Michael Neill

Noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs: The Burden of Shakespeare's Tempest

When Caliban reassures the terrified Stephano and Trinculo about the nature of the sounds that fill his island world, he draws attention to the fact that The Tempest, uniquely among Shakespeares plays, is equipped with an elaborate soundtrack. Although Caliban seems not to distinguish between them, two kinds of sound—noise, introduced by the chaotic racket of the opening storm, and music, introduced by the exquisite harmony of Ariels songs—alternate throughout the play. This article explores how this pattern contributes to the dramatic meaning of the play, emphasizing the way in which, by a network of delicate wordplay, it is linked to the burdens, both physical and emotional, from which its characters seek to be freed. The essay ends by indicating how such a reading might help to reconcile current postcolonial readings with the seemingly incompatible philosophical, biographical, and metadramatic approaches favored by previous critics.

Othello's Black Handkerchief: Response to Ian Smith

IN T H E WA K E O F I A N S M I T H ’ S C A R E F U L LY M A R S H A L E D A R G U M E N T S , Shakespeare’s great tragedy will never seem quite the same again. Smith takes us back, of course, to an aspect of Othello’s design that has been contentious ever since the play was first subjected to a systematic critique by the newly appointed Historiographer Royal, Thomas Rymer, in 1692. A would-be playwright himself—still smarting, one must suppose, from the long-ago failure of his own immaculately neoclassical tragedy, Edgar, or the English Monarch (1677)— Rymer, in his Short View of Tragedy, mounted a blistering attack on the playwrights of the previous age for their barbarous neglect of tragic decorum. He reserved particular scorn for the work which “from all the tragedies acted on our English stage, is said to bear the bell away”1—Shakespeare’s Othello. In Rymer’s judgment, the play was reprehensible for the gross “improbabilities” that marred its dramaturgy.2 Bridling against the impropriety of casting a (naturally upright) soldier as the villain of the piece, disdainful of the preposterous suggestion that a mere “Black-amoor” could rise to become a general of Venice (let alone marry the daughter of a senator), Rymer ridiculed a design whose time scheme required that playgoers “must deny their senses, to reconcile it to common sense,” and famously derided a plot that turned upon contrivances so patently ludicrous that the tragic action was reduced to “a Bloody Farce.”3 Long rendered obnoxious by its racial sneers, A Short View has been a convenient whipping boy for detractors of rule-bound neoclassical theory.4 For Karen Newman, Rymer’s contemptuous response to the play exposes him as “a kind of critical Iago.”5 But however much his judgment may have been clouded (like most of ours) by the prejudices of his own time, Rymer was by no means imperceptive. Indeed, as his remarks about the play’s perplexing chronology