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Has a new master — get a new man!
Freedom! High day! High day! Freedom!
Freedom, high day, freedom!
Later, the drunken trio are enticed by splendid garments Ariel puts in their way. Dividends? Capital gains? Bonuses? Trinculo sees the robes as the regalia Stefano will wear as King of the casino, with himself as Chamberlain. They ignore Caliban’s earthy warning — ‘Let it alone, thou fool, it is but trash’ — and are soon quarrelling over the gowns. At once, Prospero and Ariel detonate the crisis and unleash the hunting dogs of the credit crunch:
Ariel: Silver! There it goes, Silver!
Prospero: Fury, fury! There, Tyrant,
there, hark, hark.
Exeunt Stefano, Trinculo and Caliban, pursued
by spirits.
Shakespeare even supplies the anguished human noise of the credit crunch with his stage direction, ‘Cries within’, followed by Ariel’s exultant, ‘Hark, they roar!’
Meanwhile the fat cats are entertained by Ariel and his minions at an altogether higher level. There is ‘marvellous sweet music’, and the goblins bring in a table, covered with a grand banquet. The stage direction says ‘They dance about it with gentle actions and salutations, and, inviting the King and his companions to eat, they depart.’ Just so, the kings and princes of the City and Wall Street enjoyed the good things miraculously provided by Credit. It is interesting, according to an informant of mine, what the new-minted billionaires wanted. First came an apartment with a magic address just off Fifth Avenue, and a ‘gated-compound’ house on Palm Beach. Next a glittering Aston Martin, capable of doing 200 miles an hour, and costing at least £200,000. Thirdly, a range of astonishing watches, sparkling with gold, silver and diamonds, with all kinds of complicated astronomical mechanisms capable of telling you the time on Mars and other useful information. One of these baubles was not enough: you had to have dozens. Madoff is believed to possess hundreds of special watches, from antiques to the latest Oyster. All trash, as Caliban says. Volatile trash, too.
As the grandees approach the table with its banquet, there is thunder and lightning. Ariel ‘descends like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table and, with a quaint device, the banquet vanishes’. One would like to know exactly what Shakespeare had in mind as his quaint device. A symbolical Ponzi scheme? A mime of a share suspension? The three grandees, frightened, try to draw their swords, but as Ariel says
Your swords are now too massy for your
strengths
And will not be uplifted.
So the three ‘stand amazed’ and rooted to the spot, just as the great moguls of Wall Street and the City watched, impotent, as the electronic screens recorded their fast-diminishing riches. Ariel ‘ascends and vanishes in thunder. Then, to soft music, enter the spirits again, and dance with mocks and mows, and they depart, carrying out the table.’
Of course The Tempest, which has long been one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, and the only one I would really enjoy directing, is a comedy, of a sort, and all ends well. Unfortunately, the financial crisis through which we are passing, though it has its comic aspects, is essentially a tragedy, and one which will broaden and deepen and intensify with every month that passes, as financial breakdown affects the real economy. Businesses built up over lifetimes are destroyed in weeks, men and women who have never known the fear of unemployment, as their grandparents did, now experience it in horrible reality and perhaps for years, for the rest of their working life. Pensioners who had saved and prepared carefully for retirement now face a penurious old age, even destitution. Worst of all, as the world becomes a rougher, more desperate and frightened place, there is a real risk that the slump, as in the 1930s, will end in war, on a huge scale, that will engulf us all in thermonuclear ruin.
At the end of the play, Prospero says
I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I’ll drown my book.
No such renunciation is possible, however, in the real world. Events are not detonated by magic but by elemental passions, greed, acquisitiveness, vanity and power-lust. These remain to stalk and haunt the ruins of the financial ‘cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces’ that have collapsed.
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