Wood, Work, and Etymology:A Neglected Source of Aesthetic Unity in The Tempest

The various social strata on display in The Tempest-king, duke, prince, drunken butler, 1 jesterform a continuum, its upper limits marked by the superhuman Ariel, its lower by the subhuman Caliban.And this continuum is fluid; characters are located in it according to their understanding of the ennobling power of work, or, as John Kerrigan puts it in an important new chapter on this play, "the merits of labour as against idyllic idleness" (p.86).That some workers are incapable of improvement, and that their purpose is to work for others, are of course convenient notions constructed by the colonizer to enable and to justify all manner of brutalities against the colonized, and these notions, as Patricia Akhimie has shown, certainly inform The Tempest (pp.151-86).On another, perhaps deeper level, however, this play exposes the essential nature of work-work as a basic, universal human compulsion.All the characters in this play, including Ariel and Caliban, are in some sense workers, or artisans.Except for Prospero, they may not be artists, but their work results in objects of art, all of which, no matter how humble, elicit some degree of wonder, which is the enticement and the reward of work.And all these workers, as I hope to show, are brought together by their common medium-wood-and William Shakespeare's etymological explorations of the terms for the wooden objects they make and use.