The Imperiled Daughter: The Tempest and More in RDR2

How Dutch Van der Linde betrays Hosea Matthews: A Look at William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in RDR2.

All articles on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game, and occasionally the eventual fates of some characters in Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.

Allusions to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest are among the most obvious references in RDR2 — and yet, other allusions to the Bard’s work are so subtle we almost have to guess at them. The game doesn’t make direct allusion to King Lear or Othello, but the influence of those dramas is clear. Those plays feature a scheming villain spitting poison in the ear of a noble-but-tragically-flawed leader and a loyal but hapless child or follower who dies as a result of the leader’s weakness: a plot that RDR2 reworks beautifully. However, this is an influence felt, not named.

Other Shakespearean works are alluded to more directly. We’ll begin by discussing how RDR2 makes use of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, and get to the rest next week.

The Tempest in RDR2

The Tempest is the Shakespearean work most frequently alluded to in RDR2, which is because Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained allude to it often as well. This kind of layering, which I call nesting allusions, is something the writers are fond of doing. It creates a sort of extra dimension of referentiality, although what purpose this serves isn’t always clear.

The inaccessible part of the map called Tempest Rim is an allusion to the play, as is Caliban’s Seat (Caliban is a character in the comedy). The phrase “the king’s son” (I.2.22), which is a mission name, appears in the text, as it does in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. The mission name is probably a double allusion to both works.

The mission name “Welcome to the New World” is an allusion to the character Miranda’s famous line, “O brave new world/That has such people in’t!” (V.1.186). “Welcome to the New World” is the first of the missions set on Guarma — and in fact, RDR2’s entire island episode is inspired by The Tempest. The play opens on a ship caught in a violent storm. The spirit Ariel appears as flames on the deck of this ship. (One of the NPCs who challenges the player to a race has a horse named Ariel, named for this character.)

In the play, the ship doesn’t actually sink, but is magically guided to safe harbor. Nevertheless, several passengers end up going overboard in the storm. Perhaps the Antenor sinks, but we never see it happen, just the gang abandoning ship. In The Tempest, a group washes up together on an island. They consist mainly of treacherous and scheming characters; Ferdinand — a “good” character, to put it simple terms — washes up alone, like Arthur does. The central conflict and resolution of the play don’t bear much similarity to what happens on the island of Guarma. The allusions to this work are rather strongly stated for what’s actually made of the material (which seems to remain at the plot level rather than developing themes or characters), and are probably best understood as nested references to Paradise Lost.

The Winter’s Tale in RDR2

If the allusions to The Tempest sit at the surface of the game, those to The Winter’s Tale are nearly buried. One of them is obvious, and this is by design: “Exit, Pursued by a Bruised Ego” takes its name from what is probably the most famous English-language stage direction of all time: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” which means that instead of the text making you feel “happy” (comedies) or “sad” (tragedies), it makes you feel “respectfully, what the fuck was that.” At the beginning of the play, Leontes, King of Sicily, works himself into a lather of paranoia. He convinces himself that his childhood friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia, is sleeping with his wife Hermione and is the father of their unborn child. Polixenes is warned of the king’s madness and escapes; Leontes throws Hermione in prison, despite literally no one else believing what he’s saying. When their child is born, Hermione’s friend Paulina takes the baby to Leontes in the hopes that it will soften his heart. Instead, he orders his baby murdered.

Leontes’s loyal retainer, Antigonus (Paulina’s husband), aware that this is delusional and evil behavior, refuses the order. Although Leontes is furious at Antigonus’s disobedience, he’s finally convinced to let the infant live. Sort of. He says that Antigonus must abandon the baby in the wilderness — to be rescued or not, as fate will have it.

Meanwhile, Hermione is on trial for infidelity. Leontes has sent to the Oracle at Delphos to confirm his suspicions. The Oracle, like everyone else, says that Hermione innocent. Initially, Leontes still refuses to believes this, but then learns that their son has wasted away and died because of the false accusations against Hermione. Hermione swoons and soon dies of grief. And in Bohemia, Antigonus woefully leaves the baby. At this point, he hears a hunt nearby, and is chased off stage by a bear, which kills him.

The last two acts of the play take place 16 years later. Hermione and Leontes’s baby girl, Perdita, was found in the wilderness and raised by a shepherd. Perdita meets Prince Florizel — Polixenes’s son — and they fall in love and marry. Eventually, she’s reunited with her father, and Hermione comes back to life (sure!). Hermione and Leontes’s son does not.

Hosea Matthews represents Antigonus in RDR2. His is the “bruised ego” of the mission title. But the parallels go much deeper than the bear-hunting mission. Hosea consistently stands up to Dutch Van der Linde when he wanders from his better principles or makes bad judgment calls. Dutch, the paranoid and delusional king, is Leontes. Other pieces, more fractured, show up as well: the father denying the paternity of his child (John and Jack Marston); a son dying as divine judgment for his father’s sin (Isaac and Arthur). But there’s a more profound piece here.

At the beginning of “Red Dead Redemption,” Tilly Jackson rides up to the gang with Jack and says that the Pinkertons took Abigail Roberts. When Dutch refuses to go save her, Arthur — no matter his honor level — reacts with shock and horror. He’s followed Dutch through an increasingly disillusioning series of sins: failing to protect Lenny Summers, murdering Gloria, abandoning Arthur to die at the kerosene factory, getting Eagle Flies killed. But this, Arthur cannot forgive or ignore.

That this is Dutch’s final damnation is an eloquent revelation of his character — and of Arthur’s. First and foremost, it dooms Jack — so far as anyone knows — to orphanhood, the very condition from which Dutch “rescued” Arthur and John. What this demonstrates is that Dutch did not so much save Arthur and John as realize he could exploit them. Jack is too young for Dutch to make use of. More poignantly, it’s Abigail he’s not rescuing. Abigail was like a daughter to Hosea. We see this in their conversations at Horseshoe Overlook: He gives her advice, always listens to her, and tries to convince John to grow up. She checks on him when his illness troubles him and tells him he’s been like a father to her. We see it, too, in the way he looks out for her in “Enter, Pursued by a Memory” (another allusion to the stage direction that kills his Shakespearean analog): When it seems Arthur will refuse to go look for John, Hosea intervenes because he knows she’s worried. When Jack is missing, Hosea watches Abigail with tender concern. Abigail, with Charles Smith, is the one who stole and buried Hosea’s body, and is the one to tell Dutch about it (“Fleeting Joy”).

As Dutch says in Guarma, and Arthur echoes to Charles at the beginning of “That’s Murfree Country,” Abigail “somehow managed to slip away” from the Pinkertons when they grabbed Hosea. Dutch has grown paranoid, but in a certain sense, perhaps he’s right — not that John or Abigail is working with the Pinkertons, obviously, but that there was some force at play there Dutch doesn’t understand. The most obvious possible explanation for Abigail’s escape is never stated, and for good reason¹, but it’s simply this: Hosea let himself be caught so that Abigail could get away. He saved her as Antigonus saved Leontes’s baby daughter, and like Antigonus, he died for it. Hosea loved her, and Jack, and John. Dutch cannot understand that kind of love. Not an hour after Hosea dies, Dutch can’t even be can’t even be bothered to cover Arthur and Lenny when Arthur directly asks him to. Hosea knew he was dying, and soon. It’s entirely likely that he let himself be taken because it meant he could save the woman he had always shown tender concern for.

If this is true, Dutch not only betrays Arthur, John, Abigail, and Jack, he spits on Hosea’s last, loving act. And even if Hosea got captured by chance, Dutch spits on his memory.

This is what Arthur finds unforgivable.

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1. The misogyny Rockstar has fostered in their player base. ↩︎

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