“‘A Tempestuous Noise of Thunder and Lightning heard’: Vocality, Visuality, and Diverging Stage Directions in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Dryden & Davenant’s The Enchanted Island

“‘A Tempestuous Noise of Thunder and Lightning heard’: Vocality, Visuality, and Diverging Stage Directions in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Dryden & Davenant’s The Enchanted Island

Nearly fifty years after William Shakespeare’s First Folio was published, William Davenant, who was, according to John Dryden, “a man of quick and piercing imagination… found that somewhat might be added to the design of Shakespear” began to, with the help of Dryden, revise The Tempest, including “the Counter-part to Shakespear’s Plot, namely [in the form] of a Man who had never seen a woman,” an addition that began a series of revisions leading to, after the Restoration of the crown, The Tempest or The Enchanted Island (Davenant and Drdyen A3v). In the intervening fifty years, stage technology advanced in leaps and bounds (despite, or perhaps because of, the Puritans’ banning of theatrical productions), the British theatre underwent a drastic change generically, thematically, and socially. In this essay, I will examine stage directions from the opening acts of both Shakespeare’s First Folio printing and Davenant’s and Dryden’s 1674 printing of The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island. In doing so, I note that many of the directions in Shakespeare’s play are embedded within the dialogue in manners that indicate a heightened emphasis on conveying important information vocally rather than just visually. I aim to argue that the various ways in which the latter’s changes are at least in part indicative—or, at the very least, evidence—of the advance in stage technologies because, where Shakespeare had to convey the magic of his storm through spoken dialogue, Davenant and Dryden were able to use mechanical effects to visually depict the tempest.

I wish, though, to make clear this essay’s methodology, intentions, and limits. I here examine in depth a few changed stage directions between Shakespeare’s First Folio printing of The Tempest and the later 1674 rendition in John Dryden’s and William Davenant’s The Tempest, or Enchanted Island.[1] I focus on stage directions from the opening acts of each play because they quite literally “set the stage” for the play in terms of both theme and mechanics. My methodology includes an examination of the effects of the newly-made affordances of the technological advances between Elizabethan drama and Restoration drama, including the shifting backdrop introduced (in England, at least) by William Davenant in The Siege of Rhodes, as a successor to the more rudimentary stage effects of Shakespeare’s stage. This essay does not attempt to reconcile the differences between the two different plays with the understanding that they, while deeply connected in theme, characters, actions, and locations, are two different plays. In light of the conceptual differences between the two plays, Eckhard Auberlen, in arguing that the play is an attempt to celebrate the newly-restored monarchy, with all of the social implications relating to the patriarchal norms thereof, suggests that the “play was made to support the conservative political myth that monarchy was the natural form of government” (Auberlen 72). Auberlen argues also that the

fundamental difference in Prospero’s failure [to keep a grasp on all of the events in the plot is that] in Shakespeare, Prospero firmly controls the outer events, but has to see the limits of his power in bringing about a moral regeneration on others and himself; in the adaptation, Prospero loses control over the outer events and is reduced to the status of a Polonius-like overbusy father, intent on protecting the chastity of his two sexually naïve daughters while planning advantageous dynastic marriages for them. (Auberlen 74)

Candy B. K. Schille, by contrast, argues that Davenant and Dryden revised The Tempest not in “an attempt to neutralize various threats to contemporary patriarchal orders,” as, Schille claims, various scholars usually describe the revision, but rather “that Dryden and Davenant aim to problematize the too easy attribution of qualities of savagery and ungovernability to the play’s gallery of ‘others’” (Schille 273). But, where previous scholars focus primarily on the thematic differences between Shakespeare’s play and Davenant’s and Dryden’s revisions, examined primarily through dialogue, I aim instead to focus on some of the more mechanic differences, using the stage directions—and, in Shakespeare’s case, the directions suggested within the dialogue—from the opening scenes as the loci of my examination.

In Shakespeare’s text, many of the stage directions are embedded within the dialogue of the play—the characters on the boat speak of the tempest through which they are sailing, they rely upon the tremors in their voices to convey the tenor of the storm, and in doing so they trust their audiences—of both text and performance—to imagine what this storm would look like. Shakespeare’s opening stage direction, in full, is “A tempestuous noise of Thunder and Lightning heard: Enter a Ship-master, and a Boteswaine” (Shakespeare 1)[2]. This description is limited to aurality only. The audience, from this direction, only hears a tempestuous noise. This suggests that the people putting on the show have more leeway in how they create the set in which the play is performed. Part of this most likely is a result of the fact that set designs were often limited by the available technology, an improved version of which was introduced on the British stage by Davenant with The Siege of Rhodes, with its moving backdrop and much more ornate frontispiece. Due to these limitations, it is quite probable that Shakespeare has used these noises in what Gwilim Jones calls, in borrowing Timothy Morton’s term, “rendering” which is, according to Jones, “a name for the process by which a text presents itself as reality and encourages the reader or audience to accept it as such” (Jones 127). Jones also suggests that, “if we are to take [the opening stage direction of The Tempest] literally… then it is unusual in specifying lightning as an auditory effect,” an aberrance that “is more likely” explained “as a phrase to casually depict the noise of a storm” (128). Jones claims that “in light of… the unpopularity of indoor fireworks [that could otherwise visually signify the lightning in question], the ‘tempestuous noise’ is likely to have been only a noise” (129).

The dialogue Shakespeare uses to complement the minimal stage directions also highlight the auditory aspects of the storm. Many of the Boteswaine’s (boatswain) lines emphasize this, such as, when complaining about the whining of the royals on his ship, he says, “a plague / upon this howling: they are lowder then the weather” (Shakespeare 1). These lines of dialogue tend to take the place of what would otherwise have been explicit stage directions suggesting a functional difference in the ways each playwright uses dialogue and theatrical effects. What few stage directions Shakespeare does provide, at least during the titular storm, tend also to convey auditory information. There is, for example, the “confused noise within” the ship that comes during Gonzalo’s lines in the first scene, which indicates that the sailors within the ship have been surprised, perhaps by the ferocity of this magically induced storm (1).  Where Shakespeare used auditory signifiers for many of the tensions in his play, D’Avenant and Dryden, with the technological advances between Shakespeare’s theatre and theirs, could in addition focus their stage directions on the visual aspects of theatrical productions.

 The opening of the Restoration revision, reproduced in full in Appendix A, contains precise descriptions of not just the physical appearance of the stage—the stage, as detailed on the title page, of “His Highness the Duke of York’s Theatre”—but also of the surroundings of the stage. The first sentence of the direction, detailing that “The Front of the Stage is open'd, and the Band of 24 Violins, with the Harpsicals and Theorbo's which accompany the Voices, are plac'd between the Pit and the Stage,” is incredibly specific in its details, suggesting a more rigid stage design than would have been required from Shakespeare—perhaps a facet of stage design made necessary as a result of the more complex mechanisms on stage (Davenant and Dryden B1r). The playwrights—mostly Dryden at the time of this printing, six years after Davenant’s death—provide an explicit detailing of not just the arrangement of the band in relation to the stage, but also some of the numbers of the musicians. There are, according to this direction, twenty-four violins accompanying the harpsicals, the theorbos—string instruments in the lute family—and the singers. The size of this band is itself significant, with probably at least thirty musicians who would be playing the overture as the curtain rises, thus suggesting that the play would have been popular enough to employ that many musicians in addition to the actors on stage, also showing an awareness for the accompanying factors that come with staging a play this complex. The popularity, notes John Shanahan, of the 1667 version of The Enchanted Island made it “the most performed play of the Restoration, and constituted a tenth of all live performances on both [Lincoln’s Inn Fields] stages in its first season,” thus marking it “an immediate hit… apparently because it did in fact have (stage) magic” (Shanahan 91). The technology in use led Samuel Pepys, marks Shanahan, to celebrate “the ‘variety’ of the play’s high-tech stagecraft, being particularly impressed with the revised play’s echo songs and extravagant combined use of music and machinery (91-92). The rising curtain, in the opening stage direction reveals “a new Frontispiece, joyn’d to the great Pylasters,” or rectangular columns, “on each side of the stage. This frontispiece is a noble Arch, supported by large wreathed Columns of the Corinthian Order; the wreathings of the Columns are beautify’d with Roses wound round them, and several Cupids flying about them” (B1r). Notable in this description is the evocation of Greek antiquity in the explicit detailing of the wreathed columns of the Corinthian order, notably more elaborate than their Doric and Ionic counterparts, suggesting a heightened awareness of the physical, visual appearance of the stage in a play that is, at its core, an interrogation of “elsewhere.” There are also extravagant decorations, including wreathes of roses and flying cupids, adorning these columns for the express purpose of beautification, suggesting that there had begun to be a more evident focus on the artistic aspects of stage design.

This extravagance is not limited only to the columns, nor is it apolitical. “On the cornice,” the direction reads, “just over the Capitals,” the tops of the columns, “sits on either side a Figure, with a Trumpet in one hand, and a Palm in the other, representing Fame” (B1r). This is, perhaps, an evocation of Fame with “her trumpet and… a palm branch, symbol of justice and triumph,” or “the glorification of power, whether military, regal, noble or religious,” suggesting Davenant and Dryden wanted to associate their stage with these ideals (López 22). The stage direction continues, showing that “a little farther on the same Cornice, on each side of the Compass-pediment,” or the top of the aforementioned noble arch, “lie a Lion and a Unicorn, the Supporters of the Royal Arms of England” (B1r). This lion and this unicorn are symbols that originated with James I in 1603, were used after by Charles I, ignored when “the Commonwealth did not adopt the royal arms,” but were revived when “Charles II… used the same arms” (Knight 150-151). These symbols, then, are deeply politicized, and when used so explicitly as “supporters of the royal arms of England,” indicate that Davenant and Dryden were acutely aware of the political ramifications of theatrical productions, particularly when used in a play that is a revision of a play that originated before the Commonwealth. This goes a step further, though, in the following sentence, which shows that “In the middle of the Arch are several Angels holding the King’s Arms, as if they were placing them in the midst of that Compass-pediment,” thus even more explicitly tying Prospero taking control over “his” island, as well as the original inhabitants thereof, with the monarchy in England in the latter half of the 17th century (B1r).

In taking stock of what, precisely, the stage that Davenant and Dryden describe before any action occurs, it is revealed that the forefront of the stage contains imagery that upholds, literally, the symbols of the monarchy on top of an extravagant display that architecturally harkens back to Greek antiquity as well as a relatively large orchestra to accompany the actors on stage. This is, even before getting to the actual titular storm, a far cry from Shakespeare’s fifteen word opening stage direction. It may be useful here to note that Shakespeare’s opening scene contains a total of thirteen explicit stage directs, with five of those thirteen directions being “exit,” indicating a character leaving the stage, and five others flagging the entries of various characters. In contrast, Dryden and Davenant provide thirty-six stage directions with a roughly even amount of entrances, exits, and other assorted stage directions. It is evident that Davenant and Dryden took their revisions seriously by liberally adding indicators of movements on stage.

The storm in question is also detailed much more thoroughly by Davenant and Dryden in ways that complicate the potential mode in which the play is consumed. The second portion of the stage direction focuses on the actual scene in question. “Behind this,” referring to the frontispiece, “is the Scene, which represents a thick Cloudy Sky, a very Rocky Coast, and a Tempestuous sea in perpetual agitation” (B1r). This sentence is much closer to Shakespeare’s original direction, despite its focus on the visual aspects of the scene instead of the aural. Davenant and Dryden complicate the relationship between page and stage with the description of the origin of the storm, stating that “This Tempest (suppos’d to be rais’d by Magick) has many dreadful objects in it,” (B1r). There are potential deeper implications here than in any of the surrounding indicators of stage appearance because this direction relays information that is not strictly necessary for the staging of the play. The closest corollary that I have found to describe this type of stage direction comes from Sarah Bess Rowan’s work on “affective stage directions” in more recent theatre texts. Rowan describes affective stage directions as those which “are lines that a playwright uses to describe the nuance and/or subtext of a given portion of the play… providing information that does not directly translate to an agreed-upon code or interpretation in the theatrical lexicon,” or, in other words, stage directions that refer to the inner machinations within a line of dialogue (Rowen 310). That said, where Rowen’s work focuses on the ways in which stage directions give nuance to spoken lines, my focus here is on a storm. I would argue, though, that the core elements translate effectively between dialogue and stage effects. That the tempest was raised by magic implies, potentially, that the people making the storm, using what practical effects were available to them at the time, had some extra leniency in the “realism” with which they used effects, because it was raised by magic, and their audiences, in realizing the origins of this storm, would accept any potential errors or factual inaccuracies. Alternatively, this, along with Dryden’s preface to the play, could suggest that he had an additional audience in mind while writing the play—literate readers. This preface, written in 1669, details some of the origins of the play itself—how Davenant invited Dryden to work together on the revision, with Dryden including effusive praise for his then recently-deceased co-writer, showing some of their inspiration in adding Hippolito, as well as justification for their revisions on Shakespeare’s play. These two facets of this text, taken together, could suggest that Dryden, especially after Davenant’s death, wanted his work to appeal to readers in addition to the previously traditional theatre-going audience.

What remains of the opening stage direction here is, generally, standard fare, showing that the storm “has many dreadful Objects in it, as several Spirits in horrid shapes flying down amongst the sailers, then rising and crossing in the Air,” showing the tumultuousness of the storm (B1r). Interestingly, this long-winded stage direction includes details beyond just the opening of the play, stating that “when the ship is sinking, the whole House is darken’d, and a shower of Fire falls upon ‘em,” indicating both that there would have been people working the lighting in this potentially theoretical house and that these directions would have been read by or told to these workers, and that they would have had some sort of cue upon which they would have darkened the theatre which implies that they had the ability, through various technologies, to darken the house (B1r).

It is, overall, evident that Davenant and Dryden could, in their revision of The Tempest, use more mechanical tools in their stagings of this play. Even using only stage directions from the openings of both Shakespeare’s text in the First Folio and Davenant’s and Dryden’s revision in 1674, I have here highlighted some of the ways in which the latter textually depicted a stage with décor associated with the newly restored British monarchy by using technology that was, at the time, more readily available than fifty years previous. I find here in these differences a mechanical separation in the conveying and expression of movements on stage and of depictions of the stage. Where Davenant and Dryden, with the technological advances between Shakespeare’s theatre and theirs, could focus their stage directions on the visual aspects of theatrical productions—on the physicality of their stage—Shakespeare instead used auditory signifiers for many of the tensions in his play.  In examining other differences in stage directions between the two versions, my future scholarship may reveal some of the ways in which later playwrights focused on more mechanical aspects, including a heightened emphasis on movement, interaction between characters and stages, and technological advances, of the staging of plays.

Works Cited

Auberlen, Eckhard. “‘The Tempest’ and the Concerns of the Restoration Court: A Study of ‘The Enchanted Island’ and the Operatic ‘Tempest.’” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, vol. 15, no. 2, University of Tennessee, 1991, pp. 71–88.

Davenant, William, and John Dryden. The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island. T.N. for Henry Herringman, 1674.

Foster, Gavin. “Ignoring ‘The Tempest’: Pepys, Dryden, and the Politics of Spectating in 1667.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 1/2, University of California Press, 2000, pp. 5–22.

Jones, Gwilym. “The Tempest and Theatrical Reality.” Shakespeare’s Storms, Manchester University Press, 2015, pp. 125–50.

Knight, Charles, editor. The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Charles Knight, 1835. The Making of the Modern World.

López, María Isabel Rodríguez. “Victory, Triumph and Fame as the Iconic Expressions of the Courtly Power.” Music in Art, vol. 37, no. 1/2, Research Center for Music Iconography, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2012, pp. 9–23.

Rowen, Bess. “Undigested Reading: Rethinking Stage Directions through Affect.” Theatre Journal, vol. 70, no. 3, 2018, pp. 307–26.

Schille, Candy B. K. “‘Man Hungry’: Reconsidering Threats to Colonial and Patriarchal Order in Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 48, no. 4, University of Texas Press, 2006, pp. 273–90.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 1623.

Shanahan, John. “The Dryden-Davenant ‘Tempest’, Wonder Production, and the State of Natural Philosophy in 1667.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 54, no. 1, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, pp. 91–118.

Appendix A

The opening stage direction for Davenant’s and Dryden’s The Enchanted Island

The Front of the Stage is open'd, and the Band of 24 Violins, with the Harpsicals and Theorbo's which accompany the Voices, are plac'd between the Pit and the Stage. While the Overture is playing, the Curtain rises, and discovers a new Frontispiece, joyn'd to the great Pylasters, on each side of the Stage. This Frontispiece is a noble Arch, supported by large wreathed Columns of the Corinthian Order; the wreathings of the Columns are beautifi'd with Roses wound round them, and several Cupids flying about them. On the Cornice, just over the Capitals, fits on either side a Figure, with a Trumpet in one hand, and a Palm in the other, representing Fame. A little farther on the fame Cornice, on each side of a Compass-pediment, lie a Lion and a Unicorn, the Supporters of the Royal Arms of England. In the middle of the Arch are several Angels, holding the Kings Arms, as if they were placing them in the midst of that Compass-pediment. Behind this is the Scene, which represents a thick Cloudy Sky, a very Rocky Coast, and a Tempestuous Sea in perpetual Agitation. This Tempest (suppos'd to be rais'd by Magick) has many dreadful Objects in it, as several Spirits in horrid Shapes flying down amongst the Sailers, then rising and crossing in the Air. And when the Ship is sinking, the whole House is darken'd, and a shower of Fire falls upon 'em. This is accompanied with Lightning, and several Claps of Thunder, to the end of the Storm.

[1] For clarity’s sake, I will be referring to Shakespeare’s play as The Tempest and will refer to Davenant’s and Dryden’s play as The Enchanted Island

[2] In an effort to stay accurate to the source material, I will not be modernizing spellings or capitalizations, only substituting the long s “ſ” with the regular “s”