An Orpheus for a Hercules: Virtue Redefined in ‘The Tempest’

Summary

IN the brief interval of calm following Martius’ exile in the fourth act of Coriolanus, Brutus and Sicinius congratulate themselves on their astute handling of a difficult situation. Martius is safely out of the way and the ‘world goes well’ (IV.vi.5). Then comes news that Martius has joined forces with Aufidius and is about to attack Rome. At first the tribunes cannot believe their ears. ‘This is most likely!’ says Sicinius, ‘The very trick on’t’ (70; 73). But Cominius berates them for their stupidity, assuring them that Martius will be merciless in his vengeance. ‘He’ll shake your Rome about your ears’, Cominius tells them. ‘As Hercules did shake down mellow fruit’, adds Menenius (103–4). Though there are only two allusions to Hercules in Coriolanus, Eugene Waith is justified in describing Martius as the supreme Herculean hero. For Hercules is not only the archetypal warrior; he is also famed for his terrible vengeance. Shakespeare’s most egregious example of the warrior-hero is truly Herculean, not just in his manly courage, but also in his vindictive rage.

At the end of his writing career Shakespeare turns to an entirely different kind of political leader. If, as Waith suggests, the heroes of the martial tragedies are variations on a Herculean theme, the central mythological figure that dominates the late tragi-comedies is Hercules’ symbolic antithesis. That figure is Orpheus, the divinely gifted poet-musician who was able to move even ‘moody Pluto’ (The Rape of Lucrece, 553) by his eloquence. Though both Hercules and Orpheus are represented as peacemakers in Roman literature, they represent antithetical views of manhood and civilisation. ‘As the works of wisdom surpass in dignity and power the works of strength,’ wrote Bacon in The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609), ‘so the labours of Orpheus surpass the labours of Hercules.’ War is one of the most rigidly gendered of all human activities, and Hercules, the mythological founder of war, is the very type of heroic manhood. As Ben Jonson explained in a note to The Masque of Queens, Hercules was one of the principal figures in whom the ancients expressed ‘a brave & masculine virtue’. Not surprisingly, the values of the warrior-society are masculine values. Orpheus, by contrast is a type of the creative artist and embodies a very different ideal of manhood.