Cornwall’s famous Minack Theatre is an impressive achievement. Built against the cliff-side at Porthcurno, this open-air theatre was created almost single-handedly by one woman: Rowena Cade. Her dream was to create the perfect setting for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, although since the 1930s the Minack Theatre has also hosted numerous productions of other works. By building her theatre on the Cornish coast, Rowena Cade aimed to use the cliffs of Porthcurno as the ideal background for Shakespeare’s drama, in which a storm at sea leaves a ship stranded upon the shores of a mysterious island.

View from the Minack Theatre, October 2014

Staging The Tempest against a background of real-life wind and waves is an attractive idea, but also draws attention to an important theme in Shakespeare’s play: human control over the elements. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, The Tempest was probably performed in both indoor playhouses and at the Globe, an open-air amphitheatre, but its first recorded performance took place at King James I’s court in 1611. At this indoor court performance, the tempest that frames the play’s narrative could have been represented by a wave machine, as well as the rumbling sound-effects that typically signified a storm on-stage: the playing company would have controlled the introduction and duration of such effects. When Shakespeare explores the theme of human control over the elements within his play, there may be an implied link to these original circumstances of production: Shakespeare, as dramatist, possesses imaginative control over the storm that he introduces into his fictional narrative.

Within the narrative of The Tempest, the idea of human power over the elements is explored through the figure of Prospero. Many years ago, Prospero was exiled to the mysterious island on which the play is set by his treacherous brother, who usurped his former position as Duke of Milan. Yet Prospero has been able to use his magical ‘art’ to acquire control over the spirits of this island; as the play begins, this power enables Prospero to invoke a supernatural storm that maroons a ship carrying his brother on the island. Ultimately, through this device, Prospero is able to bring his brother to repentance, and reclaim his rightful position as Duke of Milan.

The alignment between Prospero’s magical control over the elements, and his ability to reassert his political authority, is striking at a time when Shakespeare’s England was exploring new possibilities for overseas expansion. It was during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the concept of an ‘empire of the seas’ gained significance, as literary critic Claire Jowitt has demonstrated in her book The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 (2010). A number of English writers responded to this relationship between marine power and political authority: Sir Walter Ralegh, for instance, argued that ‘whosoever commands the sea, commands…the world itself’ (Discourse of the Invention of Ships, c. 1615).

Shakespeare draws upon this association between command of the seas and imperial domination in The Tempest. His control over the elemental spirit Ariel is one striking example. Ariel is associated with the air and water, and he controls these elements on Prospero’s behalf to create the supernatural storm that carries the ship to harbour ‘in the deep nook where once / Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew / From the still-vexed Bermundas’ (1.2.227-9). Ariel’s reference to the Atlantic islands echoes the ambitions of those in Shakespeare’s England who hoped to establish a new empire in the Americas. Like Ralegh, a key proponent for such expansion, Prospero aligns such imperialism with command over the seas. Ariel, spirit of the water, is repeatedly characterised as Prospero’s subject: he is described as the latter’s ‘industrious servant’ (4.1.33) or even ‘slave’ (1.2.270), and responds by saluting Prospero as his ‘great master, grave sir’ (1.2.189). Another inhabitant of the island, Caliban, directly attributes Prospero’s colonial power over the island he inhabits to his command over such elemental spirits: ‘I must obey. His art is of such power’ (1.2.371).

Prospero is able to command Ariel, and hence the seas, thanks to the magical arts that he has acquired through his ‘secret studies’ (1.2.77). This association between book-learning and conjuration invites association with the ‘art’ that Shakespeare possesses, as dramatist: the ability to create new worlds of the imagination. In this way The Tempest, a play that reflects on human control over the elements in relation to political ambitions, also highlights the power of the imagination in creating and shaping such dreams of imperial expansion – or of theatrical magic, as in the case of Rowena Cade and the Minack Theatre.

St. Michael’s Mount, the harshly beautiful island of granite that studs the coast deep within western Cornwall, has a surreptitiously important place in the history of literature. When John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, wrote the famous elegy ‘Lycidas’ in memory of his drowned friend Edward King, he imagined King’s body swirling in the oceans around Britain, denied burial and mourning. Legend had it that the archangel Michael had appeared in a vision on ‘the guarded mount’ of St. Michael’s, and Milton poetically cried out to the supernatural figure to ‘look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth [pity] / And…waft the hapless youth’ back to his friends and family.

Right at the heart of English Literature therefore – in the middle of one of the most important poems of one of most important poets – we have St. Michael’s Mount, an angel, and Cornish fable.

You would imagine the severe grandeur of the Mount would have attracted the Romantics some 150 years after Milton, but despite the fact that John Keats’ family history was probably Cornish, and that Lord Byron visited Falmouth, there is little contact between the county and the most famous Romantics. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other fascinating minor poets of the era (both Cornish and non-Cornish) who are very much drawn to places like Land’s End, Carn Brea, the banks of the Tamar – and, of course,  St. Michael’s Mount.

One of these is William Lisle Bowles.  He is perhaps best known for being one of a set of ‘pre-Romantic’ poets who reinvigorated the English sonnet, which had fallen somewhat out of fashion. Yet I’m particularly interested in his longer 1798 work, simply and straightforwardly entitled ‘St. Michael’s Mount: A Poem’ – and his engagement with Cornish landscape.

Like so much Romantic verse it begins with a walk:

While Summer airs scarce breathe along the tide,
Oft panting, up the Mountain’s craggy side
We climb: – how beautiful, how still, how clear
The scenes that stretch around! – the rocks that rear
Their shapes, in rich fantastic colours drest
The hill-tops where the softest shadows rest;
The long-retiring bay; the level sand…

But Bowles knows that the rocky scene opening up as they ascend, however glorious, would not be to everybody’s taste in the eighteenth century: particularly if imagined under the very different aspect of a stormy day, dark and lonely, with squalls driving in and the coast ‘wet with the hoar spray of the flashing tide’.

Reflecting on those who only really enjoy a tranquil nature – sun-dappled, blue-skied, graceful and soft – he notes that St. Michael’s Mount is probably not for them: ‘No sunny meadows at thy feet are spread / No streamlets sparkle o’er their pebbly bed’. The granite is too stark, too brutal, and too associated with the danger and peril of Cornish mining, ‘sunk fathoms beneath the rolling brine’. Bowles’ poem is all about respecting the savagery of the Mount’s beauty.

Savage beauty had a particular name in the days when Bowles was writing: it wasn’t actually beauty at all, but ‘the sublime’. When appreciating anything from landscape to Greek sculpture, an educated eighteenth-century person would instinctively map their aesthetic responses on to these two opposed categories, which were formalised in dozens of essays and treatises. The beautiful was soft and graceful. The sublime was harsh and angular. The beautiful relaxed and soothed. The sublime exhilarated and shocked. Beautiful landscapes were verdant, lush and welcoming; sublime landscapes were bleak, remote and dangerous.

There is no doubt that Bowles’ poem on the Mount is full of classically sublime qualities and things, and privileges them over the beautiful. Better the lash of the wind than a calm sunset:

the howling hurricane, the dashing wave
More graceful, when the storm’s dark vapours frown,
Than when the summer suns in all their pomp go down!

The Mount is a ‘stern monument amidst the delug’d plain’; the castle that crowns its peak sits ‘in the dark terror of thy ancient reign’. It is best seen – and appreciated – on a stormy night, wreathed in moonlight or sharply lit up by lightening. The feelings of awe and even terror are all part of it.

One other typically sublime thing is great antiquity – anything old, be it an ancient stone-circle or the Egyptian pyramids – was invested with a certain breathtaking reverence. Bowles picks up on this in his poem too, imagining ‘the dim record of thy early days’ and imagining the long, sometimes bloody history of the Mount and the castle. That druidic rituals were carried out on the Mount in ancient times merely adds to the aura: ‘the shadowy Druid throng, the darksome wood, / And the hoar altar, wet with human blood’. Things take a gothic turn!

As Bowles lets his imagination run riot through the history of St. Michael’s Mount, he does one final, quite clever thing. He brings together nature and history. The raging seas that batter the Mount become – symbolically – the great surges and swells of time. The violence of storms stands for the violence of human conflicts and invasions. The Cornish landscape becomes something to read symbolically, to provoke reflection and meditation: ‘O might we thus from Heav’n’s bright battlements / Behold the scene Humanity presents’.

It’s not a coincidence that this poem was written by Bowles at the end of the 1790s: the decade of the French Revolution. The ‘seas’ of historical change were indeed surging – and not always peacefully. You can see why the poet might have history and violence on his mind. Yet Bowles draws something consoling from the way the Mount resists all the natural forces thrown at it: it still stands, ‘wearing graceful the grey tints of Time’ as the waves settle and murmur at its base. The Mount is indomitable, strong, and unchanging against the storms of nature. And you get the strong sense that, amidst the storms of history, Bowles wants the human spirit to be the same or – at least – to draw some inspiration from the savage beauty (that is, the sublimity) of Cornwall’s magnificent granite forms.