An Airy Spirit

Friday night I attended Shakespeare's The Tempest by the Blowing Rock Stage Company. Since the dialogue was Shakespearean but the performance was current, the show's portrayal of spirits and sorcery offered insight into both Renaissance and modern concepts of the supernatural. I took special note of the character Ariel, described only as "an airy spirit" and considered one of the most difficult of Shakespeare's characters to interpret.

When I read The Tempest myself several years ago, I would not have classed Ariel as a fairy, but to be fair, that assumed the modern approach to fairies as tiny winged sprites. Ariel seemed to me more ethereal, even angelic, than creatures of that sort. Several times in my recent research, however, I have seen Ariel listed among Shakespeare’s fairies, and upon watching Blowing Rock’s rendition of the show, I find it simpler than I expected to draw connections between Ariel and, say, Puck.

The character Ariel is generally androgynous, and this one was played by a woman (Caitie L. Moss). She spoke in a high, childish voice, and her energy separated her immediately from the human characters, for she was a dancer, and constantly bending and twisting in a jerky manner that made her otherness believable. She dressed in greens and browns, with leaves twined about her, and her nose and lips were painted black for an almost animal appearance. These earthy associations put me in mind of the Pagan spirits upon which a great deal of Medieval fairy lore was based, and at one point Ariel even played a pipe that begged reference to Pan (a Greek god with the shape of a satyr), who influenced images of Robin Goodfellow, or Puck.

In the play, Ariel is servant to the magician Prospero, who rescued the spirit from a cloven pine where it was imprisoned by a witch upon failing to fulfill her obscene commands. Fairies often correlate with witches, according to traditional lore, and it is through the fairies that the witches gain their power. Likewise, Prospero's power as a magician seems to be enhanced by, if not dependent on, his ability to control spirits. It is in fact Ariel who stirs up the tempest for which the play is named, as well as guiding the shipwrecked passengers according to Prospero's wishes.

Though Shakespeare did not write Ariel to be a fairy in the same way that Puck, Oberon, and Titania are fairies, I think it is fair to count the airy spirit among their number for lack of a better alternative. After all, fairies are, by their simplest definition, spiritual beings, and Ariel cannot be an angel, as it serves man, or a demon, as it was too pure to obey the witch Sycorax.

Like the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Ariel seems to be based more on Shakespeare's imagination than on any specific fairy lore. In the version I watched, Ariel was for the most part lighthearted, even comic, fitting with Shakespeare's break from a darker supernatural tradition (though some of this may have been the director's interpretation). The fact that it serves a man may also relate to Shakespeare’s mortalization of fairies. For instance, the fairy queen Titania is deceived into falling in love with Bottom (a man with an ass’s head) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the fact that she can be at the wrong end of a spell puts her on par with humans. This sort of tactic disassociates Shakespeare’s immortals from the creatures banished by the Church and wrapped up in its ideology. Because Ariel is both enslaved and released by Prospero, its own power is limited, making it more safely presentable to the church-going public.

The effects of Shakespeare's efforts to make the fairy more human-friendly exist to this day. The Blowing Rock Stage Company took a humorous approach to the magical elements of The Tempest with colorful sprites and corny special effects. Such is the legacy that the magic of an older age has left to us. Ariel, like other sprites of our day, does not exist to warn or even to teach, but to amuse.

(Picture courtesy of http://www.blowingrockstage.com/shows02.php?rid=131.)