Music and Meaning in the Tempest

When Prospero puts on his magic robes to address the spirits of the island, at the start of Act 5 of The Tempest, he is not - contrary to popular opinion - making much sense.

This is deliberate.

For the real meaning of this speech lies not in the words themselves but in the music of the language.

Consider the first few lines:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be...

Little sense here unless you want to spend some time – longer than any audience in a theatre has – breaking down the structure into phrases and then trying to link the phrases back together again in a syntactical infusion which reveals a modicum of meaning under a microscope.

But I am playing.

As Shakespeare is in this speech.

Forget the meaning and listen to the sound.  Listen, particularly, to the rise and fall and changes of pace.

Notice the extremely long opening note running through the words from ‘Ye elves ‘(line 1) to ‘ye be‘ (line 9).  No breath.  No end of a sentence.  No break.  Just one long note.

Then it changes.

We move fluidly from ‘Ye’ to ‘I’.

And the energy rises noticeably.

Now the language expresses power and achievement.  Still no concrete meaning, but an impression of something omnipotent doing powerful things:

... I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.

The meaning here lies not in prosaic logic, but in the artistic images evoked by the sounds.

The abrupt intrusion of the word ‘graves’ – caused in part, paradoxically, by the appearance of a regular iambic rhythm in a highly irregular rhythmic structure – injects strident new energy.

Omnipotence.  Destructive power.  A force greater than nature.

And the music has risen from quiet elves of brooks and streams, through a crescendo of violence and raw power, to a climactic declaration of ‘Potent Art’.  A climax signalled by the assonance of ‘By my’ and ‘So Po', which majestically slows the beat and creates natural emphasis and focus on the word 'Art'.

It continues...

But this rough magic
I here abjure

And, as he does so, the power wanes.  Triggered by the suggestion of a logical argument contained in the word ‘but’.

Now the tempo slows.  The music lowers in pitch and volume.  And now the music in the language needs heavenly music to accompany it and even the very act of calling for this heavenly music is magically incoherent and yet completely comprehensible:

... and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for,

See how there is no end in sight to the sentence; no logic in the verb tenses; no definition of subject and object; no clarity of meaning.  And yet we know something is ending.  And we know this is about ‘senses’ and something ‘airy’ and magical.

And then we are hit with reality; a functioning, physical reality:

I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

These final lines make sense.  They are relatively logical and syntactically simple.  They seem to end with a full stop.

But more important than any of that, they complete the music of the whole speech.

For they carry a natural downward inflection.  The lower notes of the spectrum.  The bass sounds which you feel in your bones even more than you hear them in your ear.

And the final line is only a half-line.

It does not end with a full stop.

It ends with half a line of silence.

In one monologue – at the focal point of the whole play – Shakespeare provides Prospero with a speech which stretches language to the limit.  It communicates through image, rhythm and sound, rather than through logical meaning.  And yet it all leads to a single logical statement which establishes the impending end of Prospero’s reign; the end of Shakespeare’s Art.

On an island full of magic and music, built on a structure which mirrors the advent and passing of a storm, this speech is the epitome of The Tempest.