SOURCE: “Prospero's ‘false brother’: Shakespeare's Final Antonio,” in Particular Saints: Shakespeare's Four Antonios, Their Contexts, and Their Plays, Associated University Presses, 1997, pp. 154-85.

[In the following excerpt, Lewis compares and contrasts Prospero with Antonio.]

The essential question about the Antonio and Sebastian of The Tempest is why they are the direct antitheses of their saintly precursors. Saints Anthony and Sebastian, each in his own way, forfeited worldly possessions and risked their lives for love of God. All three of the earlier Shakespearean Antonios studied thus far bear resemblance to the saints at least in part, notably for sacrificing their own property, power, and safety in the name of earthly love, albeit not without encountering for their pains some measure of suspicion, or even outright ridicule. This last Antonio/Sebastian pairing, however, stands apart from the others, although both, like Saint Anthony, are tempted to evil. But these two do not pretend to have goals other than selfish gain. Steeped in the folly of worldly ambition, they are mocked not for trying and failing to realize true charity but for lacking the vision and will to make the attempt.

I would like to offer two analyses as to why these familiar characters are turned inside out in The Tempest. Although the explanations are not opposed to each other, the first is quick and easy, while the second is far more challenging to elaborate. The first is that the thorough subversion of virtue in Antonio and Sebastian perfectly suits the effect in The Tempest of looking at traditional doctrine about wise folly as if through a looking glass. Insofar as The Tempest concerns the relationship between this world and the next (as it does to a great extent), it urges a healthy attachment to the earthly matters that Saint Paul identifies with foolish folly, rather than detachment from the world. Most particularly, Prospero's main objective during the play is to act on spiritual principles, thereby practicing tenets that the reason knows as wisdom.

Through Prospero, that is, Shakespeare pushes to conclusion doubts about avoiding the world that pervade The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and Antony and Cleopatra. In Spenserian and Miltonic terms, The Tempest “cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue” but examines the meaning and purpose of wisdom both to the individual and to society.¹ Here, true sacrifice requires engaging in affairs of state and of family, while withdrawal from such practical concerns constitutes selfishness as gross as that about Antonio and Sebastian's ambition. If, then, the wise folly of The Tempest lies in the mirror image of its conventional form, we should not be surprised to find in this Antonio and Sebastian obversions of their originals. Rather than invalidate the saint type, Shakespeare's final Antonio and Sebastian subject it to more extreme versions of the challenges it has encountered in earlier plays. The Tempest, whose philosophy owes as much to classical learning as to Christianity, might be expected occasionally to turn something Christian on its ear.² Prospero, perennially subject to his own temptation, has virtually replaced the conventional Anthony figure. Put another way, this Antonio and Sebastian serve the dual purpose of reflecting Prospero's constant temptation toward egoism and of elucidating, like images on a photographic negative, the unorthodox treatment in this play of the doctrine they were known to represent.

Fleshing out the longer response to my opening question will occupy the rest of this chapter. Much interest will be lavished on Prospero and his temptation, as any full-length study of The Tempest necessitates, but with an eye to weaving Antonio and Sebastian into the larger fabric of Prospero's ordeal. In Prospero as both man and mage is extracted the larger play's fascination with the relationship between the temporal realm and the eternal. No wonder, then, if the complexities of Prospero's characterization eclipse other characters, his brother included. Yet Antonio finally contributes a perspective as essential to the whole play and to the portrayal of Prospero as does Caliban, whose character complements Antonio's.

Discussing Prospero critically must be one of the most problematic of all tasks currently presented by Shakespeare's canon, so disparate in temperament and attitude are the approaches that critics have adopted in the last twenty-five years or so. Chiefly, what seems to have begun as a move to correct idealistic views of Prospero has evolved into a rift between those scholars who continue to insist upon Prospero's nearly unqualified virtue and others who vehemently object to idolatry of Prospero, citing his injustice toward Caliban and other characters or his subconscious tendency to resemble Caliban.³ Although I would not presume to harmonize these opposing parties, I seek more balance between them, as well as more interrelatedness, than is typical. Harry Berger complained in 1969 that the “sentimental” version of The Tempest “does not hit the play where it lives.”⁴ But neither does a blackened Prospero or an all-out renunciation of the play's concluding optimism, however superficial it may strike us, accord with any but the most perversely distorted of its productions in the theater.⁵ Anyone who has seen the play performed more than once knows intuitively that a Prospero with pretensions to flawlessness is as unsatisfying as one marked by self-deception and irredeemable heartlessness.

I would like to sweep away cobwebs without eliminating aspects of recent criticism that acknowledge tonal and moral complexity about Prospero's characterization. On the one hand, the blatant allegorical texture of The Tempest invites allegorical critical modes. On the other hand, the defiance of the play to settle on and carry through its own allegorical suggestiveness inevitably undermines uniformly allegorical readings. Put another way, The Tempest is, among Shakespeare's works, unusually susceptible to interpretation based on selective evidence and aimed at consistency. Better to admit from the start that any models—allegorical or otherwise—will fall short of resolving all ambiguities. Better, too, I think, to take initial cues from scholars whose command of medieval and Renaissance moral philosophy and whose sensitivity to the play's poetry offers them perspective on what The Tempest and its critics cannot, as well as can, address. Consider the example of R. A. D. Grant, describing the sense in which the work concerns Providence:

The Tempest … dramatizes a complex of mutually sustaining meanings, a tissue of analogy in which the realms of human society and moral character owe their very autonomy to the providential pattern which both embraces and informs them. For this reason, the feats of abstraction performed by the dramatist and called forth in the critic in one case do, and in the other should, involve no loss. … Yet … neither The Tempest nor providential fiction … can be read as religious allegory or as contributing to pure theology in any immediate way, if, indeed, the latter should happen to be anything more than imaginative exercises. The Tempest tells us much about human life, but it has nothing to say about divinity in itself. For, whereof one cannot speak directly, thereof one must, in a manner, be silent.⁶

Grant establishes the primacy in the play of individual moral conduct in particular relation to society—of “politics” in the fullest sense of the word (255). Simultaneously, he identifies expectations that the human orientation of The Tempest cannot fulfill; he locates the limits of this art form and the criticism about it to articulate the truths at stake.

So, in a different key, does James Walter. Commenting on the play's allegorical dimension, he writes:

The Tempest … develops a psychological imagery that allegorizes many distinct voices in the soul. The clear voice of reason expresses itself in categories of conceptual thought and forms of discursive language; but other, more ambiguous voices speak from a dark depth of the soul that cannot be fully articulated in language, although spectacle, music, and poetic image can convince an audience of their reality. [Walter goes on to quote Caliban's speech about the island's “noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”]⁷

Having thus pointed out the inadequacy of verbal allegory to contain entirely an audience's knowledge of The Tempest, Walter concludes by expanding on his definition of allegory so as to account for our experience of the play:

The direction of allegory is counter [to that of the symbol], demystifying the perceived symbolic unity to uncover a depressing difference between signifier and signified. But allegory also seeks to heal itself by striving to signify a more than natural plenitude of meaning. Allegory both deflates signs by calling attention to their failure and inflates them by charging them to carry more truth of experience than they properly can.

(74)

His determination to entertain The Tempest as allegory notwithstanding, Walter's point is that the play speaks more than it or its audience can say. Both Walter and Grant are in some sense remarking that this work does not formulate accessibly all that it is about.⁸

So it is, I would argue, in the case of Antonio, whose characterization not only pushes against the theatrical tradition that bred him but also resists allegorical readings of his evil and final silence. For all the audience can surmise, Antonio is in spiritual torment as The Tempest closes, inwardly unresolved; then again, his recent experiences may yet to have seeped into his awareness. In any event, the mysteries lingering about Antonio at the play's conclusion suggest ongoing, if not secret, evolution in Antonio's inner spiritual narrative.

Can Prospero be discussed in this spirit? Can he be seen as a character in moral dilemma, in whom several motivations act in conflict with one another? And can even this loose paradigm be abandoned when it ceases to resonate in the drama? To pursue these questions, I propose to focus on Prospero's pride, as it shapes his fluid character, as it is complicated by his identity as an artist, and as he grapples with it while reformulating his social and political bonds—most notably, his relationship with his brother Antonio.

I

The promotion of one's attachment to the world in The Tempest is, like so many other features of the play, paradoxical. More than any other Renaissance work before Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), The Tempest draws on Thomas More's Utopia—most particularly, on the dangers of excessive pride associated with either reckless immersion in or complete rejection of private material gain and earthly power. More's Utopians illustrate the veritable impossibility of being both human and capable of avoiding possessiveness, as when, for instance, they wage imperialist war under the pretense of altruistically ensuring that another country's land be put to worthy use.⁹ They have only ostensibly eradicated the vice of pride through their communism, which, conveniently, applies merely in domestic, not in international, situations: they go so far as to hoard gold that they pillage from other countries (and that they purport to disdain) in order to wage more imperialist war and to allow “some of their citezeins … to lyue … sumptuously lyke men of honoure and renowne” (121). More's irony toward their hypocrisy is further complicated by his suggestion that the pride so reviled by the Utopians—and yet to which they are prone—may not, in one light, be such a bad thing. The character of More (who has a Chaucerian way of seeming a wryly naive version of the author) puts the issue this way in the book's concluding paragraph:

When Raphaell hadde made an ende of his tale, thoughe manye thinges came to my mind which in the manners and lawes of that people semed to be instituted and founded of no good reason, … yea and chieffely, in that which is the principall fondacion of al their ordinaunces, that is to saye, in the communitie of theire liffe and liuinge, without anny occupieng of money; by the whyche thynge onelye all nobilitie, magnificence, wourship, honour, and maiestie, the true ornamentes and honoures, as the common opinion is, of a common wealth, vtterly be ouerthrowen and destroyed.

(143)

Though pride be the downfall of many a civilization, without it a civilization flounders for lack of shared motivation, cause, and enthusiasm.

As The Tempest opens, Prospero struggles with a comparable paradox. Twelve years earlier, he tells Miranda, Milan had become “[t]hrough all the signories … the first,” and himself, “the prime duke,” because of his renowned “dignity” and learning in “the liberal arts” (1.2.71-74). The very study that conferred glory on his state, however, tempted him to “[neglect] worldly ends” and to concentrate solely on his own improvement (1.2.89-90). With that retirement to solitude came contempt for those who, like Antonio, were left behind to administer the practicalities that Prospero now viewed as beneath him: Prospero “cast” the burden of governing on Antonio, scorned “all popular rate,” and then was surprised when no one, least of all Antonio, remembered that he was duke in actuality (1.2.75, 92, 102-5). Succumbing to his own ambitions, Prospero inadvertently tempted Antonio to give in to his. Both men became slaves to pride—the one, by trying to transcend the world through contemplation; the other, by embracing the world's trappings.

Prospero's account of his past in 1.2 goes a long way toward consciously acknowledging his role in Antonio's temptation, as when he concedes that “[I], in my false brother, / Awak'd an evil nature” (92-93).¹⁰ Yet occasionally his diction betrays an effort to whitewash his responsibility: his “trust” in Antonio, for example, is like a “good parent” that “begets” vice in its own too much (94-97). The subtle self-justification here joins other hints in this scene of Prospero's vestigial pride—his use of present tense when declaring that he still “prize[s] his books” more than his “dukedom” (167-68) and the gloating self-satisfaction that Ariel seems to take in fulfilling Prospero's commands, which may derive from the master himself (for example, 195-237). Taken together, these details point to the greatest difficulty that Prospero's character will face in recovering his lost dignity because, to do so, he must first retrieve his former respect for the practice of governing, a kind of socially beneficial pride, which will be constantly threatened by his proclivity to flatter himself.

The demon lurking under this mage's cloak tempts him not toward but away from the world; it lures him to think of himself as separate from his society, as beyond the jurisdiction of the limits that he, the duke, must impose on his subjects. The island on which Prospero is stranded has affinities with the desert in which Saint Anthony elected to seclude himself so as to reject the world's temptations, but if removal from the world should become for Prospero an end in itself, then Prospero's opportunity to serve will degenerate into merely self-serving escapism. Only full acceptance of his social responsibility can provide him with the antidote to his false pride: paradoxically, pride in assuming and administering political responsibility—the pride of which the character More speaks at the end of Utopia—carries its own means of modulation by requiring a ruler like Prospero to meet other people's needs.

Shakespeare's model for the peculiar blindness that, like Prospero's, illuminates others' weaknesses while it obscures one's own, must surely have been Montaigne.¹¹ Most critics to date have supposed that the playwright's main interest in “Of Cannibals” was that the essay, in Walter's words, “purports to defend the natural reasonableness of precivil life.”¹² If so, then the crucial relevance of the essay to the play lies with Shakespeare's handling of Caliban's primitivism—in particular, with the question of whether Caliban's naturalness is in the end more virtuous, more civil, than the actions of civilized men like Antonio, Alonso, and even Prospero. The Tempest clearly plays with this question throughout—for example, when Caliban displays superior understanding to Trinculo (for example, 4.1.222-24); when he speaks in verse, while Stephano and Trinculo are given only prose; and when Antonio and Sebastian try to usurp Alonso's position, as Caliban does Prospero's (1.2).¹³

Still, I think the core of Montaigne's piece, and of Shakespeare's focus on Montaigne, is something other: it is the pride of allegedly civilized people, which renders them capable of perceiving barbarism in others' actions but not in their own. “Of Cannibals,” in other words, centers on the hypocrisy of one society's hiding behind the pretense of reasonableness and civility in order to judge another society as barbaric, beneath the standards of reasonableness and civility. Montaigne abhors inhumanity in any society whatsoever; he aims not to exalt “precivil life,” but to debunk civilization. Repeatedly, he signals that his subject is any society's attachment to its own practices—its self-love:

Now (to returne to my purpose) I finde (as farre as I have beene informed) there is nothing in that nation [i.e., Brazil], that is either barbarous or savage, unlesse men call that barbarisme which is not common to them. As indeed, we have no other ayme of truth and reason, than the example and Idea of the opinions and customes of the country we live in. There is ever perfect religion, perfect policie, perfect and compleat use of all things.

I am not sorie we note the barbarous horror of such an action [i.e., the practice of cannibalism “to represent an extreme, and inexpiable revenge,”] but grieved, that prying so narrowly into their faults we are so blinded in ours.

We may then well call them [i.e., Brazilians] barbarous, in regard of reasons rules, but not in respect of us that exceed them in all kinde of barbarisme.¹⁴

Montaigne does not excuse truly barbaric behavior in either natural or artificial society. Instead, he laments the license that civilization gives social beings to ignore barbarity among themselves.

Montaigne's fixation on such hypocrisy offers a crucial lens on Prospero's wrongdoers and, more so, on the problems confronting Prospero himself. Shakespeare's metaphor for Montaigne's barbarity is monstrosity, visually evident in only Caliban but manifested spiritually in the “three men of sin,” one of whom, Alonso, uses the metaphor in describing his former barbarity against Prospero:

                                                  O, it is monstrous! monstrous!
Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc'd
The name of Prosper; it did base my trespass.

(3.3.95-99)

In fact, as in Montaigne, the most potentially damaging monstrosity in The Tempest is that which is hidden within, protected by the signs of civilization, as is the absence of conscience in Antonio: “If 'twere a kibe, / 'Twould put me to my slipper; but I feel not / This deity in my bosom” (1.2.276-78).

Gonzalo makes clear in 3.3 that a reverse incongruity between the appearance and reality of monstrosity is possible; remarking on the spirits who serve the banquet, whom he takes to be “islanders” (29), he says: “though they are of monstrous shape, yet note / Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of / Our human generation” (31-33). Of course, these spirits are about to appear far less kind (and yet are also about to be truly kind—even Christian—for their role in Ariel's upcoming sermon?), but the significance of the example is that outward monstrosity can mask inward beauty and outer beauty can cover inner barbarity. In a more relevant instance, Caliban's misshapen form both reflects his moral deformity and belies his highly developed aesthetic sensibility: he speaks in often lovely verse, he appreciates music (3.2.135-43), and his attraction to Miranda, although acted on in a violative way, owes to his awareness that “she as far surpasseth Sycorax / As great'st does least” (3.2.102-3).

In the most relevant example, however, Prospero's identity as an artist—a maker of beauty—can obscure, especially from himself, his own capacity for monstrosity. Nowhere, perhaps, does he seem spiritually uglier than when he instructs Ariel to torment Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano:

Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them
Than pard or cat o' mountain.

(4.1.258-61)

Indeed, the speaker here could well be Caliban, railing at Prospero: “All the infections that the sun sucks up / From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him / By inch-meal a disease!” (2.2.1-3). This implicit comparison does not defend Caliban's behavior or attribute it to Prospero; rather, it implicates the presumably learned and civilized Prospero for losing his reason and self-control.¹⁵ From the perspective that Montaigne lends Shakespeare, what is more spiritually deformed than Prospero's vengeance here is his failure to perceive it as monstrous, a failure that hinges on his assurance of his superiority to a creature like Caliban.

The demon that distorts Prospero's vision in this way has another face—despair—which is often conflated in Renaissance literature with pride. John Faustus represents the clearest of examples here: Prospero's characterization stems partly from Faustus's attraction to magic, from his dependency on his books, which careens out of control, and, above all, from his Promethean impatience with mortal knowledge and his narcissism toward his scholarly and supernatural feats. Such pride engenders in Faustus a certainty that he alone “can never be pardoned.”¹⁶ “The Serpent that tempted Eve may be sav'd,” he groans to the young scholars who urge him to repent, “But not Faustus” (13.16-17). Faustus's hard-heartedness, leading to his ultimate damnation, traces back to his original sense of superiority to all others—in the case of his sinfulness, even to Lucifer.

Prospero flirts with a similar despair but one less obviously directed toward his own situation than toward those he would reform—specifically, the three offending nobles and Caliban. Of the latter, we hear him speak in terms clearly bereft of hope for change:

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.

(4.1.188-92)

So Prospero has felt ever since Caliban betrayed his trust—his “human care”—by trying to rape Miranda (1.2.345-48).¹⁷

The influence of this betrayal on Prospero's cynicism about Caliban should not be minimized.¹⁸ Granted that Prospero's character is naturally inclined toward condescension, Caliban not only attacked his daughter but threatened her honor, a terrifying attempt at violation in any historical period but of even more ethical than physical consequence in the cultural context of The Tempest. In addition, that the incident reprises Prospero's earlier misplaced trust in Antonio helps explain the intensity of his reaction to Caliban: he has been deceived twice but until now has had only Caliban, not Antonio, with whom to register his grief and anger. Prospero may also be understood as projecting onto Caliban shame that properly belongs to himself. Caliban's claim that Prospero usurped the island from him implies another instance, in addition to the earlier incident with Antonio, in which Prospero has contributed, partly unawares, to being betrayed (1.2.331-32). His usurpation has possibly encouraged Caliban's retaliation. Yet the context of Caliban's claim about Prospero's seizure of the island from him suggests that it is an afterthought, a means of justifying his own anger at Prospero's loss of faith in him (1.2.331-44). In short, if Prospero is given to despair in Caliban or in humanity generally, it is not gratuitous; he has seen much in twelve years' time to induce it.

My point is that Prospero's evident antisocial tendencies stem from various possible roots, some of them more understandable—and acceptable—than others. Moreover, those tendencies are in tension with Prospero's apparent desire to overcome them and his efforts to bring forth something better, redemptive even, from the mistakes and the pain of the past. That impetus depends on his capacity for humility and for the “human care” that he once dispensed to Caliban and clearly continues to display toward Miranda. The story of The Tempest is, essentially, that of Prospero's wrestling with his demons to sustain that care. As such, the play features a protagonist in moral flux. The dynamic pull between his “fury” and his “nobler reason” sees him constantly tempted to repeat his original mistake by removing himself from all that is human (5.1.26). Sometimes, he succumbs to temptation, and it is almost always with Caliban. More often, he is engaged in struggle, and the struggle is the substance of the play's drama.¹⁹

The clearest illustration of what remains unfixed in Prospero's character throughout the play is his behavior toward the three offending nobles—especially his intent as to how he will use them once he has them in his power. Tellingly, some critics assume that Prospero never entertains the possibility of avenging their wrongs but only wants to reform them; others, that Prospero intends revenge until his scene with Ariel at the beginning of 5.1. Both sets of critics seem sure of their views.²⁰ And both, I would suggest, are partly right. From the start, Prospero knows rationally that he should refrain from harming so much as one “hair” of the men on board the ship (1.2.217). What he is tempted to do is another matter. That he is tempted to wreak revenge bubbles up in his language (for example, he is “strook to th' quick” with “fury” over his enemies' “high wrongs,” 5.1.25-26), and ambiguity as to his motives hovers around some of his actions, like teasing Alonso before finally reuniting him with Ferdinand (5.1.134-71). In short, audiences disagree about aspects of Prospero's characterization because Prospero's character is unresolved. Nuances in his lines as he deals with his anger imply that he could always go in the other direction—away from forgiveness and toward a wild justice connoting despair over his peers' ability to change morally.

As if Prospero's mixed motives and sometimes subtle inner conflicts did not produce enough complexity, Shakespeare adds to the problem of coming to terms with this character the challenge of discerning when he is merely acting. For all we know, he may be ever the artist, unceasingly manipulating others through manipulating their feelings and their impression of his feelings. His peevishness toward Miranda and Ferdinand, for instance, may be partly or largely feigned. Miranda indicates twice in 1.2 that his “ungentl[e]” conduct is “unwonted” (445, 497-99), confined only to this day, and Prospero himself later calls into question the authenticity of all his earlier testiness, when he explains to Ferdinand that his “auster[ity]” was meant to convey Miranda's worth and to “test” Ferdinand's worthiness (4.1.1-7). What the audience may take as evidence of Prospero's inclination toward arrogance and disrespect, then, might sometimes be an extension of his art, a show. What's more, he is likely to seem more sympathetic for whatever portion of his pride and impatience is genuine if the audience takes into account that the only day he appears onstage is also the only day on which he can make a bid for reparation. On this particular day, he would naturally be more given than usual to anxiety.

In the end, Prospero's shortcomings are considerable and of a piece: his tendencies toward pride and despair, intolerance and wrath are consistent with his exceptional learning and rigorous demands of others. His perfectionist expectations square with his difficulty in accepting human error, even one so small as his daughter's nodding off as he speaks. Shakespeare has created for this character a rich personal history suitable to his advanced years, a matrix both for the difficulties he faces when the play opens and for the factors that may mitigate the audience's view of his weaknesses.

Only his reluctance to own up to those weaknesses remains as the one serious obstacle to his successful reentry into the world. His involvement in Alonso's conversion implicitly speaks to that problem. By virtue of his concern for Ferdinand and of Antonio and Sebastian's attempt at usurping his crown, Alonso is closely paralleled with Prospero. In addition, Prospero's waverings toward despair about Caliban and the nobles resonate in Alonso's broader vacillations between faith in Ferdinand's survival and despair that “he's gone” (2.1.123; cf. 2.1.323-24, 3.3.8-10). More than anything else, what distinguishes the two men is the way they tend to acknowledge their faults: while Prospero, as we have seen, hedges on the question of his own role in his downfall (1.2.66-151), Alonso confesses and repents his wrongdoing outright, first to himself (3.3.95-102), then to Prospero: “Thy dukedom I resign, and do entreat / Thou pardon me my wrongs” (5.1.118-19). Ironically, however, Prospero has pulled the strings of Alonso's open admission. In this light, he again appears poised on the border between self-awareness and what Skura calls “self-estrangement”—here, the temptation to ignore his own reasons to repent.²¹ Paradoxically, his art both prompts in others the self-knowledge essential to remorse and yet permits him the very aloofness from others that sustains his pride. How Prospero comes to manage his relationship to his art, including his apparent sense of superiority to it, constitutes much of his struggle to rejoin the society of mortals in Milan.

II

Although art in The Tempest is strewn with traps, it is still the means to achieving the play's highest goal, spiritual freedom. Such freedom, which assumes various forms in the play, is always paradoxical because it depends on some kind of bondage or fulfillment of obligation. Subjectively, it might be defined, for lack of better words, as service, rather than slavery—that is, a willing, generous, even foolishly self-sacrificing labor in others' behalf, as against the enforced, begrudging execution of a task at another's command.²² Hence Caliban's sense that he is enslaved because he is made to do Prospero's chores (for example, 1.2.372-74). And hence Ferdinand's view of the same burdens as welcome. Initially pressed into service (1.2.467), Ferdinand learns to accept his labors under the influence of Miranda (3.1.63-67), who herself exemplifies liberality at every turn: “To be your fellow / You may deny me, but I'll be your servant, / Whether you will or no” (3.1.84-86).

Objectively, the same spiritual freedom can be described as mercy—unhesitating, unconditional acceptance.²³ Recalling Portia's image of mercy as “not strain'd,” but falling “as the gentle rain from heaven” (Merchant, 4.1.184-85), Prospero twice refers to “grace” and “aspersion” as heavenly rain (3.1.75, 4.1.18). If grace is a free gift, however, it is also enjoined on humanity by both nature and Providence. To the first of those ordering principles Prospero refers when he tells Ariel that to be “kind” is an inherently human quality (5.1.21-24). And he repeatedly makes clear in his narration to Miranda in 1.2 that he sees himself as both the pawn and the instrument of “Providence divine” (159). In fact, Providence has dictated that the evil done to Prospero be converted to “loving wrong” and that Prospero rely on a “most auspicious star” to achieve his “zenith” (1.2.151, 180-84). As freely as he may choose the details of his plans to fulfill the larger aims of Providence, he is nonetheless bound in service to a higher power whose ultimate motivation is heavenly love and whose final destination is love on earth.²⁴

Yet neither can Providence advance in its course unless aided by Prospero's artistic manipulations. Otherwise, it is frozen in mere potentiality. Indeed, the very function of that art is to release those who partake in it from whatever obstacles impede their spiritual freedom both to forgive and to be forgiven. Most of the artistic displays that Prospero presents to an internal audience suggest that their purpose is to realize larger charitable ends. Although the vanishing banquet of 3.3, for example, has the immediate effect of arousing despair and madness in the nobles, Ariel's assurance—“I and my fellows / Are ministers of Fate” (60-61)—establishes Prospero as a guide, channeling their present pain through the difficult, slow process of penitence, to the providential end of “heart's sorrow, / And a clear life ensuing” (81-82). “the pow'rs,” says Ariel, are “delaying (not forgetting)” (73); in identifying himself as a spark of memory, he further reveals this particular spectacle of Prospero's as the catalyst by which, through time, Providence will prove effective.²⁵ If all goes well, the same conversion Prospero effects in the nobles, thereby helping to fulfill Providence, will also benefit himself.²⁶

Prospero's learnings toward pride, however, complicate his approach to artistry, as well as to forgiveness, threatening to corrupt his art with egoism. In fact, the very nature of art in the context of The Tempest spawns its own complications. Although it requires the artist to relinquish ultimate control to Providence, it nevertheless demands from the artist a high degree of control and, furthermore, attracts those who can muster it. Artistry thus contains its own temptations. Practically speaking, if Prospero feels drawn toward private vengeance, his impulse would naturally stem in part from simply possessing the power to hurt through his art. In addition to whatever specific motives might lure Prospero to revenge, that is, his identity as an artist who enjoys wielding power may well augment the enticement for him of vengeance, especially since he is certain of accomplishing it skillfully, if he so chooses. As Prospero uses art to unlock the possibility of spiritual freedom in himself and others, his art must itself enact the balance between personal freedom and obedience to higher law that also characterizes willing service and mercy. For Prospero, as for any capable artist, this is a precarious balance indeed.²⁷

The antidote in The Tempest to the pride that can thwart the most well-meaning of artists is compassion, or what Harriet Hawkins calls “empathy.”²⁸ It is the recognition that one's pain, however acutely felt, is not unique but shared; that to punish one's malefactor does nothing to relieve suffering but only increases it; that the common lot of humanity is, at best, what Spenser calls “tickle”—uncertain—and, at worst, hellish, therefore compelling kindness, grace. Once compassion is felt, in other words, spiritual freedom is within reach. The play's logic is inescapable: if even the best human beings err, the only possible response to human error is forgiveness.

To suggest the ultimate folly of pretensions to immunity from human error and sorrow, allusions to the essential sameness of all humanity are scattered throughout the play. The opening wrangling between the nobles and the Boatswain fixes immediately on the notion that class rank is no protection against the ravages of nature:

Boats.

What cares these roarers for the name of king?

.....Gon.

Good, yet remember whom thou hast aboard.

Boats.

None that I more love than myself. You are a councillor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more.

(1.1.16-23)

But perhaps no more poignant reminder of common human vulnerability emerges in The Tempest than Ariel's detailed description of Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban, whom he has led far afield of their designs to usurp Prospero:

                                                  I charm'd their ears
That calf-like they my lowing follow'd through
Tooth'd briers, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns,
Which ent'red their frail shins. At last I left them
I' th' filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,
There dancing up to th' chins that the foul lake
O'erstunk their feet.

(4.1.178-84)

Prospero responds to Ariel with sheer approval, little sensing at this feverish moment that he could be—and once was—so humbled as are now these three scoundrels: “This was well done, my bird” (4.1.184). He also portends further punishment and humiliation: “I will plague them all, / Even to roaring” (4.1.192-93). But the evocative images of these creatures' “frail shins” and their wading chin-deep in ooze seem virtual emblems of general human frailty—witness the recapitulation of the image of drowning already applied to the ship's crew, Alonso, and Ferdinand.²⁹ That Prospero does not recall here the time when he himself was at the mercy of a “rotten carcass of a butt” on the “roar[ing]” sea does not except him from the same helplessness he now inflicts on Caliban and fellows (1.2.146, 149). It merely confirms his difficulty at fully imagining the effects of his artistry on others. The three low characters' actions may have invited Prospero's discipline, but not his smugness.

The vision that will allow Prospero to understand others' capacity for pain and his own capacity for brutality is, again, the vision that Montaigne advocates in “Of Cannibals.” Through an exploration of Prospero's art, however, The Tempest pushes the issue by addressing how to achieve that vision, which engenders spiritually freeing compassion. Not surprisingly, more paradoxes ensue, specifically those through which art interrelates innocence and experience. In essence, the compassion of a child, lost in adulthood, can be retrieved through art, which is itself tainted by experience.

Montaigne's conception of an inclusive outlook on all of the world's societies is manifested in purest form in the innocent Miranda. Although the audience might expect Caliban's earlier assault on her virginity to instill some skepticism in her view of humanity, her perception is instead clear of bias toward any but her former pupil. She assumes that the men on board the afflicted ship are undeserving of Prospero's punishment, and her sympathy for their agony is explicit: “O! I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer” (1.2.5-6). Unto themselves, her tenderness and generosity are ideal. Yet the practical limitations of her perspective come into focus early on and remain so throughout the play. On first seeing Ferdinand, she takes him for a “thing divine” (1.2.419), indicating that she will fall for Ferdinand not as an individual but as a member of general humanity, with whom she is barely acquainted. Only Prospero's seasoned judgment legitimates her choice of husbands (which, in light of her naiveté, is really no choice at all). Furthermore, the audience hardly needs to hear Prospero's famous retort to know that Miranda's later assessment of humanity is dangerously ingenuous:

Mir.
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!
Pros.
'Tis new to thee.

(5.1.181-84)

Although Miranda shows signs of growing up and away from her father, as when she breaks Prospero's rule by pronouncing her name to Ferdinand (3.1.36-37), this process is still highly controlled by the hidden, protective Prospero, and it is unfinished by the play's end.³⁰

In earlier plays by Shakespeare, Miranda's inattention to the perils of blind trust and her readiness to sacrifice her comfort to do Ferdinand ease might have seemed problematic but not so painfully simple as in The Tempest. Particularly in Twelfth Night, Antonio's (and later Viola's) love at all costs raises problems concerning wise folly but remains valued and desired for its idealism. And so is Miranda's natural compassion, in one light, held in high esteem. But The Tempest deeply distrusts an easy compassion, which, uninformed by the evil of which humanity is capable, is therefore automatic, not chosen freely.³¹ Prospero's gaze, though jaded, is clearly safer. It is also profoundly of this world, born of disappointed expectations and firsthand experience with treachery. Because he is still at risk of loathing this life, his business is to recover enough of Miranda's childlike compassion to modulate his cynicism but not so much as to render his worldliness Ineffectual. Gonzalo's trust and idealism, though refreshing, go too far; he is the adult incarnation of Miranda's innocence and so is prone to reflecting both wise and foolish folly in the extreme—through, respectively, his humane concern and his inability to deal with the villains who tease him for his unworldliness (2.1.1-190).³² Prospero's partial recovery of the kindness that Gonzalo may never have lost relies in part on his fatherly love for Miranda; like other instances of parental love in the romances, this love is so fervent as to be grace indeed. What's more, Prospero often makes explicit that the image of Miranda's devotion to Ferdinand softens his heart and gives him hope—for example, while he blesses the new love between her and Ferdinand (3.1.74-76) and when he presents the pair to Alonso as a “wonder” (5.1.167-71). Not even the sight of the young lovers can erase the bitter experience that colors his view of the world, but it can restore to him some measure of joy about participating in social living: “So glad of this as they I cannot be, / Who are surpris'd withal; but my rejoicing / At nothing can be more” (3.1.92-94).³³

Another means of rehabilitating Prospero's compassion that is equally potent to his love for Miranda lies in his art. Not coincidentally, each time he is moved by parental love, he is observing Miranda in a dramatic scene or a tableau of his own devising. The strength of natural love is somehow intertwined in The Tempest with the power of artifice properly employed—at least to the extent that the father's commitment to his child's welfare compels him to use art responsibly, in the service of her welfare.³⁴ Yet the instinctive compassion of a child, to which art can return an adult, also diverges widely, in the context of this play, from the essence of artistry, which is both learned and chosen. Prospero's art is solely the product of experience—not, as in Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry, innately good simply because it is natural.³⁵ It is thus perpetually—and vexatiously—debased by the artist's fall from grace. It is also likely, then, to be an imperfect mode of recovering lost grace. Nor is it, from this angle, much to be proud about. For whatever may be natural about art in The Tempest is inherently at odds with what is unnatural—morally corrupt—about the artist.

That art in The Tempest is the exclusive domain of postlapsarian humanity is suggested frequently—for instance, by Miranda's inability to detect Ariel's presence. Miranda herself is artless, in both the senses that she does not practice art and that she is guileless. That pun suggests at least the contrivance, and at most the corruption, about the other characters' artfulness. Indeed, even young Ferdinand's exposure to courtly society is already evident in the self-consciously artful—adult—language in which he addresses Miranda: “Most sure, the goddess / On whom these airs attend!” (1.2.422-23). Although his diction mirrors Miranda's (for example, 1.2.411-12), its deliberately crafted rhetoric is implicitly contrasted with the absence of cunning in her speeches. By his own account, Ferdinand has already known many women, experience that enables him to judge Miranda's relative merits (3.1.39-48) but also that has introduced him to the manipulative ways and discourse of politicians and usurpers, such as that of his father's company. When Antonio urges Sebastian to murder Alonso in 2.1, he applies the language of the theater to political usurpation, linking fallen society with abusive artistry. Claribel, he says, is

                                                  she that from whom
We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again
(And by that destiny) to perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.

(250-54)

Human artifice in The Tempest—whether Ferdinand's, Antonio's, or Prospero's—is necessarily morally suspect because it results from experience. Hence, its moral efficacy is always in question.

Accordingly, as if portrayed as a belated appendage to human nature, art is repeatedly figured in The Tempest as a garment that may be worn or removed at will. Prospero identifies his magical powers with his mantle—“Lie there, my art” (1.2.25)—and political positions are seized and put on like costumes in a play, inessential features of the people who perform within them. The notion of political plotting as an act of fashion-mongering is sharpened through parody when Stephano and Trinculo are distracted from their ambush of Prospero by the “wardrobe” he has displayed for them (4.1.222-54). Rosemary Wright has written persuasively on the emblematic significance of this episode: “The gaudy clothes that dangle from the branches of the [lime] tree seem almost certainly to have derived from the late Gothic device of the pedlar and the apes.”³⁶ This device, she explains, concerns mainly the human folly of “being attracted … by glittering trifles,” as portrayed by the apes whose keeper sleeps idly nearby while they plunder a lime tree for pretty clothes and trinkets (137). As helpful as Wright's interpretation is, I believe that the robes donned by Shakespeare's two fools also play off of Prospero's mantle in respect to the play's most fundamental warnings about human artifice. Prospero can be contrasted with Stephano and Trinculo for the legitimacy of his apparel: he is the true mage; they, only base imitators. But in all three cases art remains external, implying that it is not natural but willed, and, if willed, then threatening, since, as Sidney insisted, in the Apology, human will has been “infected” by the fall.³⁷

But, again paradoxically, that human artifice is stained by worldly experience empowers it, in Sidney's phrase, to deliver a golden world. It cannot rise until its creator falls. Through directly encountering error, Milton would later write, comes the knowledge of error that can be deployed against itself.³⁸ Experience is double-edged, then, providing both the need for redemption and the means to it. A Prospero who had never known the temptation of lust could probably not conjure a masque that cautions a betrothed couple from indulging in lust (and a Prospero who had never struggled with such temptation would likely not repeat his call to abstinence so often and so adamantly, as in 4.1.14-23, 51-54, 94-98). In fact, art in The Tempest might yet be thought natural in the narrow sense that, quite apart from humanity, it occupies a pure realm into which experience initiates the fallen. Some attribute of Prospero's art, that is, lies beyond his ability to corrupt it or to contain it; it is that principle that permits his artistry to intersect with Providence, to instill virtue, and to awaken both conscience and compassion in folly-fallen humanity.

Such words come as close as I can force them to describing Ariel, of whom I have not yet found a thoroughly satisfactory reading.³⁹ Many of Ariel's traits delineate him as the pure idea, spirit, of art in nature. His singular refusal to be bound into any service other than that of his own delight removes him from the human sphere. His decided nonhumanity is, in fact, stressed; at one point, he is “but air” (5.1.21). He is, however, subject to abuse by mortal artists like Sycorax, as well as to the more benign employment of human beings like Prospero, whose freeing of him from the cloven pine metaphorically suggests the redirecting of the artistic principle from vice toward virtue. Ariel's own compassion recommends him for the task of imbuing spiritual freedom in the audience he shares with his master. He tells Prospero: “Your charm so strongly works 'em [Prospero's enemies] / That if you now beheld them, your affections / Would become tender” (5.1.17-19). In Aristotelian terms, if Prospero is the efficient cause of art in The Tempest and Providence the final cause, Ariel might be considered the formal cause.

Ariel's passage from unbearable slavery to Sycorax, to uncomfortable service to Prospero, to complete freedom from any earthly obligations indicates the inevitability of Prospero's forfeiting his magic, which seems to rely on a force that can be borrowed but not possessed and which, if borrowed too long, decays into ugliness. Illustrating this principle, Prospero reminds Ariel of his misery and repulsiveness after years of fruitless subjugation by Sycorax:

                                                  Thou best know'st
What torment I did find thee in; thy groans
Did make wolves howl. …
                                                  It was a torment
To lay upon the damn'd.

(1.2.286-90)

Confinement once made a virtual howling Caliban out of Ariel, until Prospero freed the spirit to create beauty (1.2.291-93). Prospero's profit by Ariel, however, could itself grow exploitative. Not coincidentally, Prospero has relied upon Ariel for twelve years, exactly the length of time that Sycorax had previously trapped him in the cloven pine (1.2.274-79). Prospero seems able to harness Ariel's spiritual perfection favorably only so long, up to a point beyond which lies unchecked pride and abuse, like that of Sycorax.

Racing against that terminus, Prospero treats Ariel with hints of impatience and disrespect, indications of the self-centeredness that militates against his kindness. The oddly unnatural aspect of human artistry is exposed over and again as Prospero imposes demands on an Ariel who must struggle to comply and marshals inflammatory insults, like calling Ariel “malignant thing,” to enforce, ironically, the natural law of love (1.2.257). As the play draws to a close, along with the day, the pressing question is whether Prospero's collaboration with Ariel can penetrate beneath the outer garments of the chief characters to affect them internally. Before Ariel vanishes, can the clothes that Gonzalo says are “newdy'd” and “fresh” come to represent the spiritual renewal of the men who wear them (2.1.64, 69)? What's more, will the artistry confined to Prospero's mantle make its spiritual impression on him before he discards it? Will Prospero's magic have left its indelible traces in his other art—that of his governing? Can he truly reenter this world and its society, that is, as a changed person?

Caliban tells Stephano that, if he would conquer Prospero, first to “possess his books; for without them / He's but a sot, as I am” (3.2.92-93). Of course, Caliban exaggerates: in the most negative light, Prospero does not, and could not, sink to “sot.” Still, Caliban's line points in a number of provocative directions, all of which contain their grain of truth. First, what distinguishes civilized, fully human creatures from monsters is their practice of artistry. But, second and at the same time, pure art always somehow escapes human practice, as though held at a distance in a book that mortal minds can briefly touch and yet that mortal hands will eventually soil—make sottish. Finally, Caliban diminishes Prospero's stature from a self-impressed artist to the lowliness that, once Prospero fully recognizes it, can plant his humility. On Prospero's willingness to lower himself in the glass of his own imagination hinges the relative success of his art.

III

Prospero reaches a distinct turning point in The Tempest, where he demonstrates a seemingly new humility in respect to his own art. It comes in 4.1, when he cuts off the masque. Previous critical analyses of this scene have concentrated on the parallels between the content of the masque—Pluto's kidnapping of Proserpine behind Ceres' back—and Prospero's history: Caliban remains at large, stalking Miranda. Of greater significance, however, is what happens to Prospero as he recognizes this parallel. What starts as a thinly veiled injunction against the young couple's prenuptial love-making ends as a warning to the artist himself. While witnessing the adverse consequences of Ceres' obliviousness to Proserpine's well-being—a devastating mistake that Ceres still rues and because of which she is now more circumspect (88-91)—Prospero connects the artistic vision with his own grievous experience, recognizing his parental obligation to Miranda: “I had forgot that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates / Against my life” (139-41). He takes the moral instruction of the masque to heart, learning about his own conduct from his own art. Apparently reordering his thinking, he moves his focus from Ferdinand's responsibility to safeguard Miranda's chastity to his own.

Such re-vision, in addition to protecting Prospero from the charge of hypocrisy, shows that he is being humbled, as reflected in his metamorphosing views of his artifice. He at first glibly calls the masque “[s]ome vanity of mine art” (41), at least striking an appropriately self-effacing pose. As the masque proceeds, however, the artist and Shakespeare's audience come to understand the real sense in which the masque is vain. Now Ferdinand, repeating Prospero's youthful history, is lured by the delight of this “vision” and longs to escape into its false freedom (118): “Let me live here ever; / So rare a wond'red father and a wise / Makes this place Paradise” (122-24). The danger of art's beauty and idealization, with which Prospero has long been wrestling, is that it will distract its audience or its maker from applying its moral content where it is most needed, in the fallen world. Ferdinand's relative inexperience also obscures from his perception much of what Prospero, who has suffered the consequences of such oblivion, can learn from it. For Ferdinand, then, the masque threatens to dwindle into a vehicle of self-admiration, a trifling entertainment, a “vanity.”

When Prospero suspends the masque to attend to life, he avoids such youthful error and lowers his pride sufficiently to objectify his art. But he also restores a much-needed perspective on the role of art in life, reestablishing art's purpose as that of serving life, which is to say serving social, rather than private, ends. Prospero has in this case, as in earlier ones, egotistically coached Ferdinand's idolatry with more false modesty toward the “[s]pirits, which … / I have from their confines call'd to enact / By my present fancies” (120-22). Yet in 4.1 Ferdinand's ill-advised attraction, so like his own toward the wonders of pure contemplation, seems to register with him. Not long after Ferdinand makes his comment, Prospero breaks off the masque, as though he suddenly comprehends the potential egoism implicit in the remark and reacts against it: “Well done, avoid; no more” (142).⁴⁰

Prospero's ambivalence toward the uses of art, however, persists in 4.1 and is so delicately scripted as to resist verbal analysis. On the one hand, his vestigial enchantment with art for its own sake tends to draw him away from social responsibility and into the selfish pleasures of his own mind. On the other hand, the traces of his suffering coerce his attention to the needs of others, visible in his urge to abandon his borrowed magic. He is still tempted, even as late as 4.1, not to do what the virtue implicit in his own art tells him he must, so that his virtuous action, once chosen, indeed seems a narrow escape out of pride and despair into humility and faith. His speeches in the remainder of the play are riddled with comparably subtle tension. His sense of social responsibility, which prompts him to end the masque, is tinged with “anger” and “distemper” (4.1.145), suggesting his unresolved emotions. The famous comparison that follows, between the transience of artistic illusion and that of human life, both extols artifice for mimicking reality and disparages anything human for its impermanence (4.1.146-58). Prospero's equally celebrated valedictory to magic in 5.1 alternates between boasts of his superhuman “command” over nature and more modest references to the “[w]eak” spirits he controls and to his “rough magic” (48, 41, 50).

This evidence of Prospero's remaining confusion shows that the final stage of his conversion, as he experiences it, is not mechanical. But it does occur. And it is living, in many senses—chiefly, in that it evolves erratically, unevenly. No sooner than he interrupts the masque to save his dukedom and his daughter than he regresses to enjoying his fantasies of brutalizing Caliban (4.1.258-61). In this ironic instance, he readily exchanges hard-won sympathy for the familiar dispassion he long ago showed Antonio. Yet Prospero makes clear strides toward human kindness that, like his openness to the substance of his own masque, demonstrate art's power to perform spiritual alchemy. Even if Prospero succeeded in teaching no one but himself, his example alone would legitimate his art, so far has he come in twelve years' time toward transforming his and others' mistakes into “loving wrong” (1.2.151).

Prospero's susceptibility to the moral instruction of his own art has significant implications for his use of art to teach others as well. Any art in The Tempest that finally proves capable of improving human nature derives its potency from invading and manipulating the audience's conscience through its emotions. But such invasiveness revives familiar reservations about Prospero's presumptuousness. Twelve years after his exile, Prospero, still wavering between pride and humility, deems necessary the use of vicarious loss to convert Alonso and to chasten Ferdinand. In Alonso's case, this strategy seems especially extreme: it is the death of a child, felt as if real because imagined to be real. No bereavement could be more painful. The exploitation of such power craves adequate justification, in addition to that already discussed—in particular, Prospero's willingness to subject himself to moral standards as high as those he expects his audience to embrace. On three additional grounds, Prospero's right to practice meddlesome artistry can be considered wise and can be distinguished from both the tyranny that marks Antonio's usurpation and his own bendings toward pride.

First, Prospero's strenuous effort to teach the characters he manipulates is called for because they repeatedly exhibit cruel and violent—inhumane—behavior, which they show no signs of amending on their own. Numerous critics have recently blamed Prospero for inciting such behavior in Caliban; some would also judge Prospero indirectly guilty of Antonio's crimes, imagining, for example, that he seduces Antonio to attempt a second usurpation in 2.1 and, beyond that, shrewdly engineers a marriage through which Milan will pass from Prospero to Ferdinand, altogether dispossessing his maligned younger brother. Stephen Orgel argues both of these points in condemning Prospero for robbing Antonio's ability to “act of his own free will.”⁴¹ He implies that Prospero practically forces Antonio to plot against Alonso so that, “at the play's end,” he will “still [have] usurpation and attempted murder to hold against his brother, things that will still disqualify Antonio from his place in the family” (111). The outcome of Prospero's machinations to rid Europe of Antonio, springing from some mysterious malignancy in Prospero's character, is, according to Orgel, that “Prospero has not regained his lost dukedom, he has usurped his brother's” (111).

But, surely, to consider so is to consider too curiously. Not only does making Prospero the villain of The Tempest require gyrations of reasoning about the plot that a theater audience would be hard-pressed to undertake (even during postproduction reflection), but it also rests on assumptions about the plot for which textual evidence is lacking. When Orgel states about the “conspiracy” in 2.1, for instance, that it is “certainly part of [Prospero's] project,” he neglects quite another possible understanding of the episode.⁴² The script divulges only two elements of the scene that are incontestably instigated by Prospero: Ariel's soporific music (184-98) and Ariel's wake-up call to Gonzalo (300-305). Why the rest occurs between lines 184 and 305 is anybody's guess. Granted, some circumstantial evidence implicates Prospero in setting up Antonio and Sebastian: Ariel likely exits just after Alonso has fallen asleep (2.1.198), perhaps depriving the other two of their chance to do the same, and that Ariel earlier agrees to follow “[a]ll points” of Prospero's “command” “[t]o th' syllable” hints that Prospero is willing every detail of the action in 2.1 (1.2.501). Other explanations of the scene, however, make more sense and require less elaborate reasoning—for instance, that Antonio and Sebastian are untouched by Ariel's music because they are wicked men, not because Prospero wills them to stay conscious.⁴³ Indeed, insofar as Prospero is involved at all, he seems to be discouraging the intrigue to which Antonio and Sebastian are prone, having Ariel rouse Gonzalo to “keep” all of these folks “living” (299). Furthermore, Ariel says only that Prospero “through his art foresees the danger” to Gonzalo (297), not that Prospero has caused the conspiracy. Anyone who has ever become embroiled in debating the theological distinction between foreseeing and willing events knows better than to assume they are identical.

On balance, Prospero hardly seems responsible for encouraging the second fall of Antonio, who by his own admission lacks a conscience (276-80). The circumstances that Prospero's art brings about in this scene are intended, rather, to test the current mettle of the men whose moral turpitude was verified twelve years earlier. In this arena, although admittedly one of Prospero's designing, two of these men freely elect not merely to sin again but to descend farther than ever into sin by committing murder. No, if Prospero is to be charged with abusing his magic, it cannot be for assaying the virtue of his one-time malefactors or, for that matter, for reinforcing Ferdinand's love through similar trial (4.1.1-11). Both ploys are necessary for ascertaining responsibly the degree to which further artistry is warranted and of protecting himself and Miranda against repeated misfortune.

The second consideration in determining the legitimacy of Prospero's severe and invasive tactics with the nobles is whether his art remains in line with providential ends in this most crucial of cases. Here, too, I think that Prospero's motives have lately been misunderstood. Not that he thoroughly skirts and resists the temptation to vengeance. As we have seen, his failures to teach Caliban give rise to a strong, desperate desire to punish Caliban and his cohorts. Nor is he above relishing the power in which he holds the nobles when it is at its apex: “At this hour / Lies at my mercy all mine enemies” (4.1.262-63). Indeed, the very revenge within Prospero's grasp is itself a metaphor for the ultimate tyranny of one person over another. Yet to read most of his artistic endeavors with the nobles as fostered mainly by pride is to misjudge him. Prospero's foremost objective is to awaken the faith that ushers in grace.

Greenblatt stops short of understanding Prospero's motives completely, I believe, when he writes that Prospero aims merely to arouse anxiety. Although Greenblatt marshals some historical evidence to argue that anxiety in itself was seen by theologians of the time as a “necessary precondition of the reassurance of salvation,” in The Tempest the majority of anxiety that Prospero elicits is neither an end in itself nor a direct path to salvation.⁴⁴ Rather, it is a form of role-playing whose immediate goal is to evoke one's compassion for others' suffering and, promptly thereafter, remorse for the suffering one has caused others. Such contrition may eventually lead to conversion and salvation, as Prospero hopes it will (5.1.28-30). While Prospero's art works to promote just such remorse, it simultaneously encourages faith, itself the complement of grace, by stimulating the sympathetic imagination. Both goals—the arousal of contrition and of faith—cooperate with Providence.

The banquet scene in 3.3 details how Prospero's art seeks to conjure both the suffering that leads to penitence and salvific faith in the “three men of sin.” Kermode identifies this scene as one of temptation, which it surely is, both by virtue of its allusion to Job 20:23, 27⁴⁵ and because it parallels the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. But the belief that the illusory banquet stirs in the minds of those who are tempted by it is also an important component in the process of repentance, which can become mired in despair. Indeed, although Ariel subverts the hungry men's pleasurable expectations when he and his spirits dismantle the banquet, thus making the impact of his austere sermon all the greater, the sinners' faith has, immediately before, already been exercised. It therefore stands ready to modulate the “ecstasy” brought on by “their great guilt,” freshly remembered in response to Ariel's accusations (108, 104). Moreover, the belief that the nobles express as they approach the banquet is one of pure awe, admiration; it retrieves a measure of their lost innocence. They are drawn not to the feast as flesh but to the apparition as wonder:

Seb.
A living drollery. Now I will believe
That there are unicorns; that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.
Ant.
I'll believe both;
And what does else want credit, come to me,
And I'll be sworn 'tis true. …
Gon.
If in Naples
I should report this now, would they believe me?

(21-28)

Sebastian speaks truer than he realizes by calling the image a “living drollery.” The art here is, in a real sense, living because it acts upon the souls of its audience. This faith in the reality of Prospero's illusion will prove key in the final scene, where the same characters' faith will be tested one last time, principally by being confronted by the apparent mirage of Prospero's person. The newfound credulity of Sebastian and Antonio at the banquet, a credulity for which Gonzalo had earlier appeared to them such a fool (2.1), will remain in their memory even after Ariel has interrupted it to plunge them into the “desperat[ion]” of self-recognition (104).⁴⁶

A similar interaction in Prospero's artistic methods between implanting grief and allaying it informs nearly every facet of his overall design. To cite another example, Ariel's song for Ferdinand moves him, uncannily, in two opposed ways: it convinces him, first, of his father's fictional death and, second, of Alonso's “sea-change / Into something rich and strange” (1.2.401-2). In actuality this is his father's ultimate destiny, although, unbeknownst to Ferdinand, it will be delayed. The song, then, is another “living drollery,” acting as a catalyst in Ferdinand's mind and spirit. It introduces him—prematurely and yet none too soon—to faith in a beauty beyond death's sadness.

Prospero's extreme measures for touching off complex spiritual chemistry in the nobles, then, are authorized both by the ambitiousness of his project and by the enormity of his audience-subjects, who grow ever greedier, ever more callous. As Friar Francis advises in Much Ado about Nothing when he proposes to counterfeit Hero's death by slander: “to strange sores strangely they strain the cure” (4.1.252). Still, Prospero's methods are less severe than those of revenge tragedy, wherein the solution to awakening people to the pain they have caused is to inflict real pain, by maiming, killing, and psychologically torturing. Prospero seeks to share his injury by reviving or implanting it in the fantasies of those who have hurt him and could do so again. On the other side of their horrific imaginings, moreoever, lies the possibility of regret for the torment they have caused Prospero and of human compassion born of shared grief. Through his artistry, Prospero offers his brother Antonio a great gift—the imaginative capacity required for sympathetic understanding.

The third and final problem to address about the extraordinary lengths to which Prospero takes his artistry is also the most crucial and the most difficult to resolve. It is that of whether the results of his labors justify his strategies, which often edge on high-handedness. To what degree and in what sense do Prospero's efforts produce the most desirable effect: an inward turning in his artistic and political subjects toward spiritual freedom in this world?

Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio compose, in that order, a spectrum of possible responses to Prospero's manipulations. Alonso so obviously undergoes and, at various points, articulates his reversal that further commentary than that already included here is superfluous. For his sincere “heart's sorrow,” expressed both to Prospero and to his son (5.1.116-19, 197-98), and for a “clear life ensuing” (3.3.81-82), he is given a “second life,” embodied in his recovered son Ferdinand (5.1.195).

Sebastian's case, although less overt than Alonso's, is not, in the end, as cryptic as is often asserted. When he first awakens from his trance, his faith in Prospero's virtue—and, by extension, his own heart's sorrow—are still unsound, as his aside evinces: “The devil speaks in him” (5.1.129). Prospero's magical ability to hear his doubt, however, unites with the tableau of the children playing chess to induce his long-awaited conversion to faith: “A most high miracle!” (5.1.177). Whether because this last of Prospero's spectacles owes more to palpable reality than to illusion, or because the sight of restored, loving children melts down Sebastian's resistance, he is brought to testify, as it were, before our eyes.⁴⁷

Antonio's reaction to Prospero's stratagems is silence. It is, therefore, impenetrable: although we can safely assume that, were he fully converted, his lines would indicate as much, neither does he speak to the contrary. He makes one more lame joke before the play closes, implying less defiance of than indifference to Prospero's high hopes that he will transform (5.1.265-66). But the actor playing Antonio has little to go on as to Antonio's inner feelings and thoughts. Earlier, during the banquet scene, he showed clear evidence of being spiritually moved. But in 5.1, however affected he may be internally, he stops short of voicing the ecstasy that seizes Sebastian and Alonso. Taken together, then, these three fellows suggest a range of outlook, from faith to skepticism.

Less mystifying than Antonio's reserve, I believe, is Caliban's promise: “I'll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace” (5.1.295-96). Even in view of his fear of Prospero's punishment—“I shall be pinch'd to death” (5.1.276)—and despite Prospero's threatening tone in the lines that precede his claim to reform, his pledge rings true because punishments, real or portended, have not changed him in the past. The distinguishing mark of his earlier vituperation for Prospero, in fact, is that it is involuntary, compulsive—necessitated by his anger and capable of drowning other consideration: “His spirits hear me, / And yet I needs must curse. … For every trifle they are set upon me” (2.2.3-4, 8). In the play's last scene, rather than pretending to win Prospero's “grace,” Caliban is at long last reflecting the lessons that experience teaches: “What a thrice-double ass / Was I to take this drunkard for a god, / And worship this dull fool!” (5.1.296-98). Clearly, what Prospero has taken as Caliban's inability to learn has been in truth the inadequacy of Prospero's art to teach—or, at the least, to teach effectively. In this regard, Caliban remains the virtual emblem of Prospero's pride.

With this reversal in Caliban's attitude toward Prospero's moral discipline comes, first, the audience's increased awareness that Caliban's brutality to date has been a form of the same innocence that vexes Miranda's comfortable and effective engagement in the real, fallen world. Perhaps what truly reaches Caliban, as the play's underplot unfolds, is not so much Prospero's intervention—the tempting wardrobe on the lime tree, for instance—but, more, the direct exposure, independent of the pedagogy that Prospero has arranged for him, with men who have far less to recommend them as rulers than does his master. Through his interaction with Trinculo and Stephano, that is, Caliban has had opportunity to see for himself, absorbing naturally—and, as he perceives of it, freely—the broader truth about his presumed slavery to Prospero. Whether or not Prospero's relative inattention to Caliban toward the day's end largely accounts for the latter's change (and it may), the outcome of that change lies chiefly in Caliban's altered understanding of service and freedom. As he discovers for himself that Stephano and Trinculo are false idols (for example, 3.2.63-67), his trust in the “freedom” they can supply him by “destroy[ing]” Prospero wanes (2.2.186-87, 4.1.224). It is replaced by another kind of trust, that in the “grace” that follows from being “wise”—in this case, wisdom gained through partaking in the folly of this world (5.1.296-98). Surely Prospero, at his most lucid, would prefer that Caliban's service issue from such freedom and trust, rather than from the bondage of punishment or from forcible instruction. Prospero's forbearance toward Caliban represents a small relaxation of his grip but just enough of a release to initiate a reversal in how the two characters interact. Caliban arrives morally where, with Prospero's continued guidance, he can begin to choose his submission freely, as Miranda and Ferdinand come to do (5.1.293-94).⁴⁸

But the spell by which Prospero has sought to control Caliban is actually broken earlier, just several lines above Caliban's professed conversion, when Prospero makes public his affinity with his nemesis: “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.275-76). This begrudging acceptance has been variously interpreted; it has even been seen as Prospero's admission of his responsibility for making Caliban into a cursing, rapacious creature.⁴⁹ In the play's larger moral context, however, with special regard to the role that Montaigne's “Of Cannibals” plays in shaping that context, Prospero's self-recognition pertains to his resemblance to Caliban, to his own proclivity to behave barbarically, monstrously. That awareness being in place, Prospero is positioned to abandon pride, better understand the quality of mercy, and return to Milanese society balancing political control against self-control. In Prospero's shift to reentering the world by accepting his human failings and needs lies his chance at spiritual freedom.⁵⁰

Reminiscent of Duke Vincentio before him, Prospero seems in this and other cases to be taken surprise by his own artistry, only to discover himself more influenced by his art than is his audience. When the earlier duke's attempts to reform Vienna meet with disappointment, he adapts accordingly, a process that continues throughout the play. In contrast, Prospero's transformation, from avoiding the world to participating in it, has already in large part occurred when the play begins. Thus, Prospero reacts to moments of defeat less by changing than by adjusting. The Tempest, then, records the last hours of a seasoned character's moral growth. Yet much the same process transpires in both dukes. They simultaneously release pride and are released from it by becoming attentive audiences to the artifice they create, thus willingly humbling themselves. Even for Prospero, however, this process is ongoing, always heading toward and yet never reaching resolution. He begins and ends in some tension, albeit tension that gradually finds certain mitigation. The refusal of The Tempest to resolve all difficulties being granted, the play nevertheless portrays a progression. Prospero fails very little in his broader aims, obviously moving others to feel more deeply, if not inspiring Antonio to repent. Such fruits help to vindicate his medding; though Prospero's means are imperfect, they are minimally presumptuous. And they work.⁵¹

Paradoxically (one last time), more evidence that Prospero's invasive strategies have left their imprint on the creator himself emerges in his restraint from foisting them any further on Antonio. Like his tentative acceptance of his kinship to Caliban, this ultimate step on Prospero's part involves some hesitation. As act 5 opens, Prospero is clearly thinking of his mercy toward all three offenders as conditional: “They being penitent, / The sole drift of my purpose doth extend / Not a frown further” (28-30). Characteristically, he has as yet given no thought to the possibility that his “so potent art” might not work a minor miracle of repentance on absolutely everyone (5.1.50). Then again, the “solemn air” that he has played to “cure” the spellbound men's “brains” is “heavenly music,” justifying Prospero's faith in its efficacy (5.1.58-59, 52). When even divine assistance stops short of realizing his hopes, however, Prospero affirms the free nature of mercy, which is not itself unless rendered unconditionally. He must deal spontaneously with his failure to convert Antonio as easily as Alonso was changed. Addressing the awakened Antonio, he reveals his intent to release his brother from his debt, even if Antonio remains unreformed: “I do forgive thee, / Unnatural though thou art” (5.1.78-79). Prospero still feels the pangs caused him by his brother's betrayal, for which Antonio has yet to express open regret, and this unresolved tension darkens his pardon with tints of his own frailty: “For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive / Thy rankest fault—all of them” (5.1.30-32). Strained though it may be by his own vulnerability and judgmentalism, it is nevertheless free and freeing grace.⁵² What is possibly even more remarkable about the scene's end than Prospero's generosity is his self-restraint; once Antonio seems spiritually static, Prospero refrains from further prodding—from trying to stir up his guilt, bring about his confession, or renew his faith in a power beyond his own ego.

Prospero's forfeiture of control over the likes of Antonio—an act paralleling his abjuration of his magic—represents the key risk required of him as he makes his way back to worldly affairs. Experience has taught him that he cannot afford to set an unregenerate Antonio loose, particularly without the borrowed powers that have helped him manage and contain Antonio's treachery on the island. Yet Prospero has no other choice than to trust Antonio even as he moves to trust himself. Such irrational faith—a version of Saint Anthony's wise folly—spiritually exonerates Prospero, too. At the same time, it makes possible—inescapable—his commitment to the worldly prospect of serving Milan. In The Tempest, to adapt Saint Paul's words, wisdom with God is, in large measure, the foolishness of this world.

IV

As in all English Renaissance plays where Antonios take substantial roles, in this one, too, arises the problem of reconciling unbounded love with all-too-real boundaries, boundaries imposed upon human beings by virtue of their corruption in their corrupt sphere. In Prospero's brother, whose literary-theatrical heritage immediately attaches him to the conception of wise folly, a shift occurs: he becomes the object, rather than the donor, of charity. As successor to Antonios whose extravagant love issues from a source beyond our ken, this Antonio confronts us with the opposite mystery, the unfathomable origin of evil. Miranda's early comment—that “Good wombs have borne bad sons” (1.2.120)—explains little more about Antonio's unplumbed depths than does his silence in the last act. From first to last, he is an inscrutable and perhaps intractable force to be reckoned with, the acceptance of whose elusiveness is the ultimate phase in Prospero's return to social responsibility.⁵³ Antonio's unruliness stands for all the reasons that Prospero veers away from ruling: he cannot be contained by Prospero's idealism and theorems. Yet, if Prospero waited until he could predict and mold every subject's actions, he would never again govern Milan.

Failing to command Antonio absolutely, he can nevertheless, as Montaigne would have it, minister to his own capacity for monstrosity, a recognition implicit in his grace toward Antonio, however tense, and crucial in recreating himself as both brother and ruler. In this light, even Prospero's brother remains true to the type of the Renaissance stage Antonio. His capacity to inspire love as intact as that of the Antonio in Twelfth Night, he merely serves Prospero unwittingly and probably unwillingly. The Antonio in The Tempest, then, is a “false brother” in many senses of the epithet (1.2.92). He is not only deceitful, as Prospero literally intends, or even, in Prospero's more figurative sense, just unbrotherly. Finally, he is also Prospero's shadow—not illusory but insubstantial relative to Prospero's active charity. By the play's end, Antonio has ceased to be the agent determining Prospero's course, or fueling his emotions, or alleviating his sense of blame for his predicament. Once Prospero becomes answerable for his own choices, Antonio fades into obscurity, set free to determine his own course. Deprived of so much as a word about his dumbness, he makes the Antonio in Merchant appear positively well-adjusted. He has, indeed, changed places with Prospero and lags behind Caliban, his spiritual paralysis rendering him a social outcast.

If Prospero is not, in the end, his subjects' equal, he is close, as is manifest in his warm summons to all of them: “Please you draw near” (5.1.319). Prospero's strong toil of grace is punctuated by such moments when he lets go of attempts to dominate what he cannot control and rebinds himself, in humility, to the collective effort of civilizing humanity. The narrative of his renewed commitment repeatedly implies that “temporal things,” in Walter's words, “are all means through which we shape our souls to an order of love.”⁵⁴ In The Tempest, to ignore this world, which entraps the likes of Antonio and Caliban, threatens to enslave Prospero in the disarray of self-love. As Montaigne quotes Saint Augustine: “He who praises the nature of the soul as the sovereign good and condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, truly both carnally desires the soul and carnally shuns the flesh; for his feeling is inspired by human vanity, not by divine truth.”⁵⁵ The emphasis on the spirituality of the flesh is apt. Prospero's great achievement is restoring some, if not all, equilibrium to his political life and social outlook—in a sense, making the word flesh.

Prospero's Epilogue concentrates into his plea for freedom the moral process he has undergone. The pattern of thought here is elegantly simple: he has given up the power he could use against his offenders, releasing them from his debt; now, he asks the audience not to level that same power against him by judging him ill for his mercy but to deliver him from blame. As he has overlooked cause to censure Antonio, he begs that his faults, too, will be pardoned.⁵⁶ To do otherwise is to neglect willfully the sense of the play. The Epilogue has power to dislodge the audience from passivity because it confronts us with our own need for unconditional love, a discomforting prospect. Much as Prospero might have permanently displaced his own vices onto Antonio or Caliban, so we can hold him accountable for all the imperfections that dissatisfy us at the play's end. We can keep clinging to a trivial kind of power by quibbling over blame.

Or, as the Epilogue urges, we can begin again. Doing so requires us to recognize in ourselves the demons that still plague us even as Prospero dissolves into thin air. The last action of The Tempest consists in returning us, too, to the material world, nagging questions, imperfections, and all. Yet, through its portrayal of Prospero's experience, the play also carefully cultivates the audience's sense of belonging to that humble world. Permitting Antonio's crimes to go unrepented and his own “crimes” to be publicly displayed (Epilogue, 19), Prospero at once throws himself at our mercy and aligns himself with Providence. To do as he requests is to retreat from pride, “dancing up to th' chins” in the “filthy-mantled pool” that is our present home.

Notes

1. John Milton, Areopagitica, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 728.

   In an essay on Prospero as both wise man and hero, Paul Cantor concludes that “The Tempest … stresses the difference between knowledge and lack of it” (“Shakespeare's The Tempest: The Wise Man as Hero,” Shakespeare Quarterly 31 [1980]: 75). By contrast, I think The Tempest stresses the difference between the virtuous use and the abuse of knowledge.

2. Recent scholarship that pays particular attention to either classical or Christian influences (or both) on The Tempest includes that of David Beauregard, Virtue's Own Feature; Lynette Cook Black, “Suppertime at Six: Prospero's New Creation,” Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 15 (1989): 59-72; Cantor, “Wise Man as Hero”; E. J. Devereux, “Sacramental Imagery in The Tempest,” The Humanities Association Bulletin (Canada) 19 (1968): 50-62; R. A. D. Grant, “Providence, Authority, and the Moral Life in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies 16 (1983): 235-63; Mary Ellen Rickey, “Prospero's Living Drolleries,” Renaissance Papers 1964: 35-42; James Walter, “From Tempest to Epilogue: Augustine's Allegory in Shakespeare's Drama,” PMLA 98 (1983): 60-76; and Rosemary Wright, “Prospero's Lime Tree and the Pursuit of ‘Vanitas,’” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 133-40.

   The idea that the effects of virtue are properly realized in the world is not, in itself, necessarily non-Christian, as attested by the Catholic doctrine of good works and the Protestant notion that good works naturally follow from saving faith. Yet Shakespeare is clearly referring in The Tempest to the classical notion that gnosis should result in praxis, the notion that Sidney uses in The Apology for Poetry to defend the capacity of imaginative literature to instill practical virtue. Narrowly speaking, that notion conflicts with Paul's that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” Nonetheless, part of the wisdom that proliferated around Saint Anthony himself took a temperate approach toward shunning participation in this world, as discussed in chap. 1.

3. Probably Harry Berger should be credited with the most influential stand toward what he calls the “sentimental” reading of Prospero and the play (“Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare's Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies 5 [1969]: 254), against which he proposed a “hard-nosed” interpretation (279 n. 3). Meredith Anne Skura's parallel terms—“idealist” versus “revisionist” (“Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 [1989]: 42-43)—may not fully capture the degree to which the two camps often differ in their understanding of Prospero and The Tempest. The “revisionists” include mainly new historicists, interested in the play's colonialist content, and psychological critics, two groups whose interests Skura seeks to correlate. For a challenging essay on the matter of approaching The Tempest from a new historicist/cultural materialist perspective, see Russ McDonald (“Reading The Tempest,” Shakespeare Survey 44 [1991]: 15-28), and for an intriguing discussion of continuities between modernist and new historicist approaches to Shakespeare, see Richard Halpern's “Shakespeare in the Tropics: From High Modernism to New Historicism” (Representations 45 [1994]: 1-25).

4. Berger, “Miraculous Harp,” 254.

5. One of the bleakest views of the play's conclusion must be Jan Kott's: “The ending of The Tempest is more disturbing than that of any other Shakespearean drama” (Shakespeare Our Contemporary [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964], 164).

6. Grant, “Providence,” 254.

7. Walter, “Tempest to Epilogue,” 71.

8. As early as 1937, D. G. James attributed much the same phenomenon to The Tempest (Scepticism and Poetry: An Essay on the Poetic Imagination [London: George Allen, 1937]). Yet to him any disjunction between symbol and meaning grew out of Shakespeare's restlessness with conventional myths and symbols, which proved “inadequate to embody all that was present in [his] imagination” (220). “Driven to be unfaithful” to convention (220), he minted less fixed, sometimes ambiguous symbols. James cites Caliban's “sense of glory” about the island's enchantment as just such a “complication of symbolism” (227).

   See also Anne Barton on this same defiance of The Tempest to be reduced (introduction to The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, New Penguin ed. [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968], e.g., 17, 21-22).

9. Thomas More, Utopia, 67.

10. Critics have long been fascinated by Prospero's suggestions, however conscious they may or may not be, of his shared guilt in Antonio's temptation. See, for example, Berger (“Miraculous Harp,” 254); James Black (“The Latter End of Prospero's Commonwealth,” Shakespeare Survey 44 [1991]:31); Devereux (“Sacramental Imagery,” 53); and Stephen Orgel (“Prospero's Wife,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's “The Tempest,” ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1988], 110).

11. Michael de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in Essays, trans. John Florio, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (New York: Modern Library, 1933).

12. Walter, “Tempest to Epilogue,” 65.

    Cf., e.g., Frank Kermode's comments on the relationship between “Of Cannibals” and The Tempest, which are related to his widely influential view that “Caliban is the core of the play” (The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, New Arden, 6th ed. [New York: Methuen, 1958], xxxiv-xxxviii). As my argument will continue to show, I would contend that Prospero is at the play's heart.

13. Several critics have cited similar evidence—for example, Walter (“Tempest to Epilogue,” 67) and William G. Masden, who notes, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (“The Destiny of Man in The Tempest,” Emory University Quarterly 20 [1964]: 176). Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan include an especially clear paragraph, in their book about Caliban, proposing that Montaigne purveys “cultural relativism”: “Brazilian cannibals, Montaigne asserted with acerbic irony, are more virtuous than their French contemporaries” (Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 47).

14. Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” 163, 166, 167.

15. Stephen Greenblatt and Karen Flagstad see reason in this parallel to wonder whether Prospero is actually responsible for Caliban's cursing, symbolic of his barbarity and hatred (Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse”: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture [New York: Routledge, 1990], passim; Flagstad, “‘Making this Place Paradise’: Prospero and the Problem of Caliban in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies 18 [1986]: 206). I think that such an argument goes too far, although, as will become clear, I would agree with both writers that Caliban represents to Prospero the barbarism in himself that he would just as soon ignore.

16. Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 2:13.15.

17. I can only agree with the now shrinking number of editors who reassign the most despairing speech in 1.2 from Miranda (as in the Folio) to Prospero:

                                                      Abhorred slave,
    Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
    Being capable of all ill! …
                                                      thy vild race
    (Though thou didst learn) had that in't which good natures
    Could not abide to be with.

    (351-62)

    I suppose that the trauma of being attacked might account for this single instance in the whole play where Miranda sounds like her father: in her emotional turmoil, she may have absorbed Prospero's cynical view of Caliban, as well as the harsh language in which he typically condemns Caliban. But common sense seems to me to dictate otherwise. This speech has nothing in common with Miranda's outlook or language elsewhere in the play, although it does echo many of Prospero's sentiments about Caliban's inability to grow morally, including some expressed in this very scene, as in lines 345-48.

    “Human care” is “humane care” in the Folio (1.2.346).

18. The tendency of new historicist and psychological criticism has been to sentimentalize Caliban so much as to make Prospero's suppression of him seem thoroughly unfair. A good example would be Bernard J. Paris, for whom Caliban's illicit behavior appears virtually insignificant: “Prospero's rationalization of his treatment of Caliban works so well that the majority of critics have accepted his point of view and have felt that Caliban deserves what he gets, although some have been sympathetic toward Caliban's suffering and uneasy about Prospero's behavior” (“The Tempest: Shakespeare's Ideal Solution,” in Shakespeare's Personality, ed. Norman N. Holland (and introd.), Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 216). While I am not denying that Prospero's extreme harshness toward Caliban is linked to a problem in Prospero's character, I would argue vigorously that “Caliban's suffering” naturally results in large part from suffering he has caused.

19. Several critics have taken approaches similar to mine in portraying Prospero as a character defined by struggle. See particularly Flagstad (“‘Making this Place Paradise,’” 218-28) and Skura (“Discourse,” esp. 57-69) on the tension in Prospero's psyche between what he desires and what he can actually have, and Paris's discussion of the Horneyan paradigm in relation to both Prospero and Shakespeare (“Ideal Solution,” passim). See also Peggy Muñoz Simonds on Prospero as an Orpheus, who must “master his own baser passions” in exercising art and statecraft (“‘Sweet Power of Music’: The Political Magic of ‘the Miraculous Harp’ in Shakespeare's The Tempest,” Comparative Drama 29 [1995]: 64).

20. For example, Flagstad believes that Prospero intends vengeance (“‘Making this Place Paradise,’” 206, passim), as does Alvin B. Kerman (The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare's Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], 140); Paris argues that Prospero's magic enables him to relieve his vengeful feelings without actually enacting revenge (“Ideal Solution,” 212, passim); but most critical studies clearly state or assume that Prospero never means to take revenge from the very beginning. Barton stresses the audience's ignorance as to what Prospero intends through the first four acts (introduction to The Tempest, 9, 12, 16).

21. Skura, “Discourse,” 63. Skura's context is somewhat different from mine in that she is discussing Caliban as an embodiment of traits that Prospero is loath to accept about himself, but, ultimately, we are both addressing Prospero's limited understanding.

22. I wish for clearer words here because Shakespeare's use of them, although frequent, does not always preserve the distinctions that I am according them. Take, for instance, Ferdinand's lines to Miranda in 3.1:

    The very instant that I saw you, did
    My heart fly to your service, there resides,
    To make me slave to it, and for your sake
    Am I this patient log-man.

    (64-67)

    Here, slave has about it a flavor of courtly love, which, although it does not obscure Ferdinand's willing love (“service”), muddles the semantics a bit.

    Ariel is the obvious exception to my two categories, since he craves absolute freedom after Prospero releases him from the cloven pine. I shall discuss his example more fully below.

23. Walter describes mercy in The Tempest as that virtue which, especially as formulated in the Epilogue, gives “all human words, deeds, and creation … their final meaning” (“Tempest to Epilogue,” 73).

24. Cf. Grant's definition of Providence as “not God himself …, but God's purpose in the world” (“Providence,” 239). See also Grant on Prospero as “minister of Providence” (241-42) and on the relationship of freedom and self-restraint (255).

    Although Grant sees Gonzalo as “in his limited way a direct human representative of the Providential power that lies behind the play” (249), I think that Gonzalo's portrait is finally more perplexing and, alas, less satisfying than Grant asserts. In addition to the allegorical value Grant assigns him, Gonzalo extends Shakespeare's study of loyal service that pervades The Winter's Tale, especially in the figures of Camillo and Antigonus. Much like Antigonus, Gonzalo good-naturedly, but uncritically, carries out whatever orders his superiors issue. If he has supplied Prospero with staples and books (1.2.160-68), he has also refrained from objecting to the exile in the first place. For this problematic loyalty to the regime at any cost, Prospero and others pay dear. Moreover, although Prospero does not resent Gonzalo's role in his banishment, his liberality seems to stem less from Gonzalo's past behavior itself than from Prospero's willingness to interpret that behavior exclusively in terms of its liberality.

25. This connection with Providence, I think, accounts for why, as Kermode notes, Art is capitalized throughout the Folio (The Tempest, xli).

    Cf. to Ariel's “not forgetting” in line 73 his “remember” in line 68.

26. In this regard, if in no other, Prospero resembles Cleopatra: she fulfills both private and political goals through her suicide, while his art is capable of reconciling the private with both the political and the providential. See chap. 4.

27. Such struggle also characterizes Prospero's predecessor, the artist Paulina in The Winter's Tale. For, even as she upholds the oracle of Apollo in her treatment of Leontes (3.2.134-36), she must also be tempted to take personal vengeance on Leontes for having killed her husband Antigonus and, presumably, her lady Hermione. Caught between duty and self-interest, she treads a fine line between faith in Leontes' ability to repent and despair that he ever can (3.2.207-24). Though she has no right to doubt that Leontes can be forgiven, she has reason.

28. Harriet Hawkins, Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 179. See also Maurice Hunt, who discusses “shared passion,” including compassion, as the basis of “personal and general salvation in The Tempest” (Shakespeare's Labored Art: Stir, Work, and the Late Plays [New York: Peter Lang, 1995], 189-90).

29. See especially Ariel's song—“Full fadom five thy father lies” (1.2.397-405)—and Alonso's description of Ferdinand as “mudded in that oozy bed” (5.1.151).

30. James Black observes that, as Miranda gains independence from Prospero, she behaves increasingly like Antonio (“Latter End,” 30-31), a point that underscores the inevitable and marked transition from innocence to experience.

31. Beauregard points out that “according to Aristotle and Thomas, wonder (admiratio: thus Miranda's name) begins in ignorance” (Virtue's Own Feature, 174).

32. Masden's discussion of Gonzalo balances well the advantages of his supremely kind disposition against its disadvantages (“Destiny of Man,” 181-82). Gonzalo, by the way, may appear awfully gullible, yet he also reveals in 2.1 that he understands more of Antonio and Sebastian's gibes against him than he earlier lets on (2.1.176-84). He implies, in other words, that his good will is not thoroughly unthinking, but possibly somewhat deliberate.

33. For Peter Holland, the love of Ferdinand and Miranda is the “triumph” at the play's core and the basis for all other human compassion therein (“The Shapeliness of The Tempest,” Essays in Criticism 45 [1995]: 226-27).

34. For further discussion of this point, see James Black's essay (“Latter End”), which analyzes Prospero's manipulations as centered on marrying Miranda responsibly.

35. As Shakespeare and much of his audience well knew, Sir Philip Sidney grounds his defense of the creative imagination in a twofold premise concerning the relationship of art to nature. First, he asserts, art repairs that branch of nature that fell along with Adam and Eve by presenting a “golden” world (An Apology for Poetry, in Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter Jackson Bate [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970], 85). To do so, however, it must spring from a source other than the human soul, which is itself fallen. Here follows the second prong of Sidney's premise, that the source of art is unfallen Nature, the eternal and immutable ordering principle of the universe (see, e.g., 85). Hence, Sidney concludes, art is licensed by unfallen Nature even if it alters fallen nature, since the alteration is, morally, for the better—that is, intent on teaching us to follow “our erected wit” (86). This natural basis of art, together with the poet's stature as divinely inspired vates (84), protects art, in Sidney's scheme, from human corruption. This issue of art's purity is of course debated by Polixenes and Perdita in 4.3 of The Winter's Tale.

36. Wright, “Prospero's Lime Tree,” 134.

37. Sidney, Apology, 86.

38. See, e.g., Areopagitica (passim; e.g., “the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world … necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth,” 729). This idea, a form of the more general notion of felix culpa, finds further reflection in 1.2.148-51 and 5.1.205-13.

39. Nor do I consider mine ideal. Berger includes many helpful observations about Ariel as both character and metaphor, especially those relating the spirit to Prospero (“Miraculous Harp,” 255-59).

40. This example of Prospero's response to the masque—conveying the modesty to identify with his audience and to be affected as they are, rather than lose himself in admiration of his artifice—directly opposes a statement like Berger's about Prospero's failings: “Prospero delight[s] in art which … continually distracts him from his ethical purpose” (“Miraculous Harp,” 257). True enough, Prospero was first exiled for being so distracted. In The Tempest, however, he is continuing to learn not to repeat his mistake. Wright takes another approach to argue, similarly, that Prospero is oblivious to the reality of danger around him when she compares him to the sleeping peddler in the emblem of the peddler and the apes, an “idle dreamer” who loses his goods because he is too dull to notice that his apes are pilfering them (“Prospero's Lime Tree,” 137-40). But both Wright and Berger neglect the difference between the former Prospero and the present one, who is struggling to overcome his desire to dream instead of act.

41. Orgel, “Prospero's Wife,” 110-11.

42. Ibid., 111.

43. As Barton writes: “What [Ariel] significantly declines to tell his audience is whether his master instructed him to exempt Antonio and Sebastian from the charmed sleep” (introduction to The Tempest, 17).

44. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 137. Greenblatt elaborates: “William Tyndale suggested that St. Paul had written the Epistle to the Romans precisely to generate a suffering that could be joyously relieved” (137). One might especially think in this connection of Duke Vincentio's stated reason for deluding Isabella about Claudio's execution (Measure for Measure, 4.3.109-11) and also of the anxiety he produces, then relieves, in Angelo. Yet, here again (and as I have argued elsewhere), such anxiety is merely a portion of a complex mission on Vincentio's part to excite sympathetic imagination in his subjects (see Lewis, “‘Dark Deeds Darkly Answered,’” 271-89).

45. Kermode, The Tempest, n. heading 3.3.

46. Rickey also sees Prospero's aims in the banquet scene as largely “penitential, not punitive,” although she does not elaborate greatly from there (“Prospero's Living Drolleries,” 38).

47. Detecting sarcasm in Sebastian's line (“A most high miracle!”) is currently fashionable (see, e.g., Barton, introduction to The Tempest, 17, 37; Flagstad, “Making this Place Paradise,” 228; Kernan, Playwright as Magician, 138). But I see no textual evidence for a cynical reading of the line. In fact, Sebastian's earlier practice, when conveying doubt in this same scene about Prospero's magic, is to speak without irony (i.e., 1. 129; the Folio, as is typical, does not designate this line as an aside). The context of line 177 is, to quote Kermode, “language [that] assumes a hieratic quality” (The Tempest, n. to 1. 177). If Sebastian's line cut across this grain, surely another character would notice and respond.

48. That same “self-negation,” Rickey points out, characterizes Ferdinand and Miranda's attitude toward each other in the chess game (5.1.172-75; Rickey, “Prospero's Living Drolleries,” 37). On Caliban's similarities to the innocent Miranda, see the Vaughans (Shakespeare's Caliban, 17-18).

49. The particular view I mention is Greenblatt's, in “Learning to Curse” (26). See also, e.g., Skura, whose reading of the line attempts to reconcile a colonialist approach with a psychological methodology: “Prospero acknowledges the child-like Caliban as his own, and although he does not thus undo hierarchy, he moves for the first time towards accepting the child in himself rather than trying to dominate and erase that child … in order to establish his adult authority” (“Discourse,” 66).

50. To return briefly to the comparison with Marlowe's hero-magician, Faustus is finally dragged into hell by demons that he cannot admit lurk within him. He remains his own victim, while Prospero dredges up just enough self-recognition to salvage what is left of his days on earth.

51. Several other critics' interpretations of Prospero's extreme tactics converge with, while others' diverge from, mine. For examples of the former, see Walter's assessment of The Tempest as “Shakespeare's profound look … at the poet's ability to redeem a world degenerated in the imaginations of the degenerate” (“Tempest to Epilogue,” 64) and Grant's “guarded optimism” toward inferring from The Tempest that the “corruption of human nature … is … largely curable” (“Providence,” 257). Contrasting ideas are epitomized in the work of Paris, who, echoing Orgel, finds Prospero's artistry self-serving (in that it “enables him to resolve his psychological conflicts,” “Ideal Solution,” 212) and who describes Prospero's forgiveness as “compulsive and indiscriminate” (224), as well as a form of passive vengeance: “The worse Antonio is, the more charitable Prospero is to forgive him” (219).

52. Barton reads such details of the last scene with greater skepticism. For example, she emphasizes the streak of “contempt” in Prospero's mercy toward Antonio, which she would probably call only technically unconditional (introduction to The Tempest, 38). She also underlines what she sees as Antonio's (and Sebastian's) “refus[al] to be absorbed into any final harmony” and implies that Prospero's ongoing challenge, even after the play closes, is such characters' (as well as Caliban's) “unalterable will to evil” (39, 30).

53. In both his concluding silence and his earlier verbal seduction of Sebastian, of course, Antonio resembles Iago, who raises similar questions about the origins of and motives for evil.

54. Walter, “Tempest to Epilogue,” 70.

55. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Experience,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 855.

56. I would not belabor the sentiment of the Epilogue, which seems so clear, if I did not find so many recent readings of it dishearteningly cynical, as well as overread for purposes of driving home points that seem alien to the play. Berger's account of it is intriguing but surely distorting: “The end is a final attempt [on Prospero's part] to reestablish mastery. The closing couplet has too much bite and sweep to it to be characterized as expressing weariness alone. It points the finger. … He has shifted his role slightly but significantly in the final couplet, from that of fellow sinner to that of homilist, the voice of conscience” (“Miraculous Harp,” 279). Greenblatt's notion, that the Epilogue savors of “subversive politics” by way of a prince's reliance on a forgiving public, seems to me similarly wide of the mark (Shakespearean Negotiations, 157).