SOURCE: "So Rare a Wonder'd Father: Prospero's Tempest," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, pp. 33-53.

[In the following essay, Sundelson provides a psychoanalytic reading of the relationships between fathers and children in The Tempest, focusing in particular on what he terms Prospero 's "paternal narcissism: the prevailing sense that there is no worthiness like a father's, no accomplishment or power, and that Prospero is the father par excellence."]

Dramatic conflict is strikingly absent from The Tempest. Brothers try to kill brothers, servants stalk their masters, and the union of attractive young lovers is delayed by an old man's whim, but none of these things creates suspense. Once we have seen Prospero calm the raging waters with a wave of his arm, danger and difficulty cease to be more than prelude to an inevitable harmony. The movement of the plot toward fulfillment is the most serene and secure in Shakespeare.

This tranquility requires the sacrifice of some characteristic Shakespearean complexity. One can be either master or servant in The Tempest, either parent or child; middle ground scarcely exists. Antonio supplanted Prospero because "my brother's servants/Were then my fellows; now they are my men" (II.i.268-69). Antonio's new mastery is a delusion, however; his plot against Prospero only puts him in debt to the King of Naples, just as Caliban's later plot makes him Stephano's slave. Ferdinand and Miranda are wiser: they outdo each other in their eagerness to serve. Ferdinand is a "patient log-man" (III.i.67) for Miranda and will be "thus humble ever" (III.i.87), while the princess who once had "four or five women" (I.ii.47) to attend her insists:

           to be your fellow
You may deny me; but I'll be your servant,
Whether you will or no.
                                          (III.i.84-86)

Real fellowship, so common in Shakespeare, is elusive in The Tempest, and certainly less important than finding a good master. Without one, as the opening scene shows, all is chaos. Prospero's storm mocks and destroys the hierarchy on Alonso's ship: "What cares these roarers for the name of King?" (I.i.16-17). Great lords become snarling children who distract the sailors from their desperate work, and King, Captain, and Boatswain are equals in their utter vulnerability. The central, repeated cry in the scene is "Where's the master?" (11.9.12)—the absent authority who might bring safety to all.

"Where's the master?" is the question that echoes across the battlefield of Shrewsbury in Henry IV, Part I, where many men are dressed like the King but true authority is absent. Hamlet never finds an answer, and Angelo must wait for one until the final moments of Measure for Measure. The Tempest answers the question almost as soon as it is posed, however, for the first scene's brevity matches the ferocity of its threats. The movement from this scene to the next is from nightmare to waking relief, from a plunge toward death to the comfort of a father's reassurance: "No more amazement: tell your piterous heart / There's no harm done" (I.ii.14-15). Long before Prospero calls himself "master" (I.ii.20) or Ariel addresses him as "great master" (I.ii.189), it is clear that he is the ordering power whose absence released such terrors in the preceding scene and whose very presence restores the world to harmony. The tempest is the only one of Prospero's shows that the audience experiences at first as "real," so the opening sequence prompts in us sentiments expressed later by the Boatswain and eventually shared by nearly all the dramatis personae: "The best news is, that we have safely found/Our King" (V.i.221-22). In The Tempest, every man is Prospero's fortunate subject.

Indeed, the play belongs to Prospero in a way that seems downright un-Shakespearean. Duke Vincentio must contend with Lucio and Pompey, Rosalind with the melancholy Jaques, Henry V with the stubborn soldier, Williams—even the sonnets are marked by dialectic. In The Tempest, however, there are no discordant voices with enough wit or dignity to command attention. Dissent is confined to the discredited, to Caliban, to Antonio and Sebastian, and even they bow at last to "a most high miracle" (V.i.177). A number of critics have commented on Prospero's undisputed preeminence in the play and the unusual thinness of the other characters. G. Wilson Knight, for example, concludes [in his The Crown of Life, 1947] that "except for Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban, the people scarcely exist in their own right." Rather than treating this disparity as a given, I want to ask what makes it necessary. Why does Shakespeare endow Prospero with such extraordinary dominion? Over what anxieties does it triumph, and what conflicts does it resolve?

The calm and homage that surround Prospero on his island have little place in the story he tells Miranda. Like Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, Prospero yielded to a strong ambivalence about power and withdrew from active rule, ceding real authority to his brother Antonio:

             he whom next thyself
Of all the world I lov'd, and to him put
The manage of my state; as at that time
Through all the signories it was the first,
And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputed
In dignity, and for the liberal Arts
Without a parallel; those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies.
                                      (I.ii.68-77)

The broken sentences may reflect excitement, as Frank Kermode suggests, or conflict, since Prospero asserts both the prominence of his state and his indifference to such public considerations. He wants to be "prime duke" without any responsibilities, and the narrative goes on to reveal similar contradictions. Prospero poses to Miranda as an injured ascetic who wanted very little and was denied even that: "Me, poor man, my library / Was dukedom large enough" (I.ii.109-10). Only fifteen lines later he complains about the loss of "all the honours" and "fair Milan." In "casting the government" upon his brother, Prospero behaves like a child abdicating responsibility to an adult. Nonetheless, he accuses Antonio of usurping a father's prerogative when he "new created / The creatures that were mine" (I.ii.81-82). Like Lear, Prospero wants both the status of a father and the security and ease of a child.

The language hints at sexual uncertainties that underlie the conflict about power, at a fantasy that Duke Prospero was both mother and father, but doubly vulnerable rather than doubly strong. Antonio was "the ivy which had hid my princely trunk / And suck'd my verdure out on't" (I.ii.86-87). The metaphor makes Prospero androgynous: the second clause suggests a mother drained by an insatiable child, while the hidden "princely trunk" is an image of male strength defeated or replaced. This is not the only hint of impotence. Prospero complains that Antonio thought him "incapable" of "temporal royalties" (I.ii.l 10-11) and projects this anxiety onto his state. The new Duke had to:

                                            bend
The dukedom, yet unbow'd,—alas, poor
  Milan!—
To most ignoble stooping.
                                                      (I.ii.l 14-16)

Even fatherhood, the keystone of Prospero's island identity, seems to have been doubtful in Milan:

Miranda.     Sir, are not you my father?
Prospero. Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and
    She said thou wast my daughter; and thy
   father
    Was Duke of Milan; and his only heir
    And princess, no worse issued.
                                     (I.ii.55-59)

The question itself is surprising, and the answer is oddly evasive and ambiguous; the shift from first to third person and the disjunctive syntax separate Prospero from both daughter and dukedom. Just as his own anxiety about impotence is projected onto a personified Milan, these half-suppressed doubts of his wife's chastity are related to the imagery of his expulsion from the city. His "fair Milan" rejects him violently; he was, he says later, "thrust forth of Milan" (V.i.160), and Gonzalo echoes the phrase: "was Milan thrust from Milan" (V.i.205). Milan is like a rejecting woman, and the "thrusting" suggests a traumatic birth that Prospero shared with Miranda:

                              one midnight
Fated to th' purpose, did Antonio open
The gates of Milan; and, i' th' dead of darkness,
The ministers for th' purpose hurried thence
Me and thy crying self.
                                             (I.ii. 128-32)

The departure from Milan is an escape from shame and weakness as much as an expulsion. The Duke flees from the fearful demands of office; the father and daughter flee together from a rejecting wife and mother.

For Prospero, the defeat is a happy one. In The Tempest, it is the absence of a daughter, not a wife or mother, that leaves a man truly vulnerable. Thus when Antonio tries to enlist Sebastian in a plot to murder Alonso, his main argument is that Alonso's daughter Claribel "dwells / Ten leagues beyond man's life" (III.i.241-42). Prospero is in no such danger. Though only an infant, on their voyage Miranda provided a substitute for the lost maternal protection: "a cherubin/Thou wast that did preserve me" (I.ii. 152-53). In one sense their exile is an ordeal to be endured, but in more important ways it is a delicious idyll on an island which, to borrow Lear's description, unites them "like birds i' th' cage."

Prospero is anxious because Miranda knows him only as "master of a full poor cell,/And thy no greater father" (I.ii. 19-20)—the last phrase hesitates between shame and vanity—but she can imagine no greater eminence: "More to know/Did never meddle with my thoughts" (I.ii.21-22). Throughout his long narration, Miranda is the ideal listener; she has no critical faculty of her own, and her responses are invariably just what her father wants. She weeps when appropriate, and when Prospero reflects smugly on his success as her "schoolmaster," she promptly cries: "Heavens thank you for it" (I.ii.175). This heroine has neither Perdita's liveliness nor Imogen's dignity. Coleridge remarks that "the moral feeling called forth by the sweet words of Miranda, 'Alack, what trouble/Was I then to you!,' in which she considered only the sufferings and sorrows of her father, puts the reader in a frame of mind to exert his imagination in favor of an object so innocent and interesting. Perhaps—but Miranda's "sweet words" also cater to Prospero's need for admiration, indeed for reverence, and they mold the audience's sense that other relationships ought to do the same. Consider the undercurrent as Prospero recounts their history:

Prospero. Obey, and be attentive.
                                                       (I.ii.38)

Prospero. Dost thou attend me?
Miranda.                      Sir, most needfully.
                                                   (I.ii.78)

Prospero. Thou attend'st not?
Miranda. O, good sir, I do.
Prospero.               I pray thee, mark me.
                                            (I.ii.87-88)

Prospero. Dost thou hear?
Miranda.                    Your tale, sir, would cure
  deafness.
                                                   (I.ii.106)

Shakespeare shows us a pattern of doubt and reassurance, of a father's obsessive need for attention and a daughter who fulfills it, and also of a man preparing to relinquish something precious by clutching it more passionately than ever.

For the question remains: a mothering daughter of perfect, unceasing devotion and an omnipotent father who basks in her affection—why does Prospero accept her approaching marriage so willingly?

So glad of this as they I cannot be,
Who are surpris'd with all, but my rejoicing
At nothing can be more.
                                             (III.i.93-95)

Understatement makes the first line poignant, balancing the surprising claim that follows—surprising because the play as a whole equates a daughter's marriage with her death. "Would I had never married my daughter there," Alonso cries:

                 for, coming thence,
My son is lost, and, in my rate, she too,
Who is so far from Italy removed
I ne'er again shall see her.
                                      (II.i.103-07)

Prospero himself, when Alonso grieves over Ferdinand's supposed death, replies that he has suffered "the like loss" (V.i.142) and is less able to console himself. What is such a major defeat doing at the very center of a play that otherwise tends to grant Prospero's every wish? How does Shakespeare reconcile the loss with his hero's ongoing mastery?

Miranda makes a major contribution to what I want to call Prospero's—and the play's—paternal narcissism: the prevailing sense that there is no worthiness like a father's, no accomplishment or power, and that Prospero is the father par excellence. Praise of Miranda—even a lover's—has a way of rebounding to her father:

    for several virtues
Have I lik'd several women; never any
With so full soul, but some defect in her
Did quarrel with the noblest grace she ow'd,
And put it to the foil: but you, O you,
So perfect and so peerless, are created
Of every creature's best!
                                      (III.i.42-48)

"Created" and "creature" (an echo of "new created/The creatures that were mine") draw our attention to Prospero's marvelous powers of nurture—of design, one might say. Ordinary, imperfect women are merely born; only his art can produce a paragon.

Much in the play that might pass for dissent only adds to Prospero's stature—the brief quarrel with Ariel, for example. "What is't thou canst demand?" (I.ii.245), Prospero asks; the master fails to imagine that serving him could leave anyone other than perfectly contented. In general, Shakespeare seems to share his point of view: Ariel begs pardon for his momentary rebellion. Even the cynicism of Sebastian and Antonio promotes our reverence for Prospero. Another man's grief is merely the grindstone for their wit, and they turn the encounters between Alonso and Gonzalo into music hall entertainment:

Antonio. (Aside to Seb.) The visitor will not
  give him o'er so.
Sebastian. (Aside to Ant.) Look, he's winding
   up the watch of his wit; by and by it will
   strike.
Gonzalo. Sir,—
Sebastian. (Aside to Ant.) One: tell.
Gonzalo. When every grief is entertain'd that's
  offer'd,
  Comes to th' entertainer—
Sebastian. A dollar.
Gonzalo. Dolour comes to him, indeed: you have
  spoken truer than you purpos'd.
Sebastian. You have taken it wiselier than I
  meant you should.
                                            (II.i.11-21)

Why should an audience not prefer this flippancy to Gonzalo's ponderous earnestness and sense of wonder? We know, after all, that the tempest is part of Prospero's plan, that Ferdinand is alive and safe, that the island holds no real dangers; we might well identify with the spectator -like detachment of the two "wits." But Shakespeare makes them so callous and sneering that we are forced to adopt a contrasting attitude, to acknowledge the seriousness of the events we witness. Their smug posturing, a caricature of self-regard, makes us susceptible to a romance perspective and to the grander, sanctioned narcissism of Prospero.

This reverence for father Prospero does not extend to mothers. Whatever ambivalence toward them is hidden in Prospero's tale of his expulsion, the one mother in the play is unmistakably demonic: Sycorax. She is a "foul witch" (I.ii.257), a "damned witch" (I.ii.263), banished for "mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible/To enter human hearing" (I.ii.264-65). Unlike Prospero's, her commands were so "earthy and abhorr'd" (I.ii.273) that the delicate Ariel refused to obey them. Sycorax imprisoned Ariel in a cloven pine for twelve years:

    it was a torment
To lay upon the damn'd, which Sycorax
Could not again undo; it was mine Art,
When I arriv'd and heard thee, that made gape
The pine, and let thee out.
                                           (I.ii.289-93)

This demon mother's rage is "unmitigable" (I.ii.276); only a father could end the torture. The passage (with its over-tones of castration) lets us imagine a mother whose ulti-mate punishment is permanent imprisonment in a constricting womb.

By contrast, Prospero becomes a midwife whose art enables him to implement Ariel's rebirth. Rebirth is a staple of romance, including Shakespeare's, but The Tempest gives Prospero the power to direct processes that elsewhere defy even understanding, not to speak of control. Thus he arranges a rebirth for Ferdinand and Alonso after each has believed the other dead, and also for the Captain and crew of Alonso's ship. During the play, Ariel keeps "the mariners all under hatches stow'd" (I.ii.230); the ship is like a body holding many children, whose birth takes place in Act V with appropriate accompanying sounds. Vulnerable in Milan, on his island Prospero is both strong father and mother, or a father whose life-giving power defeats the vindictive mother, Sycorax.

The conflict between Prospero and Caliban, who claims the island "by Sycorax my mother" (I.ii.334), extends the struggle between maternal and paternal forces. Caliban invokes his mother's power repeatedly:

As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both!
                                          (I.ii.322-24)

                    All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you.
                                       (I.ii.341-42)

Such prayers always fail, because command of maternal responses in the play has been given to Prospero. In good humor he calls for heavenly nurture: "Heavens rain grace/ On that which breeds between 'em" (III.i.75-76); in a graver mood he threatens to withhold it: "No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall/To make this contract grow" (IV.i.18-19). These might seem like empty gestures were it not for his manifest power over food, a more effective means of control than any pinches and cramps. "I must eat my dinner" (I.ii.333), Caliban admits. His cruelly interrupted dream of riches about to drop on him—"when I wak'd,/I cried to dream again" (III.ii. 139-41)—is dramatized in the humiliation of Alonso and his company at the magic banquet that vanishes when they go to eat. Prospero himself was thrust from Milan and its nourishment; here he subjects his enemies to symbolic versions of his own ordeal.

Fortune sends Caliban a new master who can strut more boldly than Prospero and provides an unlimited supply of food. Stephano's bottle is a mother accessible to all, a parody of Prospero's maternal powers, and he is fully aware of its advantages: "He shall taste of my bottle; if he have never drunk wine afore, it will go near to remove his fit. If I can recover him, and keep him tame, I will not take too much for him …" (II.ii.76-79). Those who have starved leap at the chance to deprive someone else. Caliban would like to punish Trinculo as Prospero has punished him—"I do beseech thy greatness, give him blows,/ And take his bottle from him" (III.ii.63-64)—but Stephano's dominion is brief:

Trinculo. Ay, but to lose our bottles in the
  pool,—
Stephano. There is not only disgrace and
  dishonour in that, monster, but an infinite loss.
                                     (IV.i.208-10)

Prospero's punishment demonstrates once again the utter vulnerability of those who are children rather than fathers.

Throughout the play, Prospero's references to Caliban stress his own failure to transform the "mis-shapen knave" (V.i.268) and Caliban's resistance to "any print of goodness" (I.ii.354). The monster is an affront to his pride as a shaper of character, a pride that unites the artist and the father:

A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers.
                                   (IV.i. 188-92)

The tone here combines self-pity and self-congratulation, and the speech ends with an assertion that projects onto the totally demonized Caliban the anxieties about age and weakness that are Prospero's own. Caliban is Prospero's servant and carries wood for him, but the real reason why "as 'tis,/We cannot miss him" (I.ii.312) is that he carries the greater burden of Prospero's projected anxieties and wishes: "This thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine" (V.i.275-76).

Caliban's complex symbolic value is most apparent when he meets Trinculo, mistaking him at first for one of his master's agents. He has learned how to propitiate Prospero by minimizing his ominous erectness: "I'll fall flat;/Perchance he will not mind me" (II.ii.16-17). Expecting another tempest and believing Caliban to be dead, Trinculo crawls under his "gaberdine." When Stephano comes upon the pair, it looks to him like some version of Iago's "beast with two backs," an incarnation of the monstrous in lovemaking: "I have not scap'd drowning, to be afeard now of your four legs" (II.ii.60-61). "Afeard" or not, Stephano betrays a certain nervousness about female demands and his own ability to satisfy them: "Doth thy other mouth call me? Mercy, mercy! … I have no long spoon" (II.ii.98-100). The monstrous form suddenly divides: Caliban "vents" Trinculo, and for a moment, the scene becomes a parody of childbirth. "Vent" also suggests defecation, however, as if this two acts were conflated in Shakespeare's imagination. This second fantasy becomes explicit when Stephano calls Trinculo "the siege of this moon-calf" (II.ii.107)—Kermode glosses "siege" as "excrement"—an identity later confirmed by his immersion in the "filthy-mantled pool" (IV.i.182) and its "horse-piss" (IV.i.199). With its dreamlike fusion of the surreal and the antic, the sequence is what psycho-analysis calls highly overdetermined. Much of what Shakespeare finds disquieting or repulsive about women and sexuality—indeed, about nature, as compared to Prospero's cleaner art—is filtered through the bizarre humor and given unexpected shape.

Caliban himself also takes a plunge in the cesspool, a fitting punishment for his greatest crime:

           I have us'd thee,
Filth as thou art, with human care; and lodg'd
  thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.
                                       (I.ii.347-50)

The final euphemism in this speech is a defense against contemplating the rape that Caliban attempted, and his reply confirms Prospero's fears:

O ho, O ho! would't had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.
                                     (I.ii.351-52)

Paternity for Caliban is an infinite multiplication of himself. By comparison, Prospero's pride in his fathering seems reasonable and attractive.

Prospero tries to fend off all that Caliban represents, but his attempts to polarize his world are posed against a fear that opposites may be only too similar. Caliban, after all, can master the courtly language that belongs to his betters: "I thank my noble lord. Wilt thou be pleas'd to hearken once again to the suit I made to thee?" (II.ii.36-37). His "I never saw a woman,/But only Sycorax my dam and she" (III.ii.98-99) sounds startlingly like Miranda's confession:

            nor have I seen
More that I may call men than you, good friend,
And my dear father.
                                    (III.i.51-53)

Nature and nurture do not always diverge, and at times the island resembles England as Trinculo describes it: "Were I in England now … there would this monster make a man" (II.ii.28-31). We may laugh when Caliban asserts that, without his books, Prospero is "but a sot, as I am, nor hath not/One spirit to command" (III.ii.91-92), but the parallel is less outrageous than it seems. The proximity of man and monster is a subversive motif in The Tempest, but it remains subordinate to the overriding concern for security and order.

Caliban serves because he must; Ariel does so willingly, even lovingly: "All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come/To answer thy best pleasure" (I.ii. 189-90). Caliban embodies impulses that Prospero must avoid or master; Ariel gratifies Prospero's sense of his own importance and fulfills his wish for superhuman powers:

I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flam'd amazement: sometime I'd divide,
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards and boresprit, would I flame
  distinctly,
Then meet and join.
                                    (I.ii.196-201)

Prospero is a guardian, not a lover; he gives Miranda to Ferdinand and warns them both against "th' fire in th' blood" (IV.i.53). As a ruler, he would rather forgive than punish. Ariel allows him to burn by proxy, to burn like an avenger and like a lover too, for the language ("boarded," "now in the waist") confirms Prospero's own association of fire and sexuality. Caliban is grotesquely united with Trinculo in the four-legged monster; Ariel can "meet and join" delightfully without any partner at all. Separated from Caliban's explicit sadism—"thou mayst knock a nail into his head" (II.ii.60), the slave tells Stephano—Prospero is not just master but "potent master" (IV.i.34) with Ariel at his command.

Whatever sexuality Ariel represents is completely stripped of physical grossness, leaving only his delicacy and airiness:

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
                                            (V.i.88-92)

This song suggests the perfect child, perfect not only in grace and charm but in independence. This is a child who needs nourishment but not a mother, since he can suck "where the bee sucks," who needs protection but not a father, since he can hide in a flower from the predators of the night. Ariel is a child who recognizes the absoluteness of Prospero's paternal authority, who both embodies the father's power and makes no demands whatsoever on his attention and care. It is no wonder that Prospero seems more relaxed with him than with Miranda, more in his element. Ariel brings him satisfactions that a real child cannot, even one as compliant as his daughter. The sprite's very longing for freedom is, by comparison, gratifying to Prospero; Ariel has no interest in a younger, more virile rival, but wants freedom simply for its own sake.

The only one of Ariel's talents that Prospero has as well is invisibility. Unlike the lovers, who have "chang'd eyes" (I.ii.444) at their first meeting, Prospero likes to see without being seen, to supervise instead of gazing candidly. His voyeurism seems to be a substitute for other, more direct modes of gratification, and he has a complementary urge to exhibit himself. "I will disease me, and myself present/As I was sometime Milan" (V.i.85-86). It is a measure of his dominion that he both reserves certain choice spectacles for himself (the courtship of Miranda and Ferdinand) and controls the seeing done by others—sometimes in an oddly literal way. "The fringed curtains of thine eye advance/And say what thou seest yond" (I.ii.411-12), he tells Miranda, directing her initial sight of Ferdinand. Shakespeare gives Prospero an air of mastery here over the very process that is sure to wound him, the one that most comedy treats as inevitable, just as he lets Alonso believe that Claribel married only to please her father. The curtain metaphor connects this moment with Prospero's more explicitly artful shows: the masque, the false banquet, the final revelation of the lovers playing chess. Such displays master his audiences, reducing them to a wondering passivity. "No tongue! All eyes!" (IV.i.59), he commands Miranda and Ferdinand as the masque begins.

When Prospero does not direct it, the act of seeing can become the "open-ey'd conspiracy" (II.i.296) of Antonio and Sebastian, but it seems curious when he puts Ferdinand in the same class: "thou … hast put thyself/Upon the island as a spy" (I.ii.456-58). The irony may be at Prospero's expense, since he accuses Ferdinand of what is in fact his own kind of watching, but his anger is easy to understand: Ferdinand's arrival threatens the rule of fathers:

Ferdinand.           My language! heavens!
   I am the best of them that speak this speech,
   Were I but where 'tis spoken.
Prospero.           How? the best?
    What wert thou, if the King of Naples heard
   thee?
                                     (I.ii.431-34)

His identification with the King makes Prospero take offense at Ferdinand's readiness to succeed him. "Best of them" slights the dignity of fathers, and Prospero is quick to elicit a show of filial grief:

                     myself am Naples,
Who with mine eyes, never since at ebb, beheld
The King my father wrack'd.
                                   (I.ii.437-39)

The piety mollifies Prospero, as does the unwitting confession of faulty seeing, but only for a moment: Ferdinand is "a traitor" (I.ii.464), he insists.

In addition to Prospero's anger, the threat to paternal dominance provokes a counterwish, expressed by Alonso's belief that Ferdinand is drowned. This belief waxes and wanes in accordance with Alonso's hostility or guilt. Just after Francisco's impressive description of Ferdinand swimming to safety, Alonso asserts doggedly, "No, no, he's gone" (II.i.118). But his vindictive thought leads to an abrupt change of heart: "Let's make further search for my poor son" (II.i.318-19). The arduous search soon seems a sufficient show of love, however, and Alonso gives it up rather easily:

Even here I will put off my hope, and keep it
No longer for my flatterer: he is drown'd
Whom thus we stray to find; and the sea mocks
Our frustrate search on land. Well, let him go.
                                        (II.iii.7-10)

In The Tempest, the word "hope" can connect apparently altruistic thoughts to selfish ones. Here the murderous impulse emerges not in Alonso's own voice but in Antonio's: "I am right glad that he's so out of hope" (Il.iii.l 1). This echoes Antonio's attempt to engage Sebastian in his plot:

Sebastian.            I have no hope
    That he's undrown'd.
Antonio.           O, out of that "no hope"
    What great hope have you!
                                                 (II.i.233-35)

In Antonio and Sebastian, the sorts of wishes that are more unconscious in Alonso lie on or near the surface, and even in Alonso they surface persistently. When at last he sees his son playing chess with Miranda, the King exclaims:

                 If this prove
A vision of the island, one dear son
Shall I twice lose.
                                    (V.i. 175-77)

One might argue that such caution is only reasonable in Prospero's confusing realm, but Ferdinand has had similar lessons and says nothing of the kind.

Ferdinand must be cleansed of whatever hostility he has toward fathers, since Prospero is eventually to accept him as his "son" (IV.i. 146), and Ariel's song does the crucial work:

Full fadom five thy father lies;
     Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
     Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: …
                                      (I.ii.399-405)

Here magical transformation makes the father's death acceptable. The song denies that death brings decay or oblivion; instead, it offers an escape from mutability, a watery Byzantium. A father's bones—and, more important, his eyes—become beautiful, permanent, and precious; even after death he receives the homage of attractive sea nymphs, as if in tribute to his gorgeously preserved authority. The song allows Ferdinand to accept Alonso's death without undue grief of guilt, and its cool grace reflects the fact that the dead father is not Prospero.

Ferdinand's most serious threat to paternal dominance is his love for Miranda, however. The Prince has gentler manners than Caliban, of course, but is less likely to make a permanent servant; Francisco portrays him as one of nature's rulers:

I saw him beat the surges under him,
And ride upon their backs; he trod the water,
Whose enmity he flung aside, and breasted
The surge most swoln that met him; his bold
  head
'Bove the contentious waves he kept, and oared
Himself with his good arms in lusty stroke
To th' shore …
                                    (II.i.l 10-16)

Ariel and his coworkers enable Prospero to humble even "the most mighty Neptune" (I.ii.204), but this young man, whose entire body seems vigorously phallic, needs no magic to master the waves. At first Prospero presents him as "a goodly person" (I.ii.419), but the hostility beneath his colorless phrase soon emerges. "To th' most of men this is a Caliban" (I.ii.483), he warns, and Ariel's first song addresses this very fear.

Come unto yellow sands,
   And then take hands:
Courtsied when you have and kiss'd
   The wild waves whist:
Foot it featly here and there,
   And sweet sprites bear
The burthen, Hark, hark.
                                         (I.ii.377-83)

Here sexuality is subordinated to decorum and courtesy in the formal ordering of a dance. The song provides an alternative to Caliban's threat of rape, for the lovers content themselves with taking hands and kissing. Only "footing" is ambiguous, and "the wild waves whist" (a long-standing textual problem) suggests the containment of passion. The animal-noise refrain, however, reveals the cruder sexuality that the song barely suppresses: "I hear/ The strain of strutting chanticleer" (I.ii.387-88). The rooster's assertive maleness underlines Prospero's warning.

Prospero responds to the approaching marriage with a threefold defense. Ferdinand's awe of Miranda must harness his desire, first of all, and the father must have a symbolic victory over the younger man's confident sexuality. Even though Ferdinand, unlike Miranda, has been in the world and knows what women look like, he reacts just as Prospero wants him to: he addresses her as a goddess and asks humbly for "some good instruction" (I.ii.427). Such reverence is not enough to pacify Prospero, however:

I'll manacle thy neck and feet together:
Sea-water shalt thou drink; thy food shall be
The fresh-brook mussels, wither'd roots, and
  husks
Wherein the acorn cradled. Follow.
                                           (I.ii.464-67)

The striking image of neck and feet manacled together echoes the description of Sycorax "grown into a hoop" (I.ii.259). Becoming circular seems to be a form of castration, an imposed impotence—in any case, the opposite of Ferdinand the thrusting swimmer. The food Prospero mentions confirms such a reading: "wither'd roots" recall the withering Prospero himself expects and fears; "husks/ Wherein the acorn cradled" suggest what Prospero will be after he has lost the child he cradles now. Prospero is forcing on Ferdinand the food of impotence and loneliness that will soon enough be his own.

Ferdinand draws his sword, determined to resist such enslavement until his "enemy has more power" (I.ii.469), but while The Tempest continues Prospero has all the power he needs:

                   Put thy sword up, traitor;
Who Mak'st a show, but dar'st not strike, thy
  conscience
Is so possess'd with guilt: come from thy ward;
For I can here disarm thee with this stick
And make thy weapon drop.
                                     (I.ii.472-76)

Similar victories of stick over sword occur elsewhere. When Antonio and Sebastian prepare to stab Alonso and Gonzalo, Ariel thwarts their plan, and when they draw following the false banquet, the sprite derides their sudden, nightmarish impotence: "Your swords are now too massy for your strengths,/And will not be uplifted" (III.iii.67-68). Ariel merely repeats Prospero's mockery of Ferdinand: "Thy nerves are in their infancy again,/And have no vigour in them" (I.ii.487-88). For a brief time, the sexual rival is reduced to the impotence of a child and the political heir to the ignominy of a servant.

If the play ended with this triumph, we would have another version of Measure for Measure, in which the older man reserves the maiden for himself. But Ferdinand's ordeal is only temporary, a ritualistic endurance of the father's hostility. He is eventually to marry Miranda, and it is not sufficient, nor is it necessary, to conclude that many trivial gratifications compensate for one major loss. The explanation is rather that Prospero transforms a loss into a gratification, a piece of magic at least as pretty as raising a tempest. Again Measure for Measure provides a helpful parallel. When the disguised Duke asks Escalus to describe his character, the old counselor gives a reply that is more astute than he knows: "Rather rejoicing to see another merry, than merry at anything which professed to make him rejoice" (III.ii.238-40). Anna Freud has analyzed just this psychological pattern: "This normal and less conspicuous form of projection might be described as 'altruistic surrender' of our own instinctual impulses in favour of other people." [(in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, 1946)] Measure for Measure is an unsatisfying play precisely because the altruistic surrender does not really function: the Duke cannot give up Isabella as Prospero does Miranda. But like Anna Freud's patient, who "gratified her instincts by sharing in the gratification of others," Prospero identifies with Ferdinand and surrenders to him the pleasure of possessing Miranda. The success of this surrender accounts in part for the deep harmony that distinguishes The Tempest.

Even after this resolution, Prospero elicits a vow of premarital chastity from Ferdinand, although not from Miranda; her sexuality is not consciously acknowledged. Heart-felt as it is, the young man's promise leaves room for concern:

                             As I hope
For quiet days, fair issue and long life,
With such love as 'tis now, the murkiest den,
The most opportune place, the strong'st
  suggestion
Our worser genius can, shall never melt
Mine honour into lust, to take away
The edge of that day's celebration
When I shall think, or Phoebus' steeds are
  founder'd,
Or Night kept chain'd below.
                                            (IV.i.23-31)

Ferdinand protests too much: his words suggest fantasies of rape and reveal a disturbing contradiction. He feels no lust now—"The white cold virgin snow upon my heart / Abates the ardour of my liver" (IV.i.55-56)—but he will, once the vows are spoken. When Miranda has been possessed, however, she will no longer be desirable; Ferdinand will lose the "edge" of his interest, and she may be abandoned like the "widow Dido" (II.i.75) who turns up so mysteriously in the chatter of Antonio and Sebastian.

Ferdinand's oaths cannot resolve the play's anxieties about sex any more than his temporary incapacity. The somber undercurrent persists, but the "potent Art" (V.i.50) of Prospero's masque succeeds, however briefly, in containing both threats to women and the dangers of their malice. Ceres recalls how, with the help of Venus, "dusky Dis my daughter got" (IV.i.89)—an echo of Caliban's attempted rape and Alonso's lamented decision to "loose" his daughter "to an African" (II.i.121)—but now, although she and Cupid had planned "some wanton charm" (IV.i.95) against the lovers, Venus is defeated:

Mars's hot minion is return'd again;
Her waspish-headed son has broke his arrows,
Swears he will shoot no more, but play with
  sparrows,
And be a boy right out.
                                  (IV.i.98-101)

This retreat from menacing potency to the reassuring innocence of boyhood reenacts in myth Ferdinand's passage from threat to dependent infant in Act I and Caliban's comparable transformation in Act II.

Instead of Venus and her threats of sexual corruption, the masque gives us Iris, with the "refreshing showers" (IV.i.79) that fulfill the new couple's hope of sweet aspersion from the heavens, and Ceres, the nurturing mother so painfully absent throughout the play. She is "a most bounteous lady" (IV.i.60) who brings to the lovers "Earth's increase, foison plenty,/Barns and garners never empty" (IV.i. 110-11)—the abundant food denied Alonso and his men when Prospero's banquet vanished. The landscape that Ceres leaves is a setting for "cold nymphs" (IV.i.66) and "the dismissed bachelor" (IV.i.67), but the masque moves away from this sterility. Iris summons two sets of dancers: "naiads" and "sunburn'd sicklemen." The former have "ever-harmless looks" (IV.i.129)—no Sycorax here—and the men are robust, attractive, and well-protected by their sickles. The final lines echo Ariel's earlier command to "foot it featly here and there": "And these fresh nymphs encounter every one/In country footing" (IV.i. 137-38). The playwright who has Hamlet ask sarcastically about "country matters" is surely aware of the sexual puns contained in "encounter" and "country." Both sexuality and the nurturing mother are restored to the play by Prospero's magic and are subject to his reassuring control.

Caught up earlier in the glory of his own lesser vision, Gonzalo asserts that he "would with such perfection govern, sir,/T'excel the Golden Age" (II.i. 163-64). Sebastian and Antonio meet this claim with their customary derision.

Sebastian. No marrying among his subjects?
Antonio. None, man; all idle; whores and knaves.
Sebastian.                     'Save his majesty!
Antonio. Long live Gonzalo!
                                                          (II.i.161-65)

In the "real" world, nymphs and sicklemen may still become whores and knaves. But since Gonzalo's vision precedes Prospero's, it absorbs the hostile mockery that might otherwise undermine the masque and frees the audience to share Ferdinand's absolute reverence:

     Let me live here ever;
So rare a wonder'd father and a wise
Makes this place Paradise.
                                           (IV.i. 122-24)

Paradise is made, the line emphasizes, not found. This supreme validation of the father's creating power is the central wish fulfillment of the play.

Outside of the masque, brute aggression persists: the "foul conspiracy/Of the beast Caliban and his confederates" (IV.i. 139-40). Just as he reduces Ferdinand's powers to their infancy, Prospero meets the more primitive sexual and political threat by turning his foes into foolish children who follow the malicious "mother" Ariel: "calf-like, they my lowing follow'd, through/Tooth'd briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns" (IV.i. 179-80). Caliban now sees the folly of worshipping anyone other than the supreme father: "I'll be wise hereafter,/And seek for grace" (V.i.294-95).

Caliban can hope for pardon, but Prospero's treatment of Antonio is more equivocal:

For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault,—-all of them.
                                   (V.i.130-32)

This is forgiveness in name only. Prospero still insists on separating his own goodness from the evil of his enemies, like Isabella in Measure for Measure, with her distinction between her own "chaste body" and her tormentor's "concupiscible intemperate lust" (V.i.97-98). But while Isabella learns that at times the chaste must plead for the concupiscible, very little in The Tempest modifies Prospero's belief in radical opposites. Because Antonio has "expelled remorse and nature" (V.i.76), Prospero suspends a threat of punishment over him and Sebastian:

But you, my brace of lords, were I so minded,
I here could pluck his highness' frown upon
  you,
And justify you traitors: at this time
I will tell no tales.
                                            (V.i. 126-29)

Earlier, Ariel condemns Alonso to "ling'ring perdition" (IH.iii.77) but withdraws the sentence if the criminal will promise "heart-sorrow/And a clear life ensuing" (III.iii.81-82), and the pattern is repeated: Prospero brandishes the rod but enjoys his own magnanimity.

Only Ariel obtains complete freedom at the end of the play, and Prospero calls attention to his own generosity in granting it: "Why that's my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee;/But yet you shall have freedom" (V.i.95-96). Freedom is Ariel's right, of course, just as it is Miranda's, Ferdinand's, or Caliban's. But the play manipulates us into feeling that if Ariel were truly wise he would remain with Prospero—where else could he find such a perfect master? His final song about the life he will lead, "Merrily, merrily shall I live now/Under the blossom that hangs on the bough" (V.i.93-94), only adds to our sympathy for his master, who anticipates no merriment, only a lonely life in which "every third thought shall be my grave" (V.i.311).

Freedom, finally, is unimaginable in The Tempest—Ariel will enjoy it only after the play is over—and even dominion is an illusion. "The great globe itself,/Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve" (IV.i. 153-54). The word "inherit" reminds us that the speech is directed at Ferdinand, the "heir/Of Naples and of Milan" (ILL 107-08). Prospero gives him an old man's warning: only fools like Stephano think that "the King and all our company else being drown'd, we will inherit here" (II.ii. 174-75). The most one can do is choose one's heirs, and this Prospero has done quite successfully. Prospero completes his altruistic surrender; he can contemplate his own death calmly because Ferdinand has "received a second life" (V.i. 195) from him.

So he breaks his staff, after using "every possible resource to enforce the potency of his powers" in a farewell to the elves and spirits who have served him. As his other charms dissolve, Prospero retains the skills of an actor and playwright—his final entrance before the assembled company is especially well timed—and a kind of sublimated potency through story telling. Alonso would wear himself out trying to pierce the maze, while for Prospero it is no maze at all:

Do not infest your mind with beating on
The strangeness of this business; at pick'd

  leisure
Which shall be shortly single, I'll resolve you …
                                              (V.i.246-48)

The magician becomes a poet whose only magic is to make the night "go quick away" (V.i.305). One can hardly help but conclude that the celebration of Prospero's paternal power is Shakespeare's celebration of himself, qualified by irony but never seriously undermined. When Alonso asks for his son's forgiveness, Prospero stops him abruptly; no one else is to dispense pardons, and fathers are not to humble themselves before children.

The epilogue draws the audience into the psychological structure of the play by making it feel the power of a father and the vulnerability of a child. Prospero now has only his own strength, which he admits is "most faint" (1. 3), but we have for the moment gained his special powers. With them goes the choice either to imprison or to liberate. Just as in the final act Prospero releases Miranda, Ferdinand, Alonso, and finally Ariel, now we must do the same for him: "But release me from my bands/With the help of your good hands" (11. 9-10). He promised Alonso a good wind for the voyage back to Italy; now "Gentle breath of yours my sails/Must fill, or else my project fails" (11. 11-12). And what was Prospero's project? In a word: "to please." Denied the real gratification that Ferdinand will enjoy, Prospero must share in the pleasure of others. As his last piece of magic, he forestalls any criticism by proving to us that we too find pleasure and security in liberating rather than possessing. The play's final couplet reminds us that, although Prospero is returning to Milan, the Heavenly Father with whom he identifies can never be evaded: "As you from crimes would pardon'd be/Let your indulgence set me free."