"An Airy Spirit": Developing Identity Through Music, Performance, and Perception

How do audiences come to understand a character who appears to lack a discrete performed identity? This paper explores how, in performance, music and theories of magic and reader response interact to create the identity of the musical spirit, Ariel, from William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) The Tempest (1611). To facilitate this exploration, I outline Ariel’s characterisation across six productions from the Renaissance, Restoration, and modern-day on two levels: textual (concerning how culturally-bound theories of magic and gender affect interpretations of the play’s script), and performed (concerning practical decisions such gender casting, voice type, and visual design). Across both the textual and performed levels, I emphasise the roles of socio-cultural contexts and resultant audience perceptions in informing Ariel’s identity in each production, ultimately proposing that while Ariel’s textual identity as a genderless spirit remains relatively stable from the Renaissance to the modern-day, each production of The Tempest creates a new performed identity for the character through dynamic interactions between culture, history, directors, performers, and audiences.