ABSTRACT
Readers and spectators often describe The Tempest as a mystical drama and yet it is not exactly that. It does express in clear, lovely language, a perception that words will not do the job for us, if we are genuinely seeking some path to an enduring truth. Language is merely “the eye of the needle” (as actor Michael Pennington describes it in a Films for the Humanities videotape called “Passion and Coolness”). As we age, as our experience accumulates, as we gradually take in a lifetime of living, we find that we cannot utter what we know. The sensation of being tongue-tied, after many years of confident talking and writing, struck Shakespeare as it does us all, but he was a dramatist and knew his way out. In his final plays, all of them full of his most glorious language, he dramatizes his last vision, which is simply that “the cloud of unknowing” is our heritage and words alone will not dispel the mist. They tend, in fact, to make the weather worse and the confusion more irritating. Mystics have always made this point, but perhaps Shakespeare makes it more powerfully by dramatizing it for the stage.
