The Tempest Garden

video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Here is the Tempest Garden.

[Interlocutor]: What plants, Will Shakespeare, appear in The Tempest?

[Shakespeare]: There are many: nuts, including acorns, filberts, and pignuts—which are not indeed a nut, but a root; crabs and other apples; peas, oats, rye, barley, wheat, and corn in general; grass, reeds, broom, and stover; saffron, peonies, lilies, cowslips, and mushrooms; mallows, vetches, furze, gorse, sedge, ling, heath, docks, nettles, briers, and thorns; vines and ivy, pine, oak, cedar, and barnacles.

[Interlocutor]: There are several plants there that I don’t know, but—barnacles? Barnacles aren’t a plant!

[Shakespeare]: Hum! We found them in plenty on wood that drifted in the sea; so, as we never saw the eggs of the barnacle goose, we concluded that they were born of those barnacles while they were yet buds on a tree in distant lands.

[Interlocutor]: Oh…. Still, most of those are very common plants. And not many of them are flowers. Yet this is a play of magic, masques, music, and transformation.

[Shakespeare]: So it is. And the plants are well suited to their scenes.

[Interlocutor]: Even in the masque?

[Shakespeare]: A masque in my day was a form of courtly spectacle, full of costly apparel and fantastical creatures. In this play Prospero, master of magic, has his sprites present a masque to celebrate the troth of his daughter Miranda to Ferdinand, Prince of Naples.

[Interlocutor]: There are those who are sure you inserted that masque for a special performance of this play among the other pageants at the marriage of King James’ daughter.

[Shakespeare]: It is a wedding masque, certainly. It conjures up a pastoral country of innocence and rural plenty. The ancient goddesses Iris, Ceres, and Juno spread before the young couple all the fertile riches of spring, summer, and autumn. Iris praises Ceres for her:

rich leas
Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and pease;
Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatch'd with stover, them to keep;
Thy banks with peonied and lilied brims,
Which spongy April at thy hest betrims,
To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom groves,
Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves,
Being lass-lorn: thy pole-clipt vineyard;
And thy sea-marge

Ceres replies in stately measure, honoring Iris whose:

saffron wings upon my flowers
Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers,

She then blesses the happy pair with:

Barns and garners never empty,
Vines and clustering bunches growing,
Plants with goodly burden bowing

The goddesses follow this rich summer with a harvest dance peopled by nymphs and reapers in “rye-straw hats”.

[Interlocutor]: What are vetches and stover?

[Shakespeare]: Vetches are both fodder for beasts and a tall, purple flower found in the summer in fields and banks and the edge of the forest. Stover is dried grass that lies on the fields and downs, much the same thing as hay or straw.

[Interlocutor]: So the masque is full of goddesses and nymphs, and at the same time of the plants that everyone knows, with nothing magic about them.

[Shakespeare]: O, magic is everywhere in The Tempest. Prospero has two chief servants, Ariel and Caliban. Ariel is a spirit of air and music, beautiful, never still, and allied with good, though hardly fond of being bound to Prospero’s commands. Caliban holds a still deeper grudge against Prospero’s mastery; he is the bastard son of a wicked witch, sullen, earthy, lustful, and scarcely capable of good.

Prospero sends Ariel to entice Caliban and his uncouth companions from the same shipwreck that brought Ferdinand to Miranda. True to his nature, Ariel fulfills this command with music:

I charmed their ears
That calf-like they my lowing followed through
Toothed briers, sharp furzes, pricking gorse, and thorns

[Interlocutor]: Then this magic place has barren and harsh land as well.

[Shakespeare]: Aye. And even that has its uses. In the storm at the beginning of the play, the good counselor Gonzalo longs for any land at all:

Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea
for an acre of barren ground, ling, heath, brown
furze, anything. The wills above be done! but I
would fain die a dry death.

[Interlocutor]: That sounds like several different names for the same thing.

[Shakespeare]: Not altogether so. Brown furze was dull much of the year, and yet a pleasure to behold when its sweet golden blossoms spread across the hills. Yet you are right. Heath is the same plant that they called the ‘ling’in the north. And all these plants are alike in bearing little value. They grow on empty lands. We did not keep them in our gardens.

[Interlocutor]: So much of this play is about wild things: plants both beautiful and ugly, creatures of both air and earth.

[Shakespeare]: At the end of the play, they all reconcile to one another. Magic has done its deeds. They all return to the natural world—even Prospero, who in departure bestows his island on Caliban and grants Ariel the freedom which is his proper state. Ariel sings for joy:

Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On a bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

[Interlocutor]: Ariel’s song of freedom is now a favorite and very famous.

[Shakespeare]: Good! Ariel sings for joy:

Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On a bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.