A Shipwreck with No Ship and No Sea: Craig’s Ideas on Tempest I.1

The stage director, set designer and theatre theoretician Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) loathed Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, which he thought was the work of a younger playwright, reread and polished by the mature Bard. However, as much as he loathed it, he seems to have been equally fascinated by it, since throughout his life he jotted down stage directions about it, and drew sketches as though he had had a plan to produce it. This paper highlights the ideas he developed over time for the opening scene, the tempest properly said. That scene seems to have represented a particular challenge for Craig, who considered a variety of treatments for a passage that, in the tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, had always been regarded as a pretext for some lavish and spectacular pageant. Craig rejected that notion, and strove on the contrary towards a maximal stylization of this scene. Eventually, in 1956, as his cousin John Gielgud (1904–2000) was to act as Prospero at Stratford the following year, he wrote a letter intended for him (although it is uncertain whether he sent it or not), in which he synthetized his ideas for a purely abstract conception of the scene. In this conception, as he is obviously very satisfied to announce, “The dam silly imitation of a wreck on the board is swept away […]”.