The Tempest (Vol. 61) | Peggy Muñoz Simonds (essay date 1995)
Peggy Muñoz Simonds (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: “‘Sweet Power of Music’: The Political Magic of ‘the Miraculous Harp’ in Shakespeare's The Tempest,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 29, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 61-90.
[In the essay below, Simonds argues that in The Tempest Shakespeare promoted his views regarding the political reform of the monarchy.]
In a recent paper critical of the logical discrepancies between “new historicist” theory and practice, Robin Headlam Wells argues that a true historical approach to The Tempest would focus on the mythological topos of Orpheus as the conventional prototype of Prospero rather than on modern views of colonialism and demonized otherness.1 In response to this important suggestion, I shall discuss here the conflation of two such traditional topoi in Shakespeare's tragicomedy: (1) the benevolent and thus successful ruler as Orpheus, a magician in control of...
[The entire page is 9658 words long]
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