A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest (23 page)

Namontack’s presence in London in the summer of 1608 and the winter of 1609 is especially significant, for Shakespeare likely encountered the visitor who his rival Ben Jonson immortalized with a brief mention in a new play,
Epicoene
. Here was a New World man of a “shrewd, subtle capacity” who was encountering the wonders and deceits of the Old World. The technologies of England were marvels to the Powhatan from Tsenacomoco, while the subterfuge of his handlers was not immediately apparent to him (as demonstrated by his positive report to Wahunsenacawh between his two London trips). Just as Jonson saw theatrical possibilities in Namontack, so, too, might Shakespeare. Perhaps he would create a stage version of the Powhatan visitor that was more complex than Jonson’s mere mention, a character that might arise from Shakespeare’s perception of Namontack as a wild man learning western ways in the service of a European master.

 

Since the first Jamestown fleet departed England in 1607, exploration of the New World had been the talk of London. The value of that public interest was not lost on William Shakespeare. The playwright possessed a keen ability to discern popular taste and the inclinations of patrons. He surely heard the latest news from Virginia from such well-placed sources as his patron Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, who was the most prominent official of the Virginia Company. The ultimate patron of the arts was King James, in whose court any play would have to appear to be deemed a success. Though somewhat skeptical of the value of the Jamestown expeditions and willing to allow the private Virginia Company to do the work, James was closely monitoring the New World enterprise and would want to see any new play that treated it.

Shakespeare’s King’s Men were well named. The troupe performed at court thirty-seven times in 1610 and 1611. The players even provided private performances for the king during the plague epidemic. Part of their appeal was their cooperation with royal directives. Shakespeare offered little resistance to attempts to shape his plays to the tastes of kings and queens. The approval of the royal Office of the Revels was required before any play was permitted to appear at court. As one observer put it, the royal censors made sure the plays were “rehearsed, perfected, and corrected before they come to the public view of the prince and the nobility.” Giving up some creative control could prove lucrative to playwrights and their companies, of course, since shows that did well at court usually played to large audiences when they appeared before the public.

Whatever Shakespeare gave up in fashioning his work to royal and public taste, he could nevertheless be counted on to recapitulate ongoing social debates with keen insight. If the Golden Age dreams of the Virginia Company were being shattered in Jamestown, Shakespeare’s audience could be sure that a vision of the New World from his quill would reflect that reality. If critics of the Virginia enterprise were charging that colonists were invading, exploiting, and brutalizing the people of the New World, a Shakespeare play with a colonial theme would certainly incorporate that criticism. Those deeper themes were the most important elements the playwright would draw from the Jamestown chronicles. The turns of phrase he would purloin would be clues leading to that treasure.

The influence of playwrights as social commentators was stronger than ever during the period in which
The Tempest
was written. The Virginia Company was exquisitely sensitive to its depiction on the stages of the city. In his February 1610 sermon to the departing Lord Delaware, William Crashaw made a special point of disparaging the influence of “the players” on the Virginia enterprise. “Nothing that is good, excellent, or holy can escape them,” Crashaw said. “How then can this action? But this may suffice, that they are
players
. They abuse Virginia, but they are but
players
. They disgrace it, true, but they are but
players
. And they have played with better things.”

A Shakespeare play about the New World would, of course, be deeper than a simple lampooning of the Jamestown enterprise. The Virginia Company could be counted on to oppose even the most innocuous depiction, but that didn’t bother Shakespeare. His aim was to create art that would both resonate with a general audience and subtly fulfill the wishes of the most important member of the audience, King James. In fact, a current development in the royal family provided a sure way to curry royal favor. All London was aware that King James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, would soon choose a royal suitor from the continent, and that the likeliest choice was Frederick V of the Palatine. A play in which a fictional father with transcendent powers saw a daughter happily betrothed would certainly interest the royal family and might even be an appropriate entertainment for a royal engagement celebration.

All those strands of thought were well and good, but Shakespeare still needed a dramatic center around which to build a play. The inherent interest of the theatergoing public was there, as were the pithy themes that naturally arose from the clash of Old and New World cultures. But something more was needed, something vivid, dramatic, and heart pounding that would set the audience on edge from the first line. He would read the printed announcements and pamphlets along with his classical texts, talk to as many people as possible, and wait for something to inspire him.

When Thomas Gates returned from the dead to London in September 1610, Shakespeare had his story. One of the most dramatic sea tales to reach London in years would provide the framework of his new drama. First he read Silvester Jourdain’s
Discovery of the Barmodas
and Richard Rich’s
Newes from Virginia
. Then the Virginia Company’s
True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia
appeared in London book-stores. Ironically, in the pages of its triumphant account of the survival of its colonial governor, the company called the loss and return of the
Sea Venture
survivors a “tragical comedy.” In the hands of England’s pre-eminent playwright, it would become just that.

Shakespeare’s most important source, William Strachey’s letter to his “Excellent Lady,” came into the playwright’s hands sometime in the weeks after it reached London in September 1610. He may have been given a copy by an acquaintance associated with the Virginia Company, but perhaps the most likely place he saw it was at a printer’s shop in St. Paul’s churchyard, a few doors from the Blackfriars Theater. William Welby was the publisher of most of the Virginia chronicles. In an introduction he wrote to a 1613 reprint of Jourdain’s 1610
Sea Venture
account, Welby said that he had in his possession an unpublished account of the Bermuda shipwreck that was a “more full and exact description of the country and narration of the nature, site, and commodities, together with a true history of the great deliverance of Sir Thomas Gates and his company upon them.” This was almost surely Strachey’s letter, and given the animosity officials of the Virginia Company felt toward the players of London, it is more likely that Shakespeare borrowed the narrative from Welby than from a company official.

 

The Blackfriars Theater was a wood-framed stone structure with dormer windows that held five hundred paying customers. Some of the most popular seats were stools lining the sides of the stage (a tradition that annoyed the actors but was too lucrative to give up). Theater was the primary mode of entertainment for men and women of all classes, and fifteen thousand Londoners saw plays each week. Most attended large open-air playhouses like the Globe, which accommodated audiences of up to twenty-five hundred. Theaters were also housed in smaller roofed buildings that provided a more comfortable all-weather experience and appealed to the upper class. As playwright John Marston put it, in the roofed theater “a man shall not be choked with the stench of garlic nor be pasted to the barmy jacket of a beer brewer” as he might be if he watched a play among the groundlings of an open-air house.

The Blackfriars Theater reopened in 1608 as the first enclosed venue for adult actors, having featured child actors in the early years when William Strachey was part owner. The Blackfriars was the first playhouse of any kind within London’s city walls. The owners managed to circumvent a prohibition against theaters within the city because the building was a former monastery and a religious exemption to local laws remained in place. The increasing popularity of the more intimate setting of the enclosed theater prompted changes in the plays themselves—more music and dancing were presented; facial expressions became more important than grand gestures; and plays were broken into acts for the first time so that workers could replenish candles for lighting.
The Tempest
had all of those characteristics and was the first play Shakespeare tailored to the demands of the Blackfriars venue.

The Tempest
did indeed play to large crowds at the Blackfriars following the Masquing House triumph. If William Strachey saw a performance, he would have entered comfortably in advance of the King’s Men’s regular 2:00 p.m. start time. The audience entered the Blackfriars by way of a stately staircase that led to the former monastery dining hall. The theater was housed in the very chamber in which Roman Catholic officials had heard arguments about whether they should grant a divorce to Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. The interior was lit with light from windows, but candelabra provided much of the illumination and would remain lit during the performance. The stage was plain, and a small balcony provided a second level for the players. Strachey would have selected a seat on a bench and waited for the show to begin.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Into something rich and strange.

—Ariel,
The Tempest

 

 

 

A
s William Strachey awaited the beginning of
The Tempest
in the Blackfriars, he may have mulled the associations evoked by the very title of the play. Those connections may have been truer than he realized, as the title is the most conspicuous of the language Shakespeare may have drawn from the Virginia chronicles. “Tempest” was a common synonym for “storm,” but one example of its use in the
Sea Venture
narratives stands out. The anonymous author of a Virginia Company pamphlet gave the word special emphasis even by the standards of the day. In listing the problems caused by the storm that scattered the Gates fleet, the writer capitalized and italicized the word: “First, the
Tempest
: and can any man expect an answer for that?” Perhaps Shakespeare answered the rhetorical question with a storm of his own.

The Tempest
opened on the deck of a ship at sea in a storm. “A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning” filled the theater, according to the play’s stage directions. Pebbles rolled in a drum created the rumbling and a hand-cranked canvas fan just offstage provided wind. The Blackfriars was too small for pyrotechnic squibs, so sound and wind effects sufficed to create the
Tempest
storm. As the stage directions also specify, when the
Tempest
actors appeared onstage their hair had been doused with water.

Wind, rain, and thunder—to Strachey the stage action would already have been a reminder of the hurricane of July 1609. Then the parallels began to appear. One of Shakespeare’s storm-swept wayfarers—in one of only two times the playwright used the word
glut
—said the ocean did “gape at widest to glut” the boatswain of the
Tempest
ship. Strachey may have recalled that in his narrative he had described the air as filled with a “glut of water.” The
Tempest
passengers then expressed their fear that the ship would break up in the violent sea, saying, “Mercy on us!—We split, we split!” That seemed odd to Strachey, since he had written of the
Sea Venture
passengers that “there was not a moment in which sudden splitting or instant oversetting of the ship was not expected.” On the stage the boatswain complained that the cries of the passengers were louder than the storm or the calls of the mariners: “A plague upon this howling. They are louder than the weather or our office.” Why he, too, had written that the lamentations of the
Sea Venture
passengers were lost in the wind and shouts of the officers. Both ships, too, were taking on water. The pervasive leak that hampered the
Sea Venture
was a relatively rare occurrence, yet one of Shakespeare’s characters said the
Tempest
vessel was “as leaky as an unstanched wench.” This was a revelation to Strachey—it was almost as if the storm that tossed the
Sea Venture
was swept in its tumultuous whole from the pages of his own narrative to the seas surrounding the
Tempest
ship. Shakespeare had his attention now.

As the opening scene of the play continued, noblemen arrayed in the finery of an Italian court joined the sailors on deck. The characters revealed that the ship was carrying Alonso, the king of Naples, and his son Ferdinand. The king’s adviser, Gonzalo—called in the cast list “an honest old councillor”—then began a testy exchange with the boatswain. Gonzalo told the mariner to keep in mind that the king was aboard his vessel, and the annoyed boatswain told the elite passenger to get out of the way and allow him and his sailors to battle the storm. To Strachey the appearance of Gonzalo, the aged adviser to the king in
The Tempest
, may have reminded him of George Somers, the gray-haired counselor of the governor on Bermuda. Both Gonzalo and George established early on that they were as comfortable wrangling with sailors as they were advising leaders. Each straddled the visceral world of the sailors and the intellectual world of the colony’s noblemen.

Next the enchanted
Tempest
isle was revealed to Strachey and the other patrons in the Blackfriars audience. The action moved to the island of the magician Prospero, who emerged onstage attired in a long robe. With him was his daughter, Miranda, who was played by a boy dressed as a noblewoman. Miranda asked her father whether he conjured up the storm and, seeing the ship in distress offshore, pleaded with him to calm the waters. The description of the storm by the fair Miranda, to Strachey’s ear, sounded remarkably familiar. Strachey remembered that he had written of a “roaring” storm that was “a hell of darkness turned black upon us.” Miranda seemed to evoke those images when she asked her father whether he “put the wild waters in this roar” and created a sky as black as “stinking pitch.” Furthermore, Strachey knew he had written “the sea swelled above the clouds, and gave battle unto heaven” and “at length did beat all light from heaven.” Thus it added to his surprise when Miranda used a similar image, saying “the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek”—in other words, to the edge of heaven—“dashes the fire out.”