ARIEL

Evening Star, Issue 20132, 23 March 1929, Page 22

ARIEL

[Written by G. 11. Alokn for Hie ‘ Evening Star.’] Mr Allan Wilkie will .shortly be presenting to a Dunedin audience the play that; has been said, to have set the seal upon Shakespeare's career as a dramatist. The part of Ariel will bo essayed. One uses the verb without any belittling intent. It is improbable that any performer has ever played Ariel in a manner to satisfy an entire audience. The reason is not far to seek. .While it is unquestionably beyond the majority of us to call up a Macbeth , or a .Brutus, there are few of us who have not, at some time or another, i'fiiaginod a “ familiar ” that shall be ours to command. While a knowledge. of exegesis is essential to the light understanding of Hamlet, little i’hat the commentators can say lias much power to sway our notions concerning Ariel. It is well to know what, historical data Shakespeare bad at bis disposal when be portrayed the Prince Denmark. In that matter we must follow the text books as best wo may. In matters of the imagination we are free- to hold what theories we will. We can think as wo please of our own 4»d other folks’ familiars, even Shakespeare's, The performer who plays Ariel brings to the part a train of associated ideas, consciously or unconsciously, and those who follow the performance have other associations working back to the first dawning of _ consciousness. Ariel belongs to a hinterland of the mind that is not affected hy the passage of time. He is the conception of ai child, the accomplishment of a man the full maturity of his literary powers. We cannot hut believe that Shakespeare loved this fleet and sexless creature of his from his childhood lip. I We all know how easy a tiling it seems to etch a fairy into the picture until we try. Elfland has its laws, as Mr G. K. Chesterton reminds ■us. It is not only Caliban and Trinculo and Stephana whom Ariel loads a- dance. Imitators have followed, limping and breathless in his tram, through every age. Even the fairies of W. S. Gilbert, though they “ obey the fairy law,” creak a little at the .joints when set side by side with Ariel. 1 have suggested that we are free to hold what theories wo will concerning the genesis of Ariel. We ,may maintain, or deny, for instance, Alint Shakespeare coined the word. In the Old Testament Ariel is a title he- ] stowed upon an individual and a city. Shakespeare may have encountered the name in the course of his studies at the grammar school. The name is ■used by his contemporary Hoy wood, hut that is of little account. Whethei ■ or not Shakespeare coined the word. ' it is certain that he transmuted the .metal of its coinage. ' = Commentators, attach all manner of v symbolical ideas to the name. Arid As the spirit of air, light, lire, and s') on. f have some times wondered "liif it would not be truer simply to hud in Ariel a kind oi composite portrait, in which, maybe, one figure predominates. Shakespeare dedicated a senes ’iof sonnets to someone who is set don n 'alternately as a dark lady, nnd_ a ■youth of rare intellectual and physical T gifts. There can be little doubt that ■Hbakespeare had the faculty for 'idealisation, and tins faculty was, we '.must tliiuk, awake before his passions. There must have been a period .'‘of receptivity, when the child roamed i-'tjie wooded district of Arden, played 'about the hanks of the Avon and the of the market town, skir'pushed with authority at the gramvjjiar school. Is it laiicif.nl to suppose ('that, besides his “ familiar, there was actually a companion with whom .’ the child " shared his wonderland.'' ■ This, of course, is the wildest theorising, but the secret oi tins play s " greatness is that it impels one to overv kind of imaginative exercise 1 therefore postulate a presence in that little cosmogony of whicn the boy Shakespeare was a part. In his essay, ‘The Predestined.’ Maurice Maeterlinck writes of such presences, bright and radiant beings who seem to presage their early' departure, this child wlrnm Shakespeare knew may or may j not have died young. It may have been, as is so often the case, that lie shed his magic even as Prospero shed his magic cloak. It is Peter Pan alone who refused to grow up. It one, studies, the dialogue between Prospero and Ariel one will come upon a varying play of motives. There is the motive to tyrannise. Prospero ” tells Ariel oil, as the hoy of to-day would put it. 'there is the motive to applaud, the motive to succour. These are the motives that are called out by the intercourse of two children in the course of a summer's day.. The one is observant, domineering, idealistic. The other is instinct with'happiness, while resourceful as the furred and leathered world about him. There is no happier relationship in life than the conspiratorial relation. Prospero and Ariel are conspirators, and conspiracy is companionship raised do another plane. “When shall wc three meet again?” sing the witches in 1 Macbeth,' exemplifying the profound truth that two’s company, three’s none. “We two ” is the burden of the dialogue between Prospero and Ariel, and therein Shakespeare Jins bridged a chasm which, with a few rare exceptions, it is given to music alone to bridge. Htlfegan never be proven whether or not an actual child did unconsciously dominate that composite portinit in Shakespeare’s mind of which Ariel is a reflection. This at least we can tell for ourselves; In Ariel Shakespeare lias given semblance to what is a universal instinct in mankind, the instinct lor companionship. lt> is just because this instinct is universal and its nianilestations are multitudinous that the performer who essays the part of • Ariel must almost inevitably fall short of the mark. In the actual play Ariel appears in various guises, from a harpy upwards; but what are these compared to the varying forms with which, we severally endow our Ariels?