‘Very like a whale’: Scepticism and Seeing in The Tempest

Summary

Even among Shakespeare's plays The Tempest inspires an unusual amount of confusion and multiple interpretation. Mark Van Doren finds his way through all the commentary to a less than helpful conclusion:' Any set of symbols, moved close to this play, lights up as in an electric field. Its meaning, in other words, is precisely as rich as the human mind, and it says that the world is what it is.' Rather than offer still another reading, I want to look at the confusion as a phenomenon in the play itself, though some implications about meaning are likely to emerge despite my self-restraint.

One might consider the difficulty of The Tempest a non-problem, invented by modern hyper-ingenuity, but after all our difficulties of understanding are shared by the characters in the play. On looking from the critics back to the text, we may recognize ourselves in Prospero's diagnosis of Alonso's state: 'thy brains, / Now useless, boil'd within thy skull!' Alonso is not alone. Repeatedly characters do not know what to make of what they see, and when they think they understand something, they are frequently wrong. In the Renaissance the locus dassicus for analysing this kind of confusion in human affairs is Montaigne's Apology for Raymond Sebond, and it is a truism of modern criticism that Montaigne is one of the inspiring figures behind The Tempest.