When actor Pippa Nixon played Ariel at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2016, she mentioned more than once in interviews that she believed she was the first woman to play the role— which means she must not have looked very hard for confirmation of that fact, as the role has been notably—and for a very long time, exclusively—played by women since the 18th century. But in a way, Nixon was getting at something else about changing understandings of Ariel, and the role gender—and magic, too—have played in our understandings of The Tempest’s most famous spirit.
gender
If you follow controversies about casting women in male roles in Shakespeare at all, you’ll probably have heard people note that Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in the 1800s, and Charlotte Cushman played Romeo. As a novelty act or a star turn for a famous actress, it was not at all unheard of. Boy characters were also frequently converted into ‘trouser roles’ for young women, including Prince Arthur in King John and Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale.
Played by women, 18th, 19th, and early 20th century Ariels leaned into the picturesque, fairytale side of the story, or evocative of neoclassical images of Greek nymphs and goddesses. It was only in the 20th century that the stranger side of the play began to consistently emerge, as directors began exploring the darker sides of Caliban, and the non-humanity of the island’s magical denizens—and at the same time, returned to casting Ariel with men. The imaginative difference is really encapsulated by comparing the image at the top of the newsletter to this one, an image of the same scene with Ariel as the largest spirit on the right:
So in a weird way, Pippa Nixon wasn’t entirely wrong. Her bedraggled, gold-streaked Ariel, who looked like a broken-off piece of the theatre itself, did not lean into the delicacy and prettiness that seems to have drawn directors towards casting the ethereal spirit with women. Though still not the first, her belief that she was maybe points to an enduring narrowness of view when it comes to Ariel’s gender: a pretty fairy is a woman, but a strange not-really-human island creature, a more complex and textured reading of the role, apparently must generally go to a man.
magic
In her brilliant recent book Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance, scholar Pascale Aebischer offers a spectacular reading of Nixon’s Ariel and the version performed the same year at the Royal Shakespeare Company in a collaboration with Intel, which presented Ariel as a live hologram, performed in real time by an actual actor (Mark Quartley) but re-rendered digitally onstage. Both Ariels, she argues, embody the magic of the theatre space and the magic of the island at the same time: Nixon, in the more analogue production, by looking like and exerting control over the technological features of the playhouse itself like music and pulleys, and Quartley by becoming one with the network of digital effects that created their version of Prospero’s island.
Since The Tempest’s first performances it has been a showcase for technological wonders, and Ariel sits at the heart of that aim. It adopts the features of the masque, a form of courtly performance that really had its heyday during the reign of King James I and VI, when The Tempest was written. Ariel leads a spectacular pageant late in the play, causes the opening storm, transforms into a harpy. So, as Aebischer discusses, what these directors are seeing in Ariel is actually present in text: an indelible link between the character and the mechanisms that make the play work.
humanity
Ariel is The Tempest’s turning point, the eleventh hour rescue from the brink of disaster.
The deposed wizard-king Prospero, exiled to an island after his younger brother stole his crown, has his brother and his brother’s allies at his mercy at last. With Ariel’s help he has shipwrecked them on his island, lured them around, and now driven them into a stupor of guilt and madness. It’s time for him to decide what to do with them. He asks Ariel how they seem.
ARIEL
Your charm so strongly works ’em
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.PROSPERO
Dost thou think so, spirit?ARIEL
Mine would, sir, were I human.
This brings Prospero up short. If a being made of air and magic can feel more empathy than he can—he relents, and goes to free his brother and his allies from the spell, and forgives them. We never know what his plan was otherwise.
But this moment relies, of course, on the contrast between Ariel’s empathy and his inhumanity, or non-humanity. A living stage effect who suddenly can feel—but only nearly. Ariel recognizes his emotions as if from a distance, acknowledging what he would feel, but still somehow can’t, or at least not fully. It makes me picture Quartley’s digital Ariel, which I didn’t see, stalling and glitching, unable to quite synthesize the emotional information.
There aren’t many roles in Shakespeare that have been so readily cast consistently as both men and women (of course excluding the all-male casts of Shakespeare’s time, or the exceptions that prove the rule discussed above). It reflects, I think, the combination of all these features of the role: seeing Ariel’s magic and ability to exert subtle control over the environment as either feminine or masculine, the extent to which Ariel should seem to be an extension of Prospero’s magic or enslaved to it, and maybe even changing cultural sense of either men or women’s ability to portray a kind of ethereal androgyny suitable for a creature who looks human but really isn’t (and I use ‘either’ advisedly—to date, those have been the only two options in major performances). Anyone can be Ariel because Ariel isn’t anyone—he’s a being, a thing, called ‘he’ in the text, one suspects, only because that was the natural default, or maybe because Prospero called him that. It’s interesting, but also a bit of a shame that we can only happily broaden our gendered imaginations when it comes to a being that totters on the line of humanity, almost-but-not-quite.
And even then: Pippa Nixon, a professional Shakespearean actor, thought she was the first for a reason. There had evidently been no prominent female Ariels in the UK for her to see, or few enough she could miss them. To be defiant, magical, technological, and strange—nearer to the Ariel of the text than the helpful, good fairy, and the standard for 20th century Ariels—is not really very feminine.
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