desires and intentions prove variously to be within the scope of Prospero’s manipulation or frustratingly beyond it.”

Later we are informed:

“For The Tempest makes careful use of its deliberately placed echoes of classical narratives. A play in which Claribel has been married in the city where Dido ruled and died when abandoned by Aeneas, and in which Ferdinand’s first words about Miranda, “Most sure, the goddess” (I.2.422), translate words of Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid, is clearly evoking an epic narrative of the voyaging and the founding of empire. A play in which Prospero describes his frightening magical powers (V.1.33–50) in a remarkably close use of Medea’s invocation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 7) and Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation is clearly transmuting her evil response to being a rejected lover in a strange land. A play in which Gonzalo promises to rule his ideal commonwealth so well as “T’ excel the golden age” (II.1.168) is reminding its audience of the perfect world, the prelapsarian ideal detailed by Ovid in the first book of Metamorphoses.”

The introduction concludes with:

“Shakespeare had rarely written epilogues before, but he had never written one in which the speaker is a character still trapped in the plot. At the end of As You Like It the actor playing Rosalind steps out from behind the character, offering to kiss us “If I were a woman” and thereby reminding us of the gender of the performer, not the gender of the character. At the end of All’s Well That Ends Well, the actor playing the King of France tells us, “The king’s a beggar, now the play is done.” Such reminders of the limits of the fictional world of performance are impossible in The Tempest, where Shakespeare has emphasized an identity between the stage and the world. Prospero, not the actor, must try to conjure again without his magical powers, asking us for a storm of applause to balance the storm of the first scene. He asks us for his liberty, as he had been asked by Ariel to release him at the beginning of the play. Throughout the play characters have been enslaved by Prospero: Caliban and Ariel, Ferdinand and his father, Antonio and Sebastian. Now the play’s slave master asks for mercy by calling on the audience’s own need: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free.”

Prospero has been removed from the other human characters in all three of the roles he has played. As monarch colonizing and ruling the island, as magus-scientist controlling his experiment with superhuman forces, as theatrical creator making the humans perform as characters in his play, he has sustained a removedness. But Prospero must finally come to some kind of awareness of what has occurred and how it affects him. Lying behind his tormented account to Miranda in I.2 of the events leading to his exile, the unacted beginning of the play’s narrative, are years of repression of that knowledge. When Prospero tells Miranda, it is as if he tells himself for the first time, as if he voices what has been unspoken for twelve years. The contradictoriness of the account, the ambiguities between the blame for his own negligence and the indictment of Antonio, should worry us if we pay careful attention. Prospero’s multiple roles support his authority: as playwright, as magus, and as king. In abandoning his art and his island rule he will turn again into a duke, not a king, and appear “As I was sometime Milan” (V.1.86). Shorn of the otherness of his power and its symbols of robe and staff, Prospero in the last scene can often appear in productions oddly disappointing, a little too ordinary when wearing the hat and rapier he orders Ariel to fetch. After the vastnesses of the play’s compass, after the distances the mind imaginatively travels outside the island, Prospero’s appearance may bring us down to earth with something of a bump. Going out of the theater, the first audience found itself in the London Jonson had depicted in Every Man in His Humour, a city that may have been reassuringly mundane. The Tempest peoples its uninhabited island with a range of characters and concepts that Jonson never comprehended.”

This play comprises 5 acts and a total of 9 scenes, the play takes place over a single day, but we are given a lot of historic information. It is a wonderful play about family, reconciliation, magic and human nature. According to Goodreads there are almost 4000 editions of this play. This Pelican edition is great for reading or study.

I am glad I picked this up to read with my son before going to see a performance we both finished it the week before attending. It reminded me how much I loved these editions when I was young and we have started collecting the eBook versions now. If you are looking for a good copy of the play to read or study I can easily recommend this edition.

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