Shakespeare’s Imperfect “Art of Navigation”: Controlling the Forces of the Sea in The Tempest (1611)

This paper focuses on The Tempest, which is interpreted in the light of John Dee’s 1577 treatise The General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation. Here I concentrate first on Shakespeare’s characterization of Prospero with regard to the template Dee provides as an early imperialist—a side of his persona that is clearly testified in his treatise. A commitment to the idea of an emergent empire is thus what we might have expected Shakespeare to convey in the very play where a character similar to Dee is depicted. What the paper brings to the fore, however, is the way in which Shakespeare appears to react against the imperial myth promoted by Dee. Indeed, if considered from a different perspective, the “art of navigation” that Shakespeare appears to portray in The Tempest is far from a “perfect” one. The play opens with a storm that scatters an entire crew into the open sea, and soon after there is reference to an earlier shipwreck that involved the main character and his only daughter. It ends with Prospero’s departure on a journey, the destination of which is announced, but not witnessed. In the end, these tempests are nothing compared to that other, “last tempest”: the one that occurs in 4.1 evidencing Prospero’s inner perturbation that he is completely unable to control. Shaking the hero to the core, the main storm in The Tempest appears to be caused by a problematic encounter with the Other. The aim here therefore is not only to detect the impact of Dee’s navigation treatise on Shakespeare’s last play, but to focus on how the dramatist shaped, by reacting against, the former’s firm beliefs on the control of the seas and the imperialist myth he purveyed.This analysis is accompanied by references to the Motus theatre group’s Nella tempesta [Into the Tempest], an Italian production that premiered at the TransAmérique Festival in Montreal in 2013. In my reading of the performance, I focus on the techniques employed by the company in reshaping an encounter with the Other that is not (only) marked by anxiety, but also by a desire to make this meeting an invaluable opportunity to recognize the Other as part of the Self.