[In the following essay, Payne takes a pluralistic approach to The Tempest, discussing its political dimensions with reference to its depiction of Prospero's magic. In the critic's judgment, Prospero uses his magic to bring others to self-knowledge and to rectify his own original error in choosing the magical world over the political.]

Recent critical interpretation of The Tempest, perhaps more than that of any other of Shakespeare's plays, has become thoroughly polarized. Those who have concentrated their attention on Prospero's magic and the traditions it reflects have, with rare exception, seen the play as the crowning glory of Shakespeare's achievement and Prospero as a character who grows in power and moral stature to a height unmatched by any other of the playwright's creations. This view of the play has come to be strongly supported by a series of studies emanating from the Warburg Institute that have reconstructed the traditions of natural and spiritual magic, which Shakespeare carefully draws upon. These interwoven traditions extend from Ficino's complex network of Neoplatonism, hermeticism, and occult philosophy—whose goal is the attainment of knowledge and wisdom—through the more pragmatic teachings of Agrippa and Paracelsus—who would give the magician not only the power to attract but also to control good and evil spirits—on to the tradition's fulfillment in Bruno and Dee—who establish the tradition firmly in England just before its precipitous decline.¹

Confidently asserting the magician's power to transcend the earth for the sake of "far other worlds and other seas," Bruno expands on the idea of man's ability to ascend in thought to a state almost divine that Pico mentions in a famous passage in his Oration on the Dignity of Man: "It will be within your power to rise, through your own choice, to the superior orders of divine life." John Dee encourages the occult philosopher to take a further step. In his Preface to Euclid he instructs the magical polymath to return from heaven to the world of nature and to practice his occult art there:

Thus can the mathematical mind deal speculatively in his own art and by good means mount above the clouds and stars; . . . he can [then] by order descend, to frame natural things to wonderful uses; and when he list, retire home into his own center and there prepare more means to ascend or descend by; and all to the glory of God and our honest delectation in earth.²

When Prospero is considered in light of this magical history, it is not surprising that he is seen either as Shakespeare's recapitulation of occult tradition or more specifically as the reenactment on the stage of John Dee's career.³ Prospero confesses to having neglected worldly ends in Milan for the improvement of his mind (1.2.89-90)⁴ and appears in the course of the play to follow Dee's directive "to frame natural things to wonderful uses." His motive for creating the tempest is not revenge but primarily the attempt to regenerate his former enemies; thus, he declares,

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th' quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.

(5.1.25-30)

The storm is not only a means of bringing those who wronged Prospero to the island, but also an occasion for the display of his extensive magical powers, which give him command of both the worlds of nature and of spirits. It is, however, only retrospectively that the audience is informed, along with Miranda, of Prospero's beneficent control over the tempest. Throughout most of the play we mainly witness his ability to command spirits, while the other characters are restricted to seeing displays of Prospero's artistic or dramatic virtuosity. Indeed, as an ultimate indication of his self-confidence and artistic control, Prospero conceals his magical and artistic powers. Finally, with those powers at their height, he gives them up entirely in order to resume his common humanity and to allow others the freedom to "be themselves" (5.1.32), which includes his brother's freedom to reject regeneration.

In explicit opposition to this affirmative view of Prospero is a rapidly growing body of revolutionary, polemical commentary that condemns not only Prospero but also the play and Shakespeare himself for promoting a self-deceptive psychology of colonization. Although this view of The Tempest has a complex history that reaches back at least as far as Renan's Caliban (1878), the case against Prospero has been most powerfully made in two important studies published in 1985.⁵ Paul Brown's essay in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism goes beyond earlier polemical studies in arguing that the play does not simply reflect colonialist practices but is itself "an intervention in an ambivalent and often contradictory discourse" promoting a colonialist political psychology. The Tempest's "powerful and pleasurable narrative" tries but fails, in Brown's view, to harmonize or transcend the irreconcilable internal contradictions of colonialist discourse.⁶ Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, in an essay in Alternative Shakespeares, develop a similar argument. They believe that Shakespeare today is made to participate in the construction of a false English past "which is picturesque, familiar and untroubled." But in The Tempest the usual opposition between the autotelic text and its historically problematic context actually invades the text of the play itself. This invasion can now be properly understood, they argue, because of the displacement of the old critical paradigm of liberal humanism by the poststructuralist emphasis on intertextuality. An important consequence of such an emphasis, they conclude, is to see the play as two irreconcilable dramas that undermine or deconstruct each other. Prospero's play is preoccupied with his attempts to legitimate his power by securing recognition of his claim to Milan; in Caliban's play Prospero suppresses a reenactment of the original usurpation of his kingdom when he puts down Caliban's mutiny, which allows him (in the words of Barker and Hulme) "to annul the memory of his failure to prevent his expulsion from the dukedom."⁷ Both of these essays find the play—and by extension Shakespeare himself—guilty of being controlled by a political unconscious that awaits, not criticism, but a critique powerful enough to make the play's latent politics fully manifest. The essays claim to offer such a critique of the play and its use by generations of critics and performers, who have, perhaps unwittingly, promoted liberal humanism and Western imperialism by accepting The Tempest's politics without question.⁸

The evidence offered to support such a negative view of the play includes Prospero's need, in scene 2, to establish his own version of the past, which no one (least of all Miranda) is able to question. Furthermore, his usurpation of the native authority of Caliban; his need to make both Caliban and Ariel his slaves; his suppression of the matriarchal magical order of Caliban's mother Sycorax; his dualistic categorization of others as virgins or rapists, friends or foes; his insisting on regulating his daughter's sexuality; his division of the shipwrecked travelers into two clear groups of aristocrats and plebians—all lend considerable support to a polemical deconstruction of the play in an effort to expose its place in a Shakespearean hegemony.

Rather than being necessarily exclusive of each other, the two views of the play I have summarized—the one emphasizing the tradition of magic and Prospero's personal growth and the other emphasizing politics and Caliban's enslavement—not only need but also require each other. To suggest, however, the complementarity of magic and politics is to confess resistance to recent attempts to displace a liberal, humanistic tradition of history. The editor of Alternative Shakespeares warns his readers that "'historical' and, in certain cases, historicist, accounts of Shakespearean texts, pluralist in emphasis and liberal in their capacity to assimilate revisionist, or even radical, challenges, have become a staple of Shakespeare criticism."⁹ To this, one may respond simply that Shakespeare himself may be the model for such pluralistic assimilation, especially in the all-encompassing ecumenicism of the dramatic romances.¹⁰

Magic and politics are linked throughout The Tempest. In the narrative past Prospero neglected politics for magic. In the dramatic present he uses magic as a means to achieve specific political ends. The reclaiming of his dukedom, establishing a line of succession through Miranda and Ferdinand, creating amity between Milan and Naples, controlling the conspiracies against Alonso and himself, regenerating his enemies in preparation for the return to Italy, and restoring Caliban to authority over the island are all political accomplishments of his magical art. In the future, to which the Epilogue points, Prospero will lack the authority he has drawn from magic; yet in choosing vulnerable weakness, he displays his greatest strength and highest art. By the end of the play he has made a complete transition from what D. P. Walker has called transitive magic, used to manipulate others, to subjective magic, directed inward to the control of himself.¹¹ In aesthetic terms this is an achievement of an artistic style of such subtlety and refinement that it hides itself, transferring power from playwright, director, and actor to the audience. In religious terms it is the attainment of the state of grace, a willing suspension of presumed self-sufficiency that makes one receptive to an act of mercy. Prospero combines in his Epilogue the religious, aesthetic, political, and magical significance of his chosen weakness:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confín'd by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell.
. . . Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults. . . .

(Epil. 1-8, 13-18)

Prospero's salvation requires the audience's mercy that is made possible by a full imaginative identification with his desire for freedom and absolution.

The complementary relationship between magic and politics is diffused throughout the action of the play. It shapes the characterization of Prospero, whose control over the action is greater than that of any of Shakespeare's other creations, and it determines an important part of the audience's perspective on the play. The action of the play may be thought of as consisting of three tempests, each one manifest in a different form. The first is the visual spectacle of the storm itself that occupies the first scene and is the most dazzling display of Prospero's magical powers. In his account of how he brought about the storm at Prospero's command, Ariel suggests that what he did was to play upon the visual perceptions of the voyagers, enflaming their imaginations:

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. Jove's lightnings, the precursors

O'th' dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary
And sight-outrunning were not: the fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble,
Yea, his dread trident shake. . . . Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and play'd
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plung'd in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me.

(1.2.198-206, 208-12)

Ariel concludes his account by insisting that the effect of their ordeal by water and fire was to make the voyagers fresher than before, as Prospero had specifically commanded:

Not a hair perish'd;
On their sustaining garments not a blemish,
But fresher than before: and, as thou bad'st me.

(1.2.217-19)

These words reinforce Prospero's earlier assurances to Miranda and firmly establish his intent to regenerate and restore his former enemies rather than avenge himself upon them.

Immediately following the visual spectacle of the storm but preceeding Ariel's account of his role in creating it is Prospero's narrative of the tempestuous series of events occurring before the play begins—his neglect of his responsibilities as Duke of Milan, his entrusting the dukedom to his brother Antonio, and his own banishment following Antonio's usurpation—all caused by Prospero's apparently selfish absorption in the inactive and purely bookish delights of "the liberal Arts" and "secret studies" (1.2.73, 77). Rather than condemning Prospero's attraction to magic, the play emphasizes his error in choosing between the political world and the magical, an error that he has had twelve years to contemplate and now the opportunity to rectify. Thus, Shakespeare would seem to be supporting Dee's advocacy of the active use of magic by a sage who may have first mounted "above the clouds and stars" in pursuit of spiritual truth but who at last retires "home into his own center," applying his knowledge to the affairs of the world.

Following the spectacular tempest of the play's first scene and Prospero's narrative of his stormy past in scene two, the dramatic action of the play itself unfolds, joining the consequences of Prospero's past with his new redemptive purpose. The main action includes Prospero's bringing his tutelage of Miranda to an end by preparing her to return to Italy with a new husband, Ferdinand. Just as he gives his daughter her freedom, so also does Prospero end his control over the lives of Ariel and Caliban. In the midst of these affairs he also attempts to regenerate the usurpers of his dukedom by allowing them the freedom to reenact their crimes against him in the plot to supplant Alonso. In restraining his power over Miranda, Ariel, Caliban, and the voyagers, Prospero exhibits his own self-regenerative control that is also a manifestation of the highest refinement of the art he practices. His abjuration of magic is no second abdication. Rather it is a confident expression of Prospero's self-realization, of his belief in the powers of freedom and self-determination, and of his artistic style that conceals itself by encouraging the recreative participation of his audience, first the several audiences of the masques within the play and then the larger audience of The Tempest to whom Prospero finally—in the Epilogue—entrusts himself. This main action may be seen as moving through a complete revolution: from Prospero's self-indulgence in the magical arts with its political cost, to his using art for the purpose of regenerating himself and others; from the bondage of Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban, to their liberation to "be themselves"; from Prospero's "neglecting worldly ends," to his abjuring "rough magic" and reassuming a common humanity.

In bringing Prospero's tempestuous past to bear on the present action of the play, Shakespeare simultaneously divides up the characters into significant groups and arranges those groups and the individuals within them in a hierarchy of discrepant awarenesses, further strengthening the link between magic and politics. The principal division initially lies between those who are on the island from the beginning of the play—Prospero, Ariel, Miranda, and Caliban—and those who are shipwrecked there by the storm. The second group is further subdivided into three: Ferdinand; the royal party (Alonso, Gonzalo, Antonio, and Sebastian); and the clowns Stephano and Trinculo. Although the manipulations or "practices" of one character upon another leading to different degrees of knowledge is a basic ingredient in Shakespeare's dramatic art, The Tempest is unique in placing Prospero on a pinnacle of awareness that allows him to tower, however briefly, even over the audience.¹² Beneath him, from Miranda to Stephano and Trinculo, the characters occupy different positions of varying ironic limitation in a pattern that is recapitulated even within the royal party, as Antonio and Sebastian scheme to overthrow Alonso in an act of treachery that would parallel the original usurpation of Prospero's dukedom. As though to undermine any static sense of hierarchy in these groupings, having once established them, Shakespeare meshes the islanders with the shipwrecked voyagers, bringing Ferdinand and Miranda together, Ariel into a position of control over the royal party, and Caliban into contact with the clowns, while Prospero interacts with them all. The continuum from Prospero to the clowns represents a range of regenerative possibility, from Prospero's radical reorientation to the world and his power over it to Antonio's final, stubborn silence and the clowns' punishment. Prospero's magical power, conducted through his agent Ariel, controls all of these groups and maintains the advantage for the islanders. Even Caliban finally rises above the mindless scheming of the clowns.

The minidramas set within each of these groups are essentially political. The meeting of Ferdinand and Miranda establishes the order of rightful succession in Milan, as well as the union of two Italian states; and in terms of sexual politics it insures the equality of husband and wife, as the chess game with its accompanying wit combat between the lovers suggests. Sebastian's and Antonio's intrigue recapitulates the political treachery of Shakespeare's tragedies: brother conspires against brother and against rightful heirs in a manner that shatters the Utopian illusions of Gonzalo. Thinking themselves masterless men, Stephano and Trinculo would replace the only authority they believe remains and substitute their own debauched tyranny for it. Despite all these acts of rebellion (even Miranda believes she is defying her father in loving Ferdinand), none of these characters finally realizes how much Prospero's magic controls them. Instead, they see an effacement of his magic in the four entertainments that he produces for their enlightenment. For the court party the disappearing banquet (3.3.18 ff.) exposes the appetite for illusory power; for Miranda and Ferdinand the wedding masque (4.1.60 ff.) captures their prospect for harmonious love and fruitful marriage that has the potential of renewing their soon to be united kingdoms; for Stephano and Trinculo their being hunted and hounded (4.1.255) is a means of singling them out for punishment because of their incapacity for regeneration, or what Henri Bergson would have called their mechanical inelasticity; and for Alonso and the royal party the scene of Ferdinand and Miranda at chess (5.1.172) is both an occasion for reunion of father and son and a forecast of a greater union to come of Prospero's and Alonso's states.

All of these internal dramas contribute to the triumph of Prospero's "rarer action" that ultimately manifests itself rather "in virtue than in vengeance" (5.1.27-28) and that makes possible through his art the restoration of all of the characters to their own true selves, as well as the restoration of the play's several political worlds. Alonso facilitates the return of Prospero's dukedom, Prospero provides for the union of their dynasties, the rebellions against both of them are exposed, and Caliban regains his island kingdom. Prospero's magic, thus, provides the world of the play with the security and pleasurable resolution of the romantic comedies, which typically move from a state of bondage to an old law or a dark past to a new and liberated society based on love, "natural perspective," and the promise of new life. The shipwrecked voyagers, on the other hand, bring to the island all the dangers of violence, evil, death, and lost identity that permeate the tragedies. In Prospero, Shakespeare creates a protagonist who has grown and developed out of a past marked by many of the same losses suffered by Lear—indeed, Bradley notes how The Tempest in effect continues Lear's story¹³—yet Prospero is also complete from the beginning of the play, as his unusual autobiographical narrative in the second scene reveals.

In defining Prospero's character, Shakespeare further develops in this play a dramatic psychology that conceives of the self as consisting of a repertoire of external, socially interactive roles, which clothe or encase a vulnerable inner core of being. The recurring metaphor for this psychology throughout Shakespeare's works equates the roles with the parts an actor plays—these are further called "spirits" in Prospero's revels speech (4.1.149)—and the inner being is equated with the actor's true personality, which is what remains of Prospero after he ceases to play the magician's part. Each role is a means of relating to others and can be terminated at will. The core of being is given at birth, like Antonio's "evil nature," but it can change and develop through experience or be hidden by the roles one plays.

Prospero's roles as father and teacher that have occupied him for the past twelve years are brought to an end in the course of the play. Indeed, Prospero implies that there is a logic of self-effacement in both roles: the father invites his child to assert her own will as a necessary consequence of her maturing independence that he has fostered, and the teacher's authority must finally give way to the student's need to test what she has learned against her experience of the world. As magician, on the other hand, Prospero's achievements have been absolute and cosmic in scope, as he recalls in his speech on abjuring magic. Addressing the daemons who have assisted him, he recalls,

I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-bas'd promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let'em forth
By my so potent Art.

(5.1.33-50)

Indeed as he looks back on his magical career, Prospero claims as achievements the very powers Marlowe's Faustus longed to possess:

Emperors and kings
Are but obey'd in their several provinces:
Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds:
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.
A sound magician is a mighty god.

(Doctor Faustus, II. 85-90)

Unlike Faustus, however, Prospero serves a moral purpose with his magic. He uses it to bring others to a full realization of themselves by first working "upon their senses" (5.1.53) until "their understanding / Begins to swell," flooding their "foul and muddy" minds with reason (79-82).

Although his final rejection of magical power forms the dramatic climax of the play, Prospero acts principally as a magician in all that we see him do. His fatherly care of Miranda and his instruction of her and Caliban are in the past, while the resumption of his political role is projected into the future. Indeed it would seem that whereas magic costs Faustus his soul, it is the means by which Prospero regains his and restores those who come under his influence. According to the familiar distinction, Faustus practices goetic magic, calling up evil spirits and commercing with the devil, while Prospero practices theurgic magic, commanding planetary spirits in order to turn loss into restoration. Despite Gonzalo's irrepressible enthusiasm, which has inspired the stage convention of depicting him as a complete fool, he does see clearly the dominant pattern of loss and restoration that extends from Prospero's exile and the marriage of Alonso's daughter Claribel to the concluding action of The Tempest:

Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue
Should become Kings of Naples? O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy! and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle, and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.

(5.1.205-13)

Gonzalo does not see Prospero's magical agency creating this pattern because Prospero presents himself to the royal party not as the magician he has been but as Duke of Milan. Immediately after breaking his staff and drowning his book, Prospero directs Ariel to attire him in his princely garb:

Fetch me the hat and rapier in my cell:
I will discase me, and myself present
As I was sometime Milan.

(5.1.84-86)

The audience alone has witnessed the full extent of Prospero's power.

This unique role of the audience in the play makes the circumstances of The Tempest's earliest performances especially significant, adding as well another political dimension to the play. The Revels Accounts list the presentation of The Tempest at Court by Shakespeare's company in 1611, which is its first recorded performance. In the winter of 1612-13 it was played again as part of the Court entertainments between the betrothal and marriage of the Elector to Princess Elizabeth, both of whom are specifically mentioned in the record of payment to the King's Men. It is not surprising, therefore, that The Tempest abounds in themes and details that mirror concerns and interests of the royal family: the politics of succession, the desire to unify two kingdoms, interest in New World exploration, the study of magic and demonology, the rights of kingship, the theatrical role of the monarch, even Prince Henry's fascination with ships are all reflected in the play and can easily be imagined to have been a powerful part of the royal audience's apparent pleasure at its first performance. Alonso's situation throughout much of The Tempest parallels James's when he saw the play for a second time in 1613.¹⁴ Just as Alonso's daughter Clari-bel is married to the sovereign of faraway Tunis and his son Ferdinand presumed by him to be drowned, so within four months had James's son Prince Henry died of typhoid and his daughter Elizabeth become the "Winter Queen" of Bohemia. Such parallels create an almost irresistible temptation to resort to various forms of topical reductionism or historical determinism in interpreting the play. Recent studies of Shakespearean mimesis by Jonathan Goldberg, Howard Felperin, and David Bergeron, however, have emphasized the ways in which Shakespeare mediates by "re-presentation" all of the sources that can now be identified.¹⁵ In representing the traditions of magic, the interests of the royal family, and his identifiable written sources, it is Shakespeare's transubstantiation of those sources rather than his duplication of them that is most important for an understanding of his art.

In his re-presentation of the traditions of magic, Shakespeare gives Prospero a sense of his magical power that is close to John Dee's; but unlike Dee, Prospero chooses art, theater, and specifically the masque as the means of exercising that power. In reflecting the contemporary political preoccupations of the Jacobean Court, Shakespeare embodies those topical concerns more specifically in the Alonso subplot than in his account of Prospero, thus invoking those concerns but not allowing them to dominate the play. Despite The Tempest's thematic preoccupations with politics and Prospero's manifesting his magic in the creation of masques, Shakespeare specifically avoids using the masque to flatter James's illusions of imperial power.¹⁶ Instead, either Ariel or Prospero offer sufficient commentary on each of the masques to transform them into moral allegories. Shakespeare's transformation of his written sources is an even more telling instance of his art of re-presentation. Unlike the sources for most of his other plays, those for The Tempest do not provide Shakespeare with a narrative. The Bermuda pamphlets and Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals" instead offer points of view on the contact between Europe and the New World, which Shakespeare weaves into his depiction of the relationship between Caliban and Prospero.

Samuel Purchas's travel books, though they contain the first published version of William Strachey's True Repertory of the Wrack, which was written and privately circulated in 1610, carefully surround the reporting of new facts about foreign exploration with accounts of classical voyages and an apology for colonization based on religious and moral ideas. Drake, for example, is typologized as a Christian Moses who brings the law to savages. Montaigne, on the other hand, argues that the New World is a place of natural virtue, free of the corruption of civilization. In the Indians, he writes, "are the true and most profitable vertues, and naturall properties most lively and vigorous, which in these we have bastardized, applying them to the pleasure of our corrupted taste."¹⁷ The authors of the Bermuda pamphlets generally maintain the high moral tone of those, like Purchas, who rationalized colonization; but when Strachey and Jourdain describe the islands and the life they found there, the point of view they adopt, based on personal experience, approaches Montaigne's naturalism. Strachey confronts the issue directly:

. . . I hope to deliver the world from a foule and generali errour: it being counted of most, that they can be no habitation for Men, but rather given over to Devils and wicked Spirits; whereas indeed wee find them now by experience, to be as habitable and commodi us as most Countries of the same climate and situation. . . . Men ought not to deny every thing which is not subject to their owne sense. . . .¹⁸

When he created Caliban, Shakespeare had available to him these three views of natural man; that he was wild and immoral, in need of the virtuous instruction and saving grace of Christianity; that he exhibited natural virtues and enviable vitality that civilized man is ready to corrupt; and that he is like other men and can be understood by anyone who takes the trouble to cut through propaganda and see native life for oneself.¹⁹

Rather than choosing to follow one of his sources and to reject the others, Shakespeare blends in Caliban all three views of natural man, combining in effect Strachey and Montaigne. Caliban recalls that when Prospero first came to the island, the relationship between them was one of affection, mutual care, and love:

When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me, and made much of me;
wouldst give me
Water with berries in 't; and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I lov'd thee,
And show'd thee all the qualities o' th' isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.

(1.2.334-40)

That initial relationship, like that of father and child, was shattered by Caliban's attempt to violate Miranda, which Caliban recalls in terms of Montaignean biological growth—"Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans" (1.2.352-55)—but which Prospero and Miranda understandably consider in moral terms:

Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill!

(1.2.353-55)

Throughout the play, however, Caliban identifies himself with the minute details of natural life on the island. He offers to take Stephano and Trinculo where crabs grow, to dig them pig-nuts, to show them a jay's nest, to instruct them in snaring the marmoset, and to provide them with filberts and sea birds (2.2.166-72). This aspect of Caliban reflects the humane interest among some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century explorers in careful observation of life in the New World that led to the level of achievement in ethnographic art found in John White's drawings of American Indians.²⁰ These drawings pose a sharp contrast to the physical deformity of Caliban, which is apparently the result of his unnatural birth from the union of the devil and a witch (1.2.321). Finally, however, Caliban is redeemed. His being duped by Stephano and Trinculo not only makes him willing to return to Prospero's service but also leads him to wisdom and the desire for grace (5.1.294-95). In this repentance Caliban rises in moral stature above Antonio. In exchange for the final act of service to Prospero in preparing his cell to receive the royal party, Caliban can look forward to the pardon and freedom he desires. Caliban's life, thus, recapitulates the view of natural man to be found in Shakespeare's sources: Strachey denies that the Bermudas are "given over to Devils and wicked Spirits," which Shakespeare identifies with the birth of Caliban and the worship of his mother's god Setebos (1.2.375). From the time of Prospero's arrival on the island until the end of the play, Caliban is the natural historian of the island, intimately acquainted as he is with its flora and fauna. By the end of the play he moves into the moral and theological order that Prospero himself has commanded since his exile. In Caliban, Prospero's magic and the politics of the play come fully together: his theurgic art of self-realization is defined in contrast to the goetic practices of Caliban's mother Sycorax, and his commitment to the freedom of self-determination arising out of service leads him simultaneously to abjure that magic and to allow others to be themselves.

The polarization of recent critical commentary on the play was anticipated by Oscar Wilde in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray:

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is
the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism
is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own
face in a glass.

The Tempest, like all of Shakespeare's works, invites us to see his art as reflecting both his time and our own—"the very shape and body of the time, his form and pressure," as Hamlet calls it. It invites us as well to see our own image reflected back to us. A dislike of either Shakespeare's realism or his romanticism, Wilde suggests, turns us into raging Calibans, unredeemed by the art of Prospero and Shakespeare.

Notes

¹ The best recent study of this tradition is Barbara Howard Traister, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), pp. 1-32.

² "Preface to Euclid," sig. Ciii^v. Bruno's views are conveniently available in Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, ed. and trans. Dorothea Woley Singer (New York: Abelard-Schulman, 1950), esp. p. 249. The passage from Pico appears in Renaissance Philosophy I: The Italian Philosophers, ed. and trans. Arturo B. Fallico and Herman Shapiro (New York: Modern Library, 1967), p. 144.

³ This is the view of Frances Yates in Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). For a comprehensive study of Dee's life and thought, see Peter French, The World of an Elizabethan Magus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

⁴ Quotations from The Tempest are from the Arden edition, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1962).

⁵ The earlier studies are summarized by Philip Mason in Prospero's Magic (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 75-97.

⁶ Paul Brown, "'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism," in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 48.

⁷ Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, "Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest, " in John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 201.

⁸ Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 90-96, and Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 1-25, 51-71, develop a similar argument. Eagleton and Hawkes stress Shakespeare's identification with "the retiring magus" to the point of seeing them both as capitalists who inhumanly create unemployment by the policy of land enclosure (Hawkes) or as practitioners of "oppressive patriarchalism" and a "colonialism which signals the imminent victory of the exploitative, 'inorganic' mercantile bourgeoise" (Eagleton). Eagleton's earlier study of The Tempest sees Prospero as a positive and sympathetic figure (Shakespeare and Society [New York: Schocken Books, 1967], p. 168).

⁹ Barker and Hulme, "Nymphs and Reapers," p. 17.

¹⁰ Cf. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 53.

¹¹Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: The Warburg Institute, 1958), pp. 82-83.

¹² Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 332.

¹³ A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1905), pp. 328-330.

¹⁴ For a detailed discussion of the parallels, see David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), pp. 182-87.

¹⁵ Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family.

¹⁶ See Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

¹⁷ Florio translation, reprinted in The Tempest, ed. Kermode, p. xxxv.

¹⁸ Reprinted in ibid., p. 137.

¹⁹ For an excellent history of the wild man, see Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea," in Edward Dudley and Maximillian Novak, eds. The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1972), esp. pp. 20-21. White slights the third view, however.

²⁰ See Paul Hulton, America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White (London: British Museum Publications, 1984), esp.p. 9.

²¹Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1966), p. 17.