Epilogue: Prospero’s Bands n thinking of endings, I am drawn to the final page of the Folio text of The Tempest (see Figure E.1). The conclusion of The Tempest, I particularly Prospero’s epilogue, is perhaps the most overana- lyzed and overrated moment in the canon; given the play’s position in Shakespeare’s career, its conclusion has taken on mythological propor- tions, with many reading it as the culminating statement of the play- wright’s life in, and farewell to, the theater.1 Such a reading not only distorts the biographical record (Shakespeare continued to write for the theater after he completed The Tempest, collaborating with John Fletcher on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen2) but it also places its emphasis exclusively on performed modes of dramatic realization. As discussed in the Prologue to this book, in terms of the printing history of Shakespeare’s collected works, The Tempest represents not an ending, but a beginning, since it is the first play that appears in the Folio. The play occupies a singular position in that its placement at the beginning of the Folio initiates the experience of reading a collec- tion of Shakespearean drama that is constructed according to a larger, specific editorial program: to “gather his workes, and giue them [to] you.” With these factors in mind, and thinking of the earliest text of the play as a kind of threshold between performed and printed con- ceptualizations of drama, I return to some of my central concerns: what is it like to read this last page of The Tempest rather than seeing it performed? Or better, what is it like to read this moment and visualize it performed? How does the epilogue signify if it is not spoken by an actor but is instead conjured into existence by the imaginative powers of a reader? As Figure E.1 makes clear, readers of the Folio version of the play would have confronted something much different than readers of a modernized critical edition. The Folio page is neatly divided into three distinct segments of text (four if one includes the “FINIS” near the 186 M Shakespeare and the Imprints of Performance Figure E.1 The final page of The Tempest (F, 1623). By permission of The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. bottom). The upper segment is the conclusion of the action of the play- text proper, complete with an “Exeunt omnes.” The lower left-hand seg- ment contains Prospero’s epilogue (in italics), and a final direction for his “Exit.” These two segments are linked perhaps by way of Prospero’s “please you draw neere,” the final line before the epilogue, which might Epilogue: Prospero’s Bands M 187 be delivered to the other figures on stage, but might instead signal Prospero’s turn toward the audience as he begins his appeal to “be relieu’d by praier.” The final partitioned segment, “The Scene, an vn- inhabited Island” and the list of the “Names of the Actors,” constitutes a powerful textual rebuttal to Prospero’s prayer for freedom. The Folio text, that is, essentially resets itself—we end with a reminder of where the action took place, and of the characters motivating that action: almost as soon as Prospero finishes his petition to be free from “this bare Island” in the epilogue, the play’s setting is reinforced for read- ers; similarly, Prospero remarks that “I haue my Dukedome got, / And pardon’d the deceiuer,” yet just to the right of these lines is the descrip- tion of “Anthonio his brother, the vsurping Duke of Millaine.” Within the bounds of the Folio, Prospero’s escape to political power is over before it begins. Let me be clear: my intention is not to put this forth as a legitimate reading to the end of the play; it is difficult to imagine anyone reading the F page quite this literally and understanding the “Names of the Actors” as somehow undermining or qualifying every- thing that has come before. But this is precisely the point: reading a play involves processing various kinds of textual information located in discrete or disparate locations; that readers are almost certainly able to resist such a literal interpretation of the raw data of the F page is indicative of the level of participation that inheres in the act of reading drama. Beyond the interpenetrations of the tripartite textual layout, the page itself registers a range of information related to the material properties of the Folio text and early modern textual production that cannot be fully communicated in a critical edition. Different-sized type and fonts are used, and portions of both the title and initial lines of text of The Two Gentlemen of Verona can be seen bleeding through from the verso side of the sheet (the compositor’s anticipation of this play is recorded in the catchword “THE” at the foot of the page). The page also appears to record certain features of its underlying manuscript: Ralph Crane has been identified as having prepared the manuscript copy used in the printing house, and some of his scribal habits are on display. Prospero’s reference to “our deere-belou’d” reveals Crane’s fondness for both hyphenated words and elision. It is also likely that the list of the “Names of the Actors” and its brief descriptions of the major players—Gonzalo is “an honest old Councellor,” Caliban is “a saluage and deformed slaue,” Ariel is “an ayrie spirit”—are the contribution of Crane, not of Shakespeare. Similar lists appear at the end of other Folio texts for which Crane is thought to have prepared copy (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Folio 188 M Shakespeare and the Imprints of Performance text of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale).3 Whether Crane’s list is the product of his interpreta- tion of what he witnessed in a performance of the play or his response to descriptions in Shakespeare’s manuscript (Vaughan and Vaughan 127), the “Names of the Actors” represents a point at which textual produc- tion and imaginative participation in the performance of the play inter- mingle and energize one another. Comparable points of intersection shared by page and stage are also evidenced in many of The Tempest’s stage directions; certain phrases in the directions—“A tempestuous noise of Thunder and Lightning heard” (TLN 2), “with gentle actions of saluta- tions” (TLN 1537), “to a strange hollow and confused noyse, they heauily vanish” (TLN 1807–8), “a franticke ge-/sture” (TLN 2009–10)—lead John Jowett to argue that Crane, “apparently influenced by his experi- ence of the play on stage . emphasiz[ed] visual aspects of the play as seen in the theatre and record[ed] them in a descriptive, complimentary, literary manner, in terms which aid the reader’s appreciation of the play but which are unlikely to have been used by the dramatist instructing the players” (Companion 612).4 Much of the information encoded on the final Folio page of the play will be lost or significantly altered by the editorial and publishing pro- cesses that produce a modern edition. Typefaces, spelling, punctuation, and paper quality will all be regularized; the unique structure of the page itself will disappear, as Prospero’s epilogue will likely be justified so that it appears in line with the playtext above it, and the “Names of the Actors” is shifted to the beginning of the play to serve as a list of dramatis personae. The re-coding options that are available to a modern editor, however, give something back to readers, even as they take away. Discussions in introductions or appendices can describe early modern manuscript production and Crane’s scribal fingerprints, and these dis- cussions can be linked to the playtext by way of cross-references in com- mentary notes; facsimile pages of the Folio text can be reproduced (the Arden 3 editors supply a reproduction of the final page of the play in their examination of Crane’s contribution of “important information that appears to reflect his own judgment” (127)). Above all, editors can remain faithful to the program that Crane, an early reader and media- tor of the playtext, appears to have instituted: produce a version of the text that facilitates a reader’s ability to imaginatively approximate the play in performance. A commentary note on the epilogue in the Arden 3 edition recalls George D. Wolfe’s 1995 production for the New York Shakespeare Festival, where “Patrick Stewart gave up the microphone he had used throughout the outdoor performance and here addressed the Epilogue: Prospero’s Bands M 189 audience without the aid of amplification. If Prospero has exited and returned, he may have doffed some of his ducal trappings and appear in a simple shirt or gown. Such theatrical choices can indicate Prospero’s loss of power or the actor’s loss of his role” (Epilogue 1n). A full-page photograph of a plainly adorned and “pensive” Stewart as Prospero can be found in the Arden 3 introduction (122). Stephen Orgel, editor of the Oxford edition of the play, notes of the epilogue that “[it] is unique in the Shakespeare canon in that its speaker declares himself not an actor in a play but a character in a fiction. The release he craves of the audience is the freedom to continue his history beyond the limits of the stage and the text” (319n). Whether the epilogue is spoken by the actor in a play or the char- acter in a fiction is open to debate.