"One Dear Son Shall I Twice Lose"

Henry, Prince of Wales and the 1613 Tempest at Whitehall

Greg McNamara

The 1612-13 theater season at King James's Whitehall court has provoked a great deal of interest among literary critics and historians alike, as the King's Servants performed an unusually large number of plays in honor of Princess Elizabeth's marriage to Prince Frederick of Bohemia, Elector Palatine of the Rhine (Barroll 201-3). In the midst of negotiations for the spring marriage, the English court was tempest-tossed by the death of Henry, Prince of Wales on November 6 after a month long illness. The unexpected and untimely death of the eighteen-year-old heir-apparent was an enormous national tragedy, and the printing presses "rained tears of black ink" (Edmond 143), issuing forth an immense elegiac response reminiscent of the grief inspired by the death of Sir Philip Sidney.
Prince Henry's death was a delicate issue throughout the wedding season: King James's grief remained strong in January, moving him to cry out at court "Henry is dead, Henry is dead"; and the Venetian correspondent Antonio Foscarini observed as late as April 1613 that Queen Anna "cannot bear to hear it mentioned; nor does she ever recall it without abundant tears and sighs" (Brown 12:472,521). We learn from Stow that "In the moneths of October, November, and December, this yeere 1612 there happened many great Winds, violent Stormes, and Tempests, as well by land as by sea, which did excessive great damage, with extreame shipwrack throughout the Ocean" (913); it is almost as if the weather was roused in response to human events.
The season of destructive weather and shipwrecks loomed in the background of the February 1613 performance of The Tempest, and mourning for the Prince was left incomplete, cut short because court finances were insufficient to continue hosting the awkwardly stalled Palatine entourage. John Chamberlain had a keen awareness of the conflicting social obligations produced by the prince's unexpected death during the development of the Palatine match:

[the Palatine] marriage by this late accident is retarded, because yt wold
be thought absurd that forrain ambassadors comming to condole the Princes
death shold find us feasting and dancing: so that it is deferred until May day,
and the mourning for the Prince to continue but to the 24th of March..."
(Letter 154, 19 Nov. 1612)

    In a similarly confounded tone, the Venetian Ambassador reported, "the elector palatine does not know what to do ... and so the nuptial festivities of the house are turned to mournful trappings" (CSP Venetian 12:449). By February 5, however, King James brought the official mourning to an end (CSP Venetian 12:493), and the wedding took place on February 14, after more than a week of fireworks, pageantry, and court entertainment. "Surely," writes David Bergeron, "some of the impetus behind such an elaborate display came from the desire to transmute the tragedy of Henry's death into a romantic comedy of festivity and marriage, to create a fiction to displace difficult reality" (Bergeron 114).
    Amidst the celebration for the Palatine wedding, the specter of Prince Henry circulated, and Henry's specter subtly trod the boards when the King's Servants performed The Tempest at Whitehall. Following the maritime mock-tragedy of the opening scene which separates Ferdinand, the young Prince of Naples, from his father and the rest of the wedding party, we learn that Ariel has at Prospero's bidding "flam'd amazement" (1.2.198) aboard the ship with a purpose that describes the action of the play: "Sometime I'ld divide ... Then meet and join" (1.2.198-201). There has been much division in Alonso's court, the loss of the prince and the sea-wreck dealing capping blows that seem to speak against the affairs of state, and this kingdom of loss is not entirely unlike King James's court in the spring of 1613. The atmosphere of the play, as Adrian informs us, "must needs be subtle, tender, and delicate temperance" (2.1.42-3), yet the themes explored must often have probed the Whitehall court "most chirurgeonly" (2.1.141). The performance negotiated an unstable social situation that demanded complimentary treatment of the wedding theme tempered by sensitivity to the unhappy subject of Prince Henry's death and the problem of the lost prince in the play.
    In 1921, H.D. Gray argued that Shakespeare revised The Tempest for the court venue in 1613, suggesting that the primary revisions undertaken on the play involved the integration of masque elements such as the banquet table and the wedding masque. More recently, Stephen Orgel discusses Shakespeare's attention to the masque genre in the construction of The Tempest, arguing that the influence of Jonson and Jones is apparent in the play and that Shakespeare's familiarity with the work of the king's masque making team "must have been intimate" (45). The King's Servants presented the 1613 performance of The Tempest at court in the context of the reigning style of court entertainment -- the masque, and masquelike, the play attended to contemporary themes.
    The setting of The Tempest is particularly conducive to a rereading in the context of Prince Henry's death, considering the prince's participation and patronage in maritime enterprises and New World colonization. Preaching just after Henry's funeral, Daniel Price even saw fit to present a maritime metaphor when discussing the ill fate that "shipwrackt all our hope in that blessed ark the PRINCE" (448-9). The enchanted island setting of the play adds yet another layer of topicality to the performance; as Roy Strong has observed, "We seem to be wandering through a garden by de Caus where we are suddenly confronted by dreamlike monsters, or entering a wild grotto to be struck suddenly ... with surprise and wonder at moving statues and magical music" (Renaissance Garden 103). It was Salomon de Caus who presented designs for a Mannerist garden complete with three man-made islands planned for construction at Prince Henry's Richmond Palace. This haunting coincidence of garden architecture and dramatic setting must have loomed darkly in the minds of the audience at Whitehall in 1613 as they followed the progression of Shakespeare's play. The combination of maritime and garden imagery that frames the play would most certainly have stimulated the imagination of the audience, having only just finished mourning for Prince Henry, whose program was deeply associated with these themes.
    J.G.A. Pocock has written that "A text is an actor in its own history, and a polyvalent text acts in a multiplicity of concurrent histories" (29). In the case of the 1613 Tempest at Whitehall, two of the most powerful concurrent histories at court involve the death of Prince Henry and the Palatine marriage; there is a powerful relationship between these two histories, and some of the symbolism of this connection was borne out by The Tempest on this particular occasion. The Whitehall audience must have sensed the specter of Prince Henry in the separated Ferdinand, left "In an odd angle of the isle ... his arms in this sad knot" (1.2.223-4); so too might there have been some resonances of the dead prince in the plight of Claribel, "loosed" to an African as Henry, a devout Protestant if not a Puritan, was subject to be "loosed" in a carefully negotiated and highly unpopular Catholic marriage. James, like Alonso, was "kneeled to and importun'd otherwise," and Henry, like Claribel, "Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at which end o' th' beam should bow" (2.1.126-33). Even as he complied with his father's directions toward a Catholic match, the prince signified his agreement with a detached, theatrical response, writing that James was to tell him his "part to play" (Akrigg 133).
    In a funeral elegy for Prince Henry dedicated to the Elector Palatine by Robert Alleyn, the poet laments that the Elector will lead Princess Elizabeth far away from England, and this creates yet another interesting tension when read against the problem of Claribel's marriage in The Tempest. Sebastian's criticism of Alonso's decision to marry Claribel to the distant King of Tunis figures Tunis as a distant realm of darkness or blackness. We might read a Catholic match for Prince Henry as darkly figured by Tunis in The Tempest, and the Palatine match, too, was eventually characterized by darkness, distance, and forced separation from England. As Alonso punishes himself for marrying Claribel to the King of Tunis, his lines present an uncanny prophecy of James's loss of his own children:

would I had never
Married my daughter there: For comming thence
My sonne is lost, and (in my rate) she too,
Who is so farre from Italy removed,
I ne'er again shall see her: O thou mine heire
Of Naples and Milainne, what strange fish
Hath made his meale on thee? (2.1.108-114)

In the context of the 1613 Tempest at Whitehall, these lines would have evoked mixed feelings from an audience pondering the implications of the recently and suspiciously lost prince and the removal of the princess to Heidelberg. With the wallflower Prince Charles installed as heir apparent, the concerns of the English people were not unjustified, as the nation lost a great deal of symbolic if not actual power. The princess also remained in the line of succession, of course, but well out of reach of England, and an allusion to this issue would have been discernible in Sebastian and Antonio's treacherous analysis of the impact of Ferdinand's death on the Neapolitan political structure:

Ant. Then tell me, who's the next heir of Naples?
Seb. Claribel.
Ant. She that is Queene of Tunis: she that dwels
Ten leagues beyond mans life: she that from Naples
Can have no note, unless the sun were post --
The Man I' th' Moon's too slow -- till new-born chins
Be rough and razorable... (2.1.244-50)

Like Claribel and the King of Tunis, the Elector and Electress Palatine went far from England and into a sort of darkness when Prince Frederick accepted the Crown of Bohemia against the wishes of King James. James withdrew support from the "Winter King and Queen" and refused to allow them to reenter England after the Bohemian crisis; he never saw them in person again in his life. Like Claribel, Elizabeth was "banish'd" from her father's eye (2.1.127) into the realm of darkness.
The fallen Bohemian rulers were popular in England for their Protestant loyalties and continuance of Prince Henry's chivalric appeal. With the birth of their first child in 1614 Prince Henry was, for many in England, reborn. Henry Peacham, who contributed much to the popular mythology surrounding Henry, Prince of Wales with his Minerva Brittanicum, celebrated the birth of the "swarthy" Henry Frederick, whom Elizabeth called "my little black babie," with a long poem Prince Henry Revived (Lewalski 54; Williamson 191). Robert Alleyn's dedication "To the Lady Elizabeth" upon the death of Prince Henry helps to clarify the sense of national investment in the royal family, offering the hope that:

When fruitfull Rhine is cover'd with thy sead,
That from thy royall breast may spring some one,
The living image of our Prince that's dead.

Alleyn's dedication "To the Prince Palatine" from the same body of elegies develops a metaphor of England as a "litle Heaven" "Where three great lights all in a spheare did shine." The poem addresses the awkward and tragic events at court, finding resolution in the Elector Palatine and the Palatine match:

But at thy comming came those dire defects,
That dim's the greatest light that grac'd our day,
And thou to breed a second sadde eclipse,
Would lead the second of the two away
Yet doe great Prince, for what thou mean'st to do,
Is but t'ingraft another with the two,
That three (though sundred) yet may no less shine,
O're all the bounds betwixt the Thames and Rhine.

The 1613 Tempest at Whitehall offered its audience a plausible narrative of closure, resolving the shipwreck and loss of Prince Ferdinand with his marriage to Miranda in much the same way that the marriage festivities for Elizabeth and Frederick helped to lighten the grief for Prince Henry's death. In this performance context, Ferdinand's absence and recovery in The Tempest is emblematic of the substitution of Prince Frederick for Prince Henry in the English popular imagination. The model of the lost Prince recovered through courtship and marriage that the play employs is apparent in several elegies that position the Elector as a replacement for Prince Henry. The figuring of Frederick as a surrogate for Prince Henry is apparent in the body of elegiac literature and in contemporary drama. W. Smith's citizens' play The Hector of Germanie, or the Palsgrave, Prime Elector, which was "acted at the at the Red Bull, and the Curtaine within a few weeks after [the wedding] or simultaneously with the court festivities," (Payne 22) presented a scenario which associated the two young Protestant champions. The 1613 Tempest at Whitehall shared a historical moment with the Hector of Germanie and the contemporary elegiac literature while weaving important strands into the cultural fabric blending Prince Henry's death and the Palatine marriage.
Returning to the Whitehall performance, Prospero's masque of Nymphs and Reapers, might be understood to work toward the purpose of evoking a "Sea-change" from mourning for Prince Henry to the "rich & strange" new hope of the Palatine match. This exchange is presented emblematically when Iris summons the dancers forth:

You Sun-burn'd Sicklemen of August weary,
Come hether from the furrow, and be merry,
Make holly day: your Rye-straw hats put on,
And these fresh Nimphes encounter every one
In Country footing. (4.1.134-8)

This dance of Nymphs and Reapers combines the interdependent rites of fertility and harvest. With the harvest reaped, the rye straw hats are worn for celebration. In the dance, as in the case of the typical court masque resolution, the harvest work of the Sun-burned Reapers is balanced out as they join the "fresh Nimphes" in country dancing. This moment in The Tempest demonstrates the influence of the court masque on the King's Servants' production values, and presents the dramatic equivalent of the standard merging of audience and dancers at the conclusion of a typical court masque. In the case of The Tempest, the dancing remains on-stage, but the representations of death and fertility commingled in the scene demonstrate the refreshing quality of the marriage celebration. This resolution synthesizes the conflicting demands of mourning for Prince Henry and celebrating the marriage of the Princess and the Elector.
In the play's comic closing, Ferdinand and Miranda are revealed to Alonso, whose surprise and joy are tempered by the fear that the scene is an illusion. This instability is illustrated when Alonso states, "If this prove/ A vision of the island, one dear son/ Shall I twice lose" (5.1.175-7). Ferdinand's return to the political world in the Whitehall performance of 1613 must have eased the feeling of loss associated with the death of Prince Henry through the substitution of the Elector Palatine. With Ferdinand resurrected, Gonzalo revises the history of the voyage, containing regret for Claribel's absence and reinscribing it as joy:

set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find in Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost. (5.1.207-11)

Gonzalo's revisions and the closure of romantic comedy, however, were charms "all o'erthrown" (Epilogue 1) by the force of history. Prince Henry's last vestiges appear in civic pageantry early in the reign of Charles I, and Princess Elizabeth, forbidden to return to England until 1661, saw only portraits of her father. The Elector Palatine suffered fits of melancholy (Lewalski 55) and died at 36, repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to champion European Protestantism. Although Prince Henry had been reborn in both the Elector Palatine and in his namesake nephew, the return of the prince was but a "vision of the island." Alonso's vision of Miranda and Ferdinand playing at chess reflects the complex contest of European politics in which the Elector and Electress Palatine were soon to be enmeshed, a contest that King James observed as if it were on a stage before him, while he lost his dear son twice.

University of West Virginia

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