If someone said they would take you to see a film that was both tempestuous and ethereal, you would be curious.  One is stormy – very stormy; in dictionary terms, ‘characterised by violent agitation’.  The other is light and airy, like a clear sky – perhaps even spirit-like, not of this world, celestial even.

The Tempest is widely seen as the author’s farewell to the theatre.  It is very condensed and it makes strong calls on the imagination.  It involves magic and it comes from another time. 

Much the same may be said for the painting La Tempesta by Giorgione.  Each may be said to be one of the title deeds of western civilisation. Each may also be said to be at least in part either tempestuous or ethereal.  And each has had rivers of ink spilled on it to explain the apparent contradiction. 

For the purpose of this note, I shall take each as ‘read’ – if I may be granted that latitude in speaking of a masterpiece.

Although the play starts with a tempest, it has a dream like quality throughout that is summed up in its most famous lines.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

It would require some hardihood to try to get inside that poetry.  (And it looks so apt for the painting, too.)  You may was well seek to explain the allure of Catherine Deneuve or the flipper of Shane Warne.  You do not have to have mastered Wittgenstein to say that of some things we cannot speak, and we must therefore remain silent.

But some cannot help themselves – even among the best and brightest.  Let us see what two writers say.  The American writer, Mark Van Doren:

The Tempest is a composition about which it is better not to be too knowing….it will not yield its secret easily; or it has no secret to yield…Its meaning is precisely as rich as the human mind, and it says that the world is what it is.  But what the world is cannot be said in a sentence.  Or even in a poem as beautiful and complete as The Tempest.

That sounds like rude good sense to me. 

W H Auden was a great poet, but in discussing Shakespeare, he calls to mind a remark about Milton – he was so intelligent, it was a wonder he wrote any poetry at all.  But Auden does throw light on the play by comparing it to others, except oddly the Dream, and he closes with a quote from Rilke:

Now he terrifies me,

This man who’s once more duke.  The way he draws

The wire into his head and hangs himself

Beside the other puppets, and henceforth

Asks mercy of the play.

Auden saw parallels with The Magic Flute, which too ignites bonfires of learned debate.  Midsummer Night’s Dream is closer to home in mixing the real with the surreal and requiring a suspension of analytic functions.  Mendelsohn’s Overture is both famous and gorgeous, but no one asks what it means.  In truth, if you asked the creator of the Pieta or Moonlight Sonata what they mean, your most polite response might be that you were impertinent.  

But I take some comfort from those writers in listening to this great play yet again. 

I had less luck with Giorgione.  I have a most handsome big book from the KHM Museum in Vienna.  It has two essays by German experts on the puzzle of La Tempesta.  One expert says:

Positing the presence of two levels of reality in the single phenomenal actuality of the painting has the methodological advantage of being able to observe the Subject and Not-Subject variants a work simultaneously.

I do not wish to be rude about German aesthetics, but may I give the response of Bluebottle in The Goons? ‘I don’t like this game.’

The other German scholar has a very different response.  After fastidious enquiry of ancient sources, he concludes that the warrior in the painting is Paris of Troy, and that the nude is someone called Oenone.  He even has a role for the shattered pillars.  May I say two things?  First, we know almost nothing of the artist, but it is hard to imagine an Italian Renaissance painter carrying on like Conan Doyle with a classics degree indulging in a cross between Charades and a cryptic crossword.  Secondly, I find no reference to the tempest in the analysis.

It is not surprising that we attach some mystique to what we now know to be the final works of great artists and minds – like Beethoven’s Ninth or Mozart’s Jupiter symphonies.  It is as if they finally rebel at the walls around them, and decide to take a peek over them before they go. 

This looks to me to be the kind of response of Newton and his entrancement with alchemy – that so scandalised the world of science.  Keynes, who may be said to have had an eye for genius, said:

Newton was not the first of the age of reason.  He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago…. For in vulgar modern terms, Newton was profoundly neurotic, of a not unfamiliar type, but – I should say from the records – a most extreme example.  His deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic – with profound shrinking from the world, a paralysing fear of exposing his thoughts, his beliefs his discoveries in all nakedness to the inspection and criticism of the world …. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty……

Many serious people felt the need to go quietly on all this – as they did with Newton’s denial of the Trinity.

It is inevitable now with the play, The Tempest, that the focus will be on Caliban.  He stands for the curse of the United States – slavery, and the brutalised savage that leads to caste.  Prospero says he ‘profits’ from Caliban and he has the gruesome line:

……this thing of darkness I

Acknowledge mine.  (5.1.275)

And it may be worse for us down here in Oz.  How did the drop-ins seduce the one they called ‘Monster’?  With the bottle.  They got him cruelly and revoltingly drunk.  ‘They were red-hot with drinking’ (4.1.171) and giving their preview of the Rum Rebellion.

What kind of people were they that ruined the savage in this play?  The scum of the earth – Trinculo and Stefano – two drunks – that we laugh out loud at. 

In 1625, Tony Tanner tells us, Francis Bacon wrote an essay On Plantations.

It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant : and not only so, but it spoileth the plantation; for they will ever live like rogues…but be lazy and do mischief….(My emphasis.)

Yep – that is us at Botany Bay in 1788, a misbegotten colony where the only currencies would be the lash and the bottle.  So sadly for our First Nations, the warning of Bacon got lost in the great American Rebellion of 1776, and in the spellbinding hypocrisy of the colonials there vowing that all men are created equal.  Some of them could have taken lessons in deceit from the Duke of Milan and the King of Naples.

All three of them are desperate.  Their great guilt,

Like poison given to work a great time after,

Now ‘gins to bite the spirits.  (3.3.104-106)

Now, in our land of the Dreamtime, you won’t hear three cheers for this brave new world of the unworldly Miranda.