The Tempest and The Waste Land

Still discusses The Tempest in the light of the Eleusinian mysteries and sees the play as an allegory of the psychological experience of initiation. His case suffers from the minuteness with which it is argued, but Eliot, in his preface to Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire (London, I930), calls Still's book interesting. I suggest he first found it interesting in I92I, when it was published, in the autumn of which year he was drafting The Waste Land. The connection between vegetation and mystery rites, clear in Frazer, is crucial in Weston. By distinguishing between their exoteric and esoteric meanings, the mysteries provide Weston with a link between primitive rite and spiritualized Grail symbolism. But pattern aside, the material in Weston and Frazer, viewed as machinery for a poem investigating the modern Wasteland, is not helpful. Frazer's is remote, and Weston restricts discussion to the Grail symbols and their origins. Eliot, while adopting the pattern, is sparing with properties from both sources. The images he needed to body the pattern in a poem where reduction of normal narrative would put strong pressure on the image-structure3 were at hand in 1This is a revised version of a paper first given at the I966 AULLA conference in Auckland. 2 Colin Still, Shakespeare's Mystery Play: A Study of The Tempest (London, i92i), Grover Smith mentions Still in T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Chicago, 1956), pp. 70, 84; and a fuller account appears in Northrop Frye, T. S. Eliot (Edinburgh, 1963), pp. 68-69. Still presented an augmented version of his views in The Timeless Theme (London, 1936). Subsequent references to Still will be made to Shakespeare's Mystery Play. 'It is well to bear in mind that the type of narrative established in final form by Pound's cutting was already inherent in Eliot's draft, in such manifestations as shifts and

Archaeology · Art history · Pure land · Tempest · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

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