The Mock Tempest - The Plot

The Plot

Duffet's Mock Tempest is set not in any exotic location, but securely in the London familiar to its audience — specifically the lower reaches of contemporaneous London society. The storm that opens the play, in both the Shakespeare and Dryden/Davenant versions, is replaced in Duffet's by a riot in a brothel. Mother Stephania, a bawd, leads her cohort of pimps, prostitutes, and aristocratic customers in a valiant but vain effort to drive off an assault from the town's apprentices. The local watch carries off all the participants to Bridewell prison (the "enchanted castle"); there, the jailkeeper Prospero Whiffe reveals that the raid on the brothel was inspired by his ethereal spirit Ariel — a pickpocket.

The parody goes on to mangle the romances of Prospero's two daughters (called Dorinda and Hippolito, in Dryden and Davenant's adaptation). Dryden and Davenant made Hippolito and Dorinda ignorant of the opposite sex; Duffet's "Dorinda and Miranda" are very familiar with men, but get confused by the concept of a "husband" —

Dorinda: Husband, what's that?

Miranda: Why that's a thing like a man (for aught I know) with a great pair of horns upon his head, and my father said 'twas made for women, look ye.

Dorinda: What, must we ride to water upon't, sister?

Miranda: No, no, it must be our slave, and give us golden clothes, pray, that other men may lie with us in a civil way, and then it must father our children and keep them.

Dorinda: And when we are so old and ugly that nobody else will lie with us, must it lie with us itself?

Miranda: Aye, that it must, sister.

Along the way, Duffet mocks Davenant's musical adaptation of Macbeth, staged in 1664 but first printed in 1674. (Duffet also ridicules Davenent's Macbeth in his Epilogue to his burlesque of Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco, another work of 1674.) The Duke of Mantua has a son who is a Quaker (his name is "Quakero"), allowing for comedy on that subject. And there is also "talk or enactment of drunkenness, violence, mutilation, cannibalism; of pimping, prostitution, adultery, incest; of hypocrisy, cowardice, torture, execution; of urine, vermin, venereal disease; of deviance, dissolution, and death."

The last act of Duffet's play features a parody of Ariel's song "Where the bee sucks, there suck I" from the final scene of The Tempest. Duffet's version is "Where good ale is, there suck I." The parody version was sung by Betty Mackerel, an orange vender who was promoted to the stage.

The Mock Tempest may have been revived in 1682.