With pages of articles, images, interviews, and activities, this Context Guide is designed to help audiences of all ages connect with the play. Read it here or grab a paper copy during the show!
Actor Q&A: Jacob Mundell
Jacob is playing Trinculo in The Tempest. He was a member of National Players Tour 65, where he played Macbeth (Macbeth), Duke/Balthazar/Pinch (The Comedy of Errors), and Perimedes (Odyssey).
Jacob Mundell as the title role in Macbeth
Tell me about your decision to join National Players.
I joined National Players because before last year I was more well-traveled outside of the country than I was inside of the country. It’s amazing for a young actor because this is one of the longest contracts that’s available. I was so relieved that last year it stepped up to a three show season, because it gives you more challenge, variety, responsibility. You get three credits, a year of work, and you get nine months to work on roles that you improve upon as time goes by.
What’s the most bizarre story from your tour?
I didn’t want to think that I would be subject to the Macbeth curse. I thought I would get away with it. I totally didn’t. The night before our first venue I went jogging at night and sprained my ankle—and that was before we performed the Scottish play on Friday the 13th. Everyone pooled in all their prescription pain killers and I did the show high on pain killers. And right in the middle of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” a bat flew at me, just swooped at me, and I had to dodge it onstage and incorporate it into the performance. But now I have my own curse story.
What’s the biggest lesson you learned on tour?
You can’t plan anything. That’s an acting lesson that I thought Ii had under wraps, that you have to willingly embrace the moments as they come, but that’s a life lesson too: You have to have an extreme amount of emotional flexibility… Facing the coming avalanche with arms open wide isn’t just an acting lesson, but a life lesson. Continue reading
Actor Q&A: Julie-Ann Elliott
Julie-Ann Elliott is portraying Ariel in The Tempest. She was a National Player for Tour 44, where she played Rosalind in As You Like It and Ma Joad in Grapes of Wrath.
Julie-Ann Elliott as Ma Joad
Tell me about your decision to join National Players.
There were two reasons I wanted to go on tour. I was in the graduate program at Catholic University, and Bill Graham was head of the MFA acting program and chair of the department at the time. One of the reasons I went to grad school was for classical training, and while we did have a classical acting class, it didn’t feel like enough. It seemed intimidating and untouchable because it was that thing that I had never done. I was also very close with some people who had been on tour prior to coming to Catholic, so I had all of their fraternal stories which seemed wonderful and inviting, and you were a part of this huge brother-sisterhood, and I wanted to be a part of that.
What was it like playing two roles back-to-back for a year, and did you get the training that you wanted?
I feel like I did. I had some classical training at Catholic, and Mr. Graham was our acting coach for the Players as well, but this was much more intensive. So yes, you have to grow, and you have to know what you’re doing enough to keep within the boundaries of the direction. You have to know two versions of both shows, so you have to know the text inside and out and be able to make the jumps you need to. To me, it was more important to think about how to approach the characters and tell the story. You need to know what the language means and you need to make it feel like your own, and I was more concerned with that than scanning and marking.
What’s the biggest lesson you learned as a Player?
The actors are loading and unloading the truck, and we all had to put the set together, we all had to screw the lights on the truss, so everybody is a part of the whole process. One of the big things is learning how to be a part of a team, knowing you’ve got a job to do and everybody has to do their part. I’ve gone into theaters with bigger budgets and with people who’ve always worked equity or don’t remember not working equity, and there’s an expectation that things will always be taken care of. Although I often have those expectations myself, being a Player puts you in the mindset of “We have a job to do and we’re going to make it work.” Continue reading
“Alchemists grow old and die in the embraces of their illusion…the achievements of the magicians are unsure and fruitless. Those practices are openly convicted of vanity, and the secret and remotest loft tower’ of the magician’s pride must be abandoned if he is to come ‘close to things.’ The real truth is that the obstacle to the course I propose lies…in human pride…it is this pride that has brought men to such a pitch of madness that they prefer to commune with their own spirits rather than with the spirit of nature.”
– Frances Bacon, a major opponent of occultism during the reign of King James I
The shipwreck in Act I, Scene 1, in a 1797 engraving based on a painting by George Romney
A real character: Is Prospero Shakespeare?
My guess is that most modern readers do see something of the ageing playwright in the wizard. How not to find metaphors in the way he moves characters around the island, conjures visions, makes pointed comments about “the great globe itself” and eventually throws aside his staff and foreswears his art? What greater last words could there be for the genius from Stratford than that famous speech about how “our revels now are ended”, or his final lines in the play asking for the audience to give him their applause and so “set him free”? Following on from that, who wouldn’t find it poignant that The Tempest is widely thought to be one of Shakespeare’s final plays (and many say his very last)? That he probably lived no more than five years after its composition? And that he did indeed quit the stage just as Prospero quit his enchanted island?
Once you start seeing autobiography in these final speeches, it follows that Shakespeare might have written more of himself into Prospero. Bardolators have loved this idea from the late 19th century onwards. Writing in 1875, for instance, Edward Dowden said: “We identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself … because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self-mastery, his calm validity of will … and with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakespeare as discovered to us in all his latest plays.”
It’s easy to be cynical about the idea that we know Prospero is Shakespeare because he shares characteristics with all the other characters we’ve also identified with the playwright. Yet it’s also easy to see why this line of thought is so tempting. Shakespeare is a uniquely tantalising historical figure. He gives us a feeling of remarkable kinship and understanding. He stretches out to us, through the ages, and shows that he thought and felt much as we do; he saw his world as we see ours. What’s more, he still speaks our minds. We can still identify with Hamlet, Othello and even Macbeth. And as a result, few historical figures feel closer than the man who created them. Except, of course, we know next to nothing about him.
Shakespeare’s names
According to the Arden edition of The Tempest, Shakespeare made some very diliberate naming choices with this play. These include:
- Prospero means “prosperous,” “fortunate”
- Miranda is a play on the word “wonder”
- Caliban is an anagram of “cannibal”
- Trinculo derives from a word for excessive drinking
- Stephano derives from an Italian word for stomach
- Ferdinant means “brave journey”
- Ariel means”God’s lion”
Movement in ‘The Tempest’
“The action on this island is mainly geographic movement writ small. The first four acts conclude with an invitation to move on: ‘Come, follow,’ ‘Lead the way,’ ‘Follow, I pray you,’ ‘Follow and do me service.’ The characters perambulate in small groups from one part of the island to another; only at Prospero’s final invitation, ‘pray you, draw near,’ do they join in one place…The sense of continual movement contributes to the play’s elusiveness.”
— Excerpted from the introduction to the Arden edition of The Tempest
“…In the late 16th century, harnessing invisible spirit power was essentially the same kind of challenge as harnessing the invisible power of the wind. It was complicated, you needed to be highly educated, but if you could do it -rather like improving the technology of your ship’s sails, the world and its wealth were at your feet. Reaching the spirit realm however, was a touch more complicated than improving your ship.”
— New Science, Old Magic: Dr Dee’s Magical Mirror, A BBC radio program
After Reading Shakespeare’s Tempest
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometime, somewhere, you had set him free
With a jolt, with which we tear ourselves away
From youth, to greatness: from all consideration.
Then, he was willing: and since then he’s served,
Impatient, after every task, for freedom.
And half imperiously, half almost ashamed,
You put it to him you’ve still need of him,
For this and that, ah, and must tell him
How you helped him. And yet you feel yourself
That all that’s held back here, with him,
Is missing from the air. So tempting, sweet,
To let him go – and then, there’s no more magic:
Committing yourself to Fate like all the others,
Knowing that his weightless friendship,
Lacking strain, with no more obligation,
An excess of the space you breathe,
Works on, without thought, in the Element.
Dependent now, and no longer gifted
With shaping your dull mouth to the call
At which he dived. Powerless, ageing, poor,
Yet breathing him, like an incomprehensible
Far-flung fragrance, that makes the unseen
Complete. Smiling that you once could so
Summon him, used so easily to such
Great undertakings. Perhaps weeping too,
Remembering how he loved, and wished
To leave you, always both at once.
(Have I loosed him, already? This man, become
A duke again, terrifies me. How gently
He draws the wire through his head
And hangs himself beside the other
Figures, and brings forward his speech
And asks for mercy…What an epilogue,
Of consummate power. Throwing off, standing
Naked, with only one’s strength: ‘which is most faint’.)
The Tempest 