Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)

Shakespeare [6]

Just a word more about that passage. If it is taken in vacuo, there is no internal justification for my idea which turns on the survival of the spirits after the pageant has faded. But almost immediately after the stage indication: “ ... to a strange, hollow and confused noise, they heavily vanish”, occurs this aside on the part of Prospero: “(To the Spirits) Well done; avoid; no more.” The quoted passage follows a little later. Then again Prospero says after Ferdinand and Miranda are gone: “Come with a thought: — I thank you: — Ariel, come.” Thereupon Ariel enters:

Ariel: Thy thoughts I cleave to. What’s thy pleasure?

Prospero: Spirit,

We must prepare to meet with Caliban.

What do you make of all this? And when Ariel reports how he has lured Prospero’s enemies into a “foul lake”, Prospero commends him:

This was well done, my bird.

Thy shape invisible retain thou still.

Still later, comes another stage-direction: “A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds ... ; Prospero and Ariel setting them on.” Even if this is taken to refer to Spirits other than those who produce that masque, the previous quotations are sufficient to prove that only the visible shapes and formations vanished — the entities themselves remained behind all the time.

I don’t see what all that has to do with the meaning of the passage in question which plainly insists that nothing endures. Obviously Ariel had an invisible shape — invisible to human eyes, but the point of the passage is that all shapes and substances and beings disappear into nothingness. We are concerned with Prospero’s meaning, not with what actually happened to the spirits or for that matter to the pageant which we might conceive also of having an invisible source or material. He uses the total disappearance of the pageant and the spirits as a base for the idea that all existence is an illusion — it is the idea of the illusion that he enforces. If he had wanted to say, “we disappear, all disappears to view but the reality of us and of all things persists in a greater immaterial reality”, he would surely have said so or at least not left it to be inferred or reasoned out by you in the twentieth century. I repeat however that this is my view of Shakespeare’s meaning and does not affect any possibility of reading into it something that Shakespeare’s outer mind did not receive or else did not express.

10 March 1935