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William Hogarth's painting, A Scene from "The Tempest" (c. 1730), depicts the same moment in the play, but focuses attention on lines that happen just after, when Miranda sees Ferdinand for the first time and declares him, “A thing divine” (1.2.422), which not only draws attention to the human drama unfolding but also relies heavily on the religious undertones in the play.  In the Hogarth image, Ariel appears like a cherub.

Although Ariel’s fairy wings are visible, Hogarth is clearly drawing on religious iconography of childlike angels akin to Raphael’s cherubim in the Sistine Madonna.  

Ariel is also periphery to the action of Hogarth’s painting. Everyone in the painting looks at Miranda—the miraculous—whereas she looks intently on Ferdinand.  The colors she wears and the iconography associated with her, such as a lamb, make her into a strangely Marian figure; the scene, therefore, approximates the Epiphany, which is fitting since Ferdinand is discovering this wonder for the first time. Hogarth’s reading of this scene highlights the religious language of the text, but it downplays a more sinister side to the scene. In Shakespeare’s play, Ariel not only draws Ferdinand toward him with the tempting “sweet air” (1.2.397) but also threatens him with horrifying taunts about his father’s seeming demise: “Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes” (1.2.400-402).  In contrast, Hogarth’s Ariel appears wholly unthreatening as a childlike angel, and a lone angel at that (unlike the Dadd painting, wherein we see a bacchanalian community of spirits). Hogarth thus presents a strangely anesthetized version of the moment in the play, and he renders Ariel into a nonthreatening character. His religious interpretation suppresses the subversive pagan dance that Dadd suggests.

This is the second post in a series.  To start from the beginning, click here.

For my visualizing assignment, the images fall into three groups based on the passages in the play that they illustrate.   Richard Dadd's Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1842) and  William Hogarth's A Scene from "The Tempest" (c. 1730) are both oil paintings that depict Ariel’s first song in the play.

The Dadd painting above draws attention to its textual source in the title, which points students to the opening lines of Ariel’s song as he is leading Ferdinand to Miranda, “Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands; / Curtsied when you have and kissed— / The wild waves whist— / Foot it featly here and there; / And, sweet sprites, bear / the burden” (1.2.378-384).  This painting is immediately striking because it imaginatively reinterprets the events of the play. In Shakespeare’s play we see Ariel alone on stage with Ferdinand, but we hear the other spirits “dispersedly” from several directions offstage (1.2.385 s.d.). Dadd draws our attention to the “sweet sprites” who “bear / the burden” or the refrain of a song. The words of the song seem to be about romantic love: taking hands, dancing, curtsying, and kissing.  It is easy for students to see this song as simply anticipating the courtship that is about to happen between Miranda and Ferdinand. Dadd suggests the possibility of a fairy dance, so that in these lines the sweet sprites are taking hands and dancing with each other instead of Ariel directing Ferdinand to act a certain way with Miranda. In fact, Dadd seems to eliminate Ferdinand from the painting entirely.  The poem places Ariel in a community, one that is governed over by a Fairy Queen (perhaps Ceres, since she appears to be flanked by a daughter) rather than by Prospero.  In his interpretation of the play, Dadd edits out the humans and creates a world that is entirely fey. By displacing Prospero from the play’s power structure, Dadd creates a subversive reading of the play.

In the next couple of blog posts, I want to discuss an assignment that I am developing for my AP Lit class for our discussion of Shakespeare's The Tempest.

The format of a digital classroom has been a reminder for me about some of the core humanist principles that underlie the majority of our teaching practices. This series of posts will explore some of those principles in a writing assignment that I have used (and am still developing) for my students: a visual analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I am working with Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s definition of the field of the Digital Humanities: 

This assignment uses digitized images to investigate a series of questions about Shakespeare’s play that are themselves quite traditional, but then the assignment provokes questions about how this technology changes the rhetorical power of images for students in their reading and writing. 

I ask my students to consider a selection of illustrations as “non-verbal” interpretations of Shakespeare’s play and I focus my attention on the character Ariel.  I use an archive of images from Shakespeare Illustrated, a website maintained by Harry Rusche at Emory University.

I ask students to explain the interpretation that the artist is making, and evaluate it based on textual evidence that they find in Shakespeare.  This exercise was inspired by Virginia’s Tufte’s essay, “Visualizing Paradise Lost: Classroom Use of Illustrations by Medina, Blake, and Doré,” from which I draw heavily.  She argues, and I agree, that asking students to consider illustrations as a type of interpretation of the text encourages students to return to the text in order to close read passages. The list of questions that I include below comes from her essay, but is adapted to Shakespeare’s play instead of Milton’s epic:

1. Identify the characters, actions, and scenes: What specific lines of Shakespeare’s text does the artist appear to be illustrating? Is the illustration accurate in relation to Shakespeare’s text? Is it clearly dependent on some source other than Shakespeare? In choosing these characters, this action, this scene, what is the illustrator suggesting about them? Does the illustration indicate their relative importance? Does the illustrator ignore certain episodes usually deemed crucial? 
2. Examine the methods of the illustrators: does the illustrator focus on one key, dramatic exchange or does he attempt to epitomize the narrative sense of the whole scene, act, or play? Does the illustrator have a command of scale? Is concern with landscape important in the illustration? Is it a central concern? 
3. Explain how the illustrations interpret the text:  Are symbolic meanings attached to the literal? How do you know—because the figures reference, perhaps, iconography that you recognize? Does the illustration suggest the character’s states of mind, interior experience as well as exterior? Can you state some kind of thesis concerning the illustration: what kind of messages or meanings in The Tempest is this illustrator emphasizing? What kind of comments on, or criticisms of, The Tempest is this illustrator making? How would you evaluate the artist’s interpretation according to your own reading of the play?
   

I have my students choose from one of the following five images of Ariel archived at Shakespeare Illustrated: Richard Dadd, Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1842), William Hogarth, A Scene from "The Tempest" (c. 1730), John Anster Fitzgerald, Ariel (c. 1858), Henry Fuseli, Ariel (c. 1800-10), and James Henry Nixon, The Tempest (n.d.).  I focus on Ariel because he—like Caliban—is difficult to pin down entirely in terms of what he looks like.  The class focuses on Caliban in subsequent units, so this assignment allows me to diversify the attention spent on individual characters; the basic assignment, however, could be adapted for instructors teaching other plays or wishing to focus on other characters.  In the following posts I will model the types of responses that students might have to these images, and then I will consider how my exercise differs philosophically and pedagogically from Tufte’s essay from which I have learned so much.