The Return of Prospero’s Wife: Mother Figures in The Tempest’s Afterlife

Summary

Fresh as a rose in spring. And laid out in my coffin. He had built it himself, my husband. Yes, he did. Always had a gift for shaping things. Couldn't have been a more stylish coffin in the country. Handle bars in silver, and the lining of silk from end to end. He'd prepare my body himself; white veil and the lace nightgown in black. Wouldn't have any other shade but black. Transparent, so that I showed all through. God, how frightened I would be sometimes. The way he watched over me; watched over his corpse. After he had made me ready for burial, he would wait by his coffin, and watch over me. The only pleasure he would have of me.

The Tempest has exerted a consistently strong influence on readers and audiences. Plays once well known and admired, such as King John and Henry VIII, are now seldom performed, whereas others, such as Titus Andronicus, were little appreciated until the twentieth century. But The Tempest's high status within the corpus has never seriously been questioned, and this prominence is reflected in the large body of creative works - novels, poems, plays and films - where its influence is strongly felt. If we trace the play's creative afterlife it soon becomes clear that critics' recent preoccupation with issues of race, sexuality and gender have long been anticipated. In particular the play's two absent mothers - Sycorax and Prospero's wife - can be identified as surprisingly potent presences, not simply in recent novels such as Marina Warner's Indigo and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, but in two of the very first creative responses to the play, Jonson's The New Inn and Fletcher's The Sea Voyage.