[In the following essay, Phillips evaluates three principal figures of The Tempest—Caliban, Ariel, and Prospero—in terms of the Renaissance conception of the tripartite soul, divided into vegetative, sensitive, and rational spheres.]

Most students of The Tempest are agreed that there is more to Shakespeare's last play than charms the eye and delights the ear.¹ Some have regarded its deeper meaning as autobiographical in nature, communicating Shakespeare's view of his own art and announcing his withdrawal from active professional life. Others have found it a covert commentary on England's colonizing efforts in the New World, or more generally, on the impact of civilization on primitivism. Some have explained its significance in terms of Christian concepts of ethical and political morality, some in terms of neoplatonic doctrine, and some in terms of Renaissance ideas about white and black magic. Almost all concur, however, in a general feeling that beneath its splendid surface of poetry and theater The Tempest is somehow concerned with man's effort to overcome his worser self. Or as John Middleton Murry put it, “The Island … is what would be if Humanity—the best in man—controlled the life of man. And Prospero is a man in whom the best in man has won the victory: …”²

In their efforts to define “the best in man” as exemplified in The Tempest, all but a few commentators have tended to ignore ideas on the nature of man widely held in Shakespeare's day and frequently expressed in treatises on moral philosophy, learned and popular alike. Theodore Spencer, among the few, has suggested that Renaissance ideas about the animal, human, and intellectual elements in man can be made to account respectively for the character and actions of Caliban, of the conspirators, comics, and lovers, and of Prospero. Ariel is not clearly incorporated into this scheme.³ With similar reference to sixteenth-century thought about the nature of man, Donald Stauffer equated Caliban with “instinct and passion”, Ariel with “Imagination”, and Prospero with “Noble Reason” in interpreting The Tempest as a drama symbolically portraying (among other autobiographical and moral concerns) the ultimate triumph of ethical control over passion.⁴

Neither critic, however, nor any other that I know of, has observed the striking similarity between the functions of Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban in the play and the functions of the three parts of the soul—Rational, Sensitive, and Vegetative—almost universally recognized and described in Renaissance literature on the nature of man. Upon closer examination, this similarity appears to be more than coincidental. The parallels which I propose to point out suggest, I think, a way of looking at the activities and relationships of the island trio that might contribute ultimately to a more complete understanding of the play as a whole. They cannot be made to account for every detail of the history and character of Prospero and his two aides, nor can they be extended, directly at least, to the other characters and incidents of the play. As Frank Kermode admonishes us in his introduction to the Arden text of the play, the temptation to allegorize Shakespeare is strong but to be resisted; on the other hand, Theodore Spencer, echoing other critics, acknowledges that The Tempest is “a play with so many layers of meaning that no single interpretation can do it justice”. A brief reminder of Renaissance thought about the nature of man and his soul will provide, I hope, an adequate basis for suggesting one more element of meaning in the play.

I

Studies by Lily B. Campbell, Ruth Anderson, Lawrence Babb, and others have made generally familiar to students of Shakespeare a concept of the tripartite soul widely accepted in his day and expounded in such discussions of moral philosophy as Batman uppon Bartholome (1582), Sir John Davies' Nosce Teipsum (1599), Philippe de Mornay's The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe (1602), and Pierre de la Primaudaye's The French Academy (1618).⁵ Ultimately derived from Plato and Aristotle, the concept was also indebted to Galen, Augustine, Avicenna, and Aquinas. In the sixteenth century the soul of man, which animates the body and directs its activities for good or ill, was usually described in terms of three sub-souls, to each of which particular functions were attributed. The lowest of these was known variously as the vegetative or quickening soul. To this soul or power, which man has in common with vegetable and animal life, were ascribed the faculties of nourishment, growth, elimination, reproduction, and the other instinctive physiological processes. Often referred to as the “housekeeper of the body”, charged with supplying the basic needs, the vegetative soul, as Sir John Davies described it, “doth employ her oeconomicke art, / And busie care, her household to preserue”.⁶ The second sub-soul or power, possessed by man in common with animal life, was known as the sensitive or sensible soul. It includes the faculty of knowing, in the sense of perceiving and apprehending, and the faculty of moving, in the sense of physical and emotional activity alike. The faculty of knowing includes, in turn, the activities of the five senses, and the activities of common sense, imagination or fantasy, and memory. The faculty of moving includes in its turn the power of bodily movement and the power of the passions or affections, as the emotions were termed. The third and highest of the sub-souls, in the possession of which man is unique among all worldly creatures, was variously termed the intellectual power or rational soul. As Professor Babb describes the concept of it generally held in the Renaissance:

It has two divisions—intellectual and volitional, that is, reason and will. The former … is capable of perceiving the essence, not merely the appearance [of things]. It seeks truth through a logical train of thought. It draws conclusions regarding truth and falsehood, good and evil; in other words, it is capable of judgment. The reason determines what is good and what is evil and informs the will of its conclusions. The will because of an instinct implanted in it by God, desires the good and abhors the evil which the reason represents to it. … When the will conceives a desire or aversion, a corresponding passion normally arises in the sensitive soul. Thus the will causes physical action indirectly through the sensitive passions.⁷

Or as Miss Campbell puts it, “The rational soul has two great powers: … It knows what 'twere good to do and has the power of desiring to do that which it judges good to do.”⁸

When these three sub-souls or powers operate together in the way God originally designed them to operate, man lives virtuously and knows true happiness in this world. The vegetative soul keeps the organism running. The knowing power of the sensitive soul collects the impressions of experience through the senses and identifies the data by means of the common sense; with the imagination it forms the data into images or transforms them by its creative ability, then evaluates them as pleasurable or painful; and with the memory it retains the data for future use. At this point, the rational soul takes over the data thus processed. Reason proceeds to evaluate it, determining general principles from the particulars, judging what is true and what is false, and above all, distinguishing between good and bad. It so informs the will, which, with its God-given instinct to choose good, decrees man's action accordingly by directing the sensitive soul, in its function of moving, to provide the appropriate emotional response (desire for good, for example, or hatred of evil), and to effect the appropriate physical action through the muscles, sinews, and tendons.

Unfortunately, however, man's tripartite soul does not always function in the way that God intended. As a result of the Fall, man's life and happiness are constantly threatened by a persistent tendency in the soul to short-circuit itself. Or as Davies put it, a “declining pronenesse unto nought, / Is euen that sinne that we are borne withall” (p. 57). That is, the sensitive soul collects and processes the data as it should, but then it by-passes the rational soul and sends the data directly to the motive faculties of the sensible soul. The passions, with no control by the judgment of reason or the moral choice of will, are aroused by what is pleasurable or what is painful, not by what is true or false, good or bad, and they direct action accordingly. And that way lie madness, misery, and death. Consequently, man since the Fall has faced a constant struggle to keep his vegetative and sensitive souls the servants of his rational soul, and above all to keep the passions subject to the control of his reason. In this control lies the essential humanity that distinguishes man from all other creatures. The man who achieves this victory is the virtuous man and therefore, inevitably, the happy man. As Professor Babb concludes, quoting Pierre Charron's Of Wisdom from the English translation of 1606:

The summum bonum, the greatest good possible to man in his earthly life, is ‘tranquillitie of the spirit. … This is that great and rich treasure, which … is the fruit of all our labors and studies, the crowne of wisdome’. To achieve this enviable condition, the reasonable soul must keep continual watch over the sensitive powers and must continually exert itself in curbing them.⁹

Such, then, is the concept of the nature of man's soul which, even in the latter days of the Renaissance when disturbing doubts were already beginning to be expressed, was still widely accepted.¹⁰ Re-examined in the light of this concept, the functions and relationships of Caliban, Ariel, and Prospero take on new meaning.

II

Caliban has been interpreted by commentators in different ways too numerous to be conveniently detailed here.¹¹ All agree, however, that in Caliban Shakespeare intended to represent some form of life or activity below that of civilized man, whether it be the primitive savage encountered in England's colonial ventures, the monster frequently described in contemporary travel literature, the devil-daemon of black magic and medieval Christian tradition, or the cannibal, from which his name seems to be derived. Many critics see in Caliban a symbol of the brutish or animal element in human nature, a representation of the instincts and passions in man. John E. Hankins, for example, has argued that he is Aristotle's “bestial man”, possessing the attributes of the sensible soul but not those of the intellectual.¹²

If we regard only the history, the appearance, and the drunken, conspiratorial character of Caliban, each of these suggested interpretations appears plausible. But when we regard the function of Caliban on the island and his relationship to Prospero, his activities are remarkably like those attributed in the Renaissance not to the sensitive or animal soul, but instead to the vegetative or quickening power. Sir John Davies, it will be recalled, in describing the quickening power as it should function ideally, wrote:

Her quick'ning power in euery liuing part,
          Doth as a nurse, or as a mother serue;
          And doth employ her oeconomicke art,
          And busie care, her household to preserue.
Here she attracts, and there she doth retaine,
          There she decocts, and doth the food prepare;
          There she distributes it to euery vaine,
          There she expels what she may fitly spare.
This power to Martha may compared be,
          Which busie was, the household-things to doe;
          Or to a Dryas, liuing in a tree:
          For euen to trees this power is proper too.

(Pp. 63-64)

Like the vegetative part of man's soul, Caliban is the “housekeeper” of the island. Only at the end, of course, does Caliban come to regard his duties with anything like an attitude that might be called “busie care”. But from the beginning the activities expected of him are consistently similar to those assigned to the vegetative soul. Like this lowest power in man, Caliban is regarded as essential to simple existence on the island. When Miranda exclaims of him at the outset, “'Tis a villain, sir, I do not love to look on”, her father replies:

                                                                                                    But, as 'tis,
We cannot miss him: he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices
That profit us.

(I.ii.311-315)

Soon these “offices” are more specifically indicated. It was Caliban, we learn, who first provided nourishment for Prospero and Miranda when they arrived on the island, showing them “all the qualities o'th'isle, / The fresh springs, brinepits, barren place and fertile” (I.ii. 339-340). Later, Prospero commands him, “Fetch us in fuel, and be quick, thou'rt best, / To answer other business” (I.ii. 368-369). Even when he would change masters, Caliban speaks of his service function in terms of providing heat, drink, and nourishment. He promises Stephano:

I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries;
I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.
A plague upon the tyrant that I serve!
I'll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee,
Thou wondrous man. …
I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;
And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts;
Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee
To clustering filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee
Young scamels from the rock.

(II.ii.160-172)

Caliban summarizes the housekeeping duties which he has performed for Prospero (and will perform again) when he sings:

No more dams I'll make for fish;
          Nor fetch in firing
          At requiring;
Nor scrape trenchering, nor wash dish.

(II.ii.193-196)

Finally brought to recognize his true master and his true function, Caliban willingly accepts Prospero's order to trim the cell handsomely (V.i. 290-295). It is possible that we are also meant to identify Caliban with the generative or reproductive functions of the vegetative soul, as well as with its maintenance functions. It does not appear to be the passions of love or lust in the sensitive soul that motivate Caliban's attempt to violate the honor of Miranda, but simply the instinctive urge to reproduce his own kind. As he tells Prospero:

O ho, O ho! would't had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.

(I.ii.351-353)

Apparently he is incapable of thinking of the relationship of man and woman in any other than these fundamental terms, for he later tells Stephano, with reference to Miranda, “she will become thy bed, I warrant, / And bring thee forth brave brood” (III.ii. 102-103). But be that as it may, in all the services that Caliban can and does perform on the island, his powers are consistently limited to those attributed in Renaissance moral philosophy not to the knowing and moving power of the sensitive or animal soul, but to the quickening powers of the vegetative.

As in his functions, so in his relationship to Prospero does Caliban resemble the vegetative soul in its relationship to the nature of man as a whole. A more pertinent examination of this resemblance can better be made when Prospero himself has been considered later. Suffice it to say for the moment that the Renaissance moral philosophers repeatedly insisted that, insofar as man is concerned, the vegetative soul is simply the servant of the higher human powers. As Davies put it, “The best the service of the least doth need” (p. 80). To enumerate Prospero's frequent references to Caliban as “slave” and “servant”, or Caliban's references to the “master” he serves, is probably unnecessary. To this ordained servant, even freedom itself means only that “Caliban / Has a new master”. His relationship to Prospero further resembles the Renaissance concept in the fact that, just as man's vegetative soul, like his sensitive soul, must constantly since the Fall be kept under control by man's rational soul, so also Caliban must constantly, and often by vigorous means, be kept under control by Prospero. Howsoever we may regard Prospero in the Renaissance scheme at this point, the fact in itself that Caliban must be controlled from above in performing his “housekeeping” functions completes the striking similarity to the vegetative or quickening power of man's soul.

III

Ariel, like Caliban, has been subject to almost as many different interpretations as there are commentators on the play.¹³ He has been variously explained as Shakespeare's own poetic imagination or, more generally, a symbol of man's higher imaginative powers; as the beneficent spirit or daemon of the elements in Hebrew or Neo-platonic tradition; and as the fairy creature sometimes reported in the travel literature of the period. All agree, however, in identifying him with the spiritual and intangible, in contrast to the earthiness of Caliban. But again, if we regard the activities of Ariel and his function in relation to Prospero, as distinct from his history and character, his similarity to the sensitive soul in Renaissance man appears to be more than coincidental. Not all of the powers ascribed to the sensitive soul by the moral philosophers of Shakespeare's day can be found in Ariel, perhaps, but all of Ariel's functions can indeed be found in contemporary descriptions of this aspect of man's nature.

The sensitive soul, it will be recalled, was regarded in the Renaissance as possessing two classes of powers, the knowing or apprehending and the moving or feeling. In the first of these are found the activities of the senses, which enable man to receive impressions from the world outside himself. As Sir John Davies wrote of man's soul:

She hath a power which she abroad doth send,
Which views and searcheth all things every where.
This power is Sense, which from abroad doth send
          The coulour, taste, and touch, and sent, and sound;
          The quantitie, and shape of euery thing
          Within th'Earth's center, or Heauen's circle found.
This power, in parts made fit, fit objects takes,
          Yet not the things, but forms of things receiues;
          As when a seale in waxe impression makes,
          The print therein, but not itselfe it leaues.

(Pp. 64-65)

And he concludes, with particular reference to the eyes and ears, “These conduit-pipes of knowledge feed the Mind” (p. 68).

One of Ariel's principal functions in The Tempest is reporting to Prospero what he sees and hears, for Prospero himself does not always see or hear the crucial actions he controls. Ariel describes for him the sights and sounds of the storm and the wreck. He announces that he will report to his lord what he has observed of the conspiracy against Alonso (II.i. 321), and what he has overheard when Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo are hatching their plot (III.ii.113). Later, he describes for Prospero the discomfiture of the comic plotters, even to the point of suggesting the smell of “the foul lake” that “O'er-stunk their feet” (IV.i.182-184). And finally, it is Ariel who reports the helpless state of the aristocratic prisoners which is the basis of Prospero's crucial decision to forgive (V.i.7-18).

In addition to the sensory faculties, Renaissance moral philosophers also assigned to the sensitive soul the faculty of imagination, both in its power to retain and recreate images received through the senses, and in its power to create new images. As Professor Babb summarizes the commonly received opinion on this point:

Sensory impressions are next conveyed to the imagination. This faculty can retain and consider them for some time. It evaluates them as pleasant or painful. It has the power of conceiving circumstances and situations other than those existing at the moment and of forming synthetic images from disparate elements as it pleases (hence, centaurs, griffons, and chimeras). This is the creative power of the imagination. It is a faculty which never rests; even when the other sensory and intellectual powers are in repose, a stream of images flows aimlessly through the imagination, and when one is asleep, this stream continues in his dreams.¹⁴

This is the faculty which enables man's soul to achieve the remarkable feat of traveling outside the body to any point in time or space. In Nosce Teipsum Sir John Davies marvels at this power:

When she, without a Pegasus, doth flie
          Swifter then lightning's fire from East to West,
          About the Center and aboue the skie,
          She trauels then, although the body rest. …
She is sent as soone to China as to Spaine,
          And thence returnes, as soone as shee is sent;
          She measures with one time, and with one paine,
          An ell of silke, and heauen's wide spreading tent.

(Pp. 31, 45)

Several of Ariel's powers and functions are similar to these attributed to the imaginative faculty in the sensitive soul. In fact, the first thing we hear of him is his sleepless ability to travel instantaneously to any point in space. When Prospero summons him at the outset of the play, Ariel responds:

All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.

(I.ii.189-193)

And a few moments later he recalls

                                                                                                    the deep nook, where once
Thou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dew
From the still-vex'd Bermoothes, …

(I.ii.227-229)

Prospero acknowledges this power, somewhat backhandedly, perhaps, when in rebuking Ariel for ingratitude he charges that the sprite

                                        think'st it much to tread the ooze
Of the salt deep,
To run upon the sharp wind of the north,
To do me business in the veins o'th'earth
When it is bak'd with frost,

(I.ii.252-256)

a charge, incidentally, which Ariel promptly denies with “I do not, sir”. Some of Ariel's most important activities in the play, however, are those associated in Shakespeare's day with the creative function of the imagination. Prospero usually wills the poetry, music, and drama that are part of the action, but Ariel is charged with producing the works themselves. He creates the lyric poetry which leads Ferdinand to Miranda (I.ii. 377-405), and the song which alerts Gonzalo to Antonio's conspiracy (II.i. 295-300). He performs, and presumably composes, the music which puts the stranded aristocrats to sleep (II.i. 177-180). He designs, directs, and participates in the lavish spectacle of the banquet, rich in settings, music, and dance, whereby the crimes of the aristocrats against Prospero are revealed to themselves. So effective is Ariel in this particular creative achievement that Prospero compliments him:

Bravely the figure of this Harpy hast thou
Perform'd, my Ariel; a grace it had devouring:
Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated
In what thou hadst to say: …

(III. iii. 83-86)

And finally, of course, at Prospero's command Ariel creates, and acts a principal role in, the masque of Iris and Ceres, a production where, in accordance with Renaissance theories, the arts of music, dance, and poetry are made to serve a moral function by instructing Ferdinand and Miranda in proper pre-nuptial conduct (IV.i. 34-138).

In addition to these functions which Shakespeare's contemporaries associated with the knowing and apprehending part of the sensitive soul, Ariel demonstrates others that are similar to those assigned to the moving and feeling part. In Renaissance moral philosophy, as Miss Campbell has observed, “The sensible soul … is also generally regarded as the soul that has the moving power which resides in the sinews, muscles, ligaments, etc., by which power the soul [i.e., the rational soul] effects its purposes” (p. 67). Or as Davies describes this power in the sensitive soul:

This makes the pulses beat, and lungs respire,
          This holds the sinewes like a bridle's reines;
          And makes the Body to aduance, retire,
          To turne or stop, as she them slacks, or straines.
Thus the soule tunes the bodie's instrument;
          These harmonies she makes with life and sense;
          The organs fit are by the body lent,
          But th'actions flow from the Soule's influence.

(Pp. 74-75)

One of Ariel's principal functions in The Tempest is, of course, to effect the purposes of Prospero. From the raising of the storm in the beginning to the calming of the seas at the end, Ariel regularly puts into action the judgment and will of his master. Again it is worth noting that just as Prospero sees and hears little of the crucial developments directly, so he does little directly in actuating the developments he decrees. It is Ariel who brings Ferdinand to Miranda, leads the conspirators, noble and comic alike, to their respective confusions, brings the mariners back to Prospero, and effects the release of Caliban and his companions—to cite only a few of the ways in which he translates Prospero's will into action. The relationship is epitomized, perhaps, in the dialogue between the two when Prospero suddenly recalls Caliban's proposed rebellion. He summons Ariel: “Come with a thought”. Ariel immediately responds: “Thy thoughts I cleave to. What's thy pleasure?” “We must prepare to meet with Caliban”, his master answers, and Ariel proceeds to carry out the order to fetch the “trumpery” of royal vestments that will trap the conspirators (IV.i. 164-166). So Ariel, like the motive power of the sensitive soul, promptly gives each proportioned thought its act.

With one notable exception there is little evidence in The Tempest to suggest that Ariel, in addition to his sensory, imaginative, and motive powers, possesses the power of feeling or passion attributed by Shakespeare's contemporaries to the moving part of the sensitive soul. As a result, commentators who have concerned themselves with the matter are inclined to deny to Ariel any capacity for feeling or emotion at all.¹⁵ But at a critical juncture in the play, Prospero himself seems to attribute such a capacity to his sprite. At the beginning of the fifth act, when Ariel reports that the aristocratic conspirators are now under Prospero's control, he adds:

                                                            Your charm so strongly works 'em,
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
PROS.
                                                                                Dost thou think so, spirit?
ARI.
Mine would, sir, were I human.
PROS.
                                                                                                                                  And mine shall.
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply
Passion as they, be kindlier mov'd than thou art?

(V.i. 17-24)

This passage suggests that Ariel may feel less deeply than Prospero, but nonetheless possesses a capacity for feeling. In this connection we recall the insistence of Renaissance moral philosophers that man's tripartite soul, when it functions as it was designed to function, brings the passionate potential of the sensitive soul into action only after the rational soul has determined that a true and good cause for an emotional response exists. More will be said on this subject below in connection with Prospero. But at least Ariel's one expression of feeling, as qualified by his master, is not inconsistent with contemporary ideas of the powers of the sensitive soul. Ariel's reiterated demands for freedom, like Caliban's, can perhaps also be better understood when Prospero's function in the scheme is considered. Suffice it to observe for the moment that Ariel's desire to be free of Prospero is in general agreement with the Renaissance view of the sensitive soul as constantly seeking to escape from rational control.

IV

Prospero, variously identified as Shakespeare himself, a magician, a theurgist, a civilizing influence in the colonies, a symbol of art or nurture as opposed to nature, and a representation of higher reason, is recognized by all commentators to be the power controlling all that is and all that happens on the island.¹⁶ For many of Prospero's attributes and much of his history, Shakespeare apparently drew on contemporary knowledge of magical art. But whatever the sources of the character, the fact remains that at least some of his more significant functions and relationships on the island are remarkably like those assigned by the Renaissance to that highest of the three faculties in man, the rational soul.

The rational soul, it will be recalled, was thought by Shakespeare's contemporaries to consist of two powers, the reason or wit, and the will, both of which are sustained by the vegetative soul and served by the sensitive. On the basis of impressions collected and processed by the apprehending faculty of the sensitive soul, the reason determines the true and the good, and informs the will accordingly, whereupon the will directs the moving part of the sensitive soul to effect an appropriate action. Enough has perhaps been said above to suggest that the similarity between Prospero's employment of Ariel and the rational soul's employment of the sensitive provides in itself some basis for identifying Prospero's function with that of the rational soul. Also, as we have seen, his constant struggle to keep Caliban and Ariel under his control is consistent with the stuggle which the rational soul has had since the Fall to keep the lower faculties in check. But Prospero's relationship to both Caliban and Ariel also recalls the insistence of Renaissance moral philosophers on the interdependence of the three component powers when man's soul functions as it should. As Davies concluded:

This is the Soule, and these her vertues bee;
          Which, though they haue their sundry proper ends,
          And one exceeds another in degree,
          Yet each on other mutually depends.
Our Wit is giuen, Almighty God to know;
          Our Will is giuen to loue Him, being knowne;
          But God could not be known to vs below,
          But by His workes which through the sense
                    are shown.
And as the Wit doth reape the fruits of Sense,
          So doth the quickning power the senses feed;
          Thus while they doe their sundry gifts dispence,
          The best, the seruice of the least doth need.

(Pp. 79-80)

Prospero's reiterated gratitude to Ariel and, at the end, his willingness to pardon Caliban, suggest a similar recognition of the indispensability of these lower powers to the higher when man is demonstrating his true humanity.

Other aspects of Prospero's role strengthen the parallel with the function of the rational soul. He distinguishes between good and evil, then wills the action necessary to repulse the evil and advance the good. His function in this respect is generally exemplified in the complete direction which he exercises over all three of the principal plot threads in the play—aristocratic conspiracy, comic conspiracy, and love story. He orders the storm which precipitates the action of each. To achieve his virtuous ends he frustrates the aristocrats, misleads the servants, and imposes the test of log-carrying on Ferdinand. Finally, he effects a resolution for all that is just and happy. Even Prospero's deep learning, howsoever we may describe its content, is reminiscent of the fact that Renaissance moral philosophers insisted on the education of the rational soul, particularly in self-knowledge, if it is to achieve the control that God designed it to exercise.¹⁷

Although many of his activities and functions thus resemble those attributed to the rational soul alone, Prospero emerges, by the end of the play, as the complete Renaissance man within whose own character the rational will directs all the faculties of the soul toward the attainment of true felicity in this life. It may be worth noting in this connection that Sir John Davies, in describing the three powers of the soul, also recognized three types of men, or creatures, whose basic natures are determined by the domination in each of one of the three sub-souls:

And these three powers, three sorts of men doe make:
          For some, like plants, their veines doe onely fill;
          And some, like beasts, their senses' pleasure take;
          And some, like angels, doe contemplate still.

(P. 80)

But throughout his account Davies is mainly concerned with defining the three faculties as parts of one soul, the soul of man. As he insists at the end:

Yet these three powers are not three soules, but one;
          As one and two are both contained in three;
          Three being one number by itself alone:
          A shadow of the blessed Trinitie.

(P. 81)

In the soul of Prospero it is the triumph of reason over passion that most clearly links him with the contemporary view of the nature of man and human happiness. As Sir Thomas More had observed of his Utopians, they thought true felicity to consist in virture, and virtue to be defined as the governance of reason in human behavior, as nature had ordained.¹⁸ More concretely, Juan Luis Vives, in An Introduction to Wisedome, had warned the age with reference to the perturbations, or passions:

As it is … a poynt of treason, that suche lewed perturbations … should rage rebell & take vpon them the rule of the hole man, contemptuously despysynge the auctorytie of the mynde, so it is extreme foly for the mynde, to be slaue vnto fonde affections, and to serue at a becke, the vyle carkeys, neyther the dignitie of nature, neyther the expresse lawe of god, any thyng regarded.¹⁹

It has already been suggested, with reference to Ariel, that Prospero keeps under his control and service that faculty in which the passions were thought to reside. But on more than one occasion he demonstrates a considerable capacity for passion in himself. He reveals anger against the complaining Ariel that mounts to fury against the rebellious Caliban, and at the end of the masque he is so perturbed that Ferdinand says to Miranda, “Your father's in some passion / That works him strongly”, to which she replies, “Never till this day / saw I him touch'd with anger, so distemper'd” (IV.i. 143-145). But in all these instances, the passion is made to serve, as passion should, the reasonable ends which Prospero pursues. His triumph is finally, and much more dramatically, illustrated, appropriately enough, at the very climax and turning point of the whole play. Informed by Ariel at the beginning of Act V that his enemies are now completely within his power, Prospero faces the choice of letting his passion or letting his reason direct and determine his action. His decision is the one which Shakespeare's contemporaries would have regarded as the truly virtuous one, and therefore the only one conducive to felicity. Thus he replies to Ariel:

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th' quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel:
My charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore,
And they shall be themselves.

(V.i. 25-32)

When, shortly thereafter, the conspirators do indeed become themselves again, Prospero describes their recovery in terms of their return to reason's control. “The charm dissolves apace”, he says,

And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.

(V. i. 64-68)

And a few moments later he observes again:

                                                                                          Their understanding
Begins to swell; and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore,
That now lies foul and muddy.

(V.i. 79-82)

Prospero is thus not only the reasonable man himself, but he is also the cause of reason in others. And from a Renaissance point of view, men in whom the rational soul has been restored to its proper function can truly be regarded as goodly creatures in a brave new world, and mankind as beauteous indeed.

Notes

1. For a review of interpretations to 1954, see The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (The Arden Shakespeare, London, 1954), pp. lxxxi-lxxxviii. To these should be added the general discussions of the play in Donald Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images (New York, 1949), pp. 301-311; D. C. Allen, Image and Meaning (Baltimore, 1960), pp. 42-66; and Leo Kirshbaum, “The Tempest—Apologetics or Spectacle?”, Two Lectures on Shakespeare (London, 1961), pp. 19-41. All Shakespeare quotations are from Kermode's text in the new Arden edition.

2. Shakespeare (New York, 1936), p. 332.

3. Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York, 1945), p. 195.

4. Shakespeare's World of Images (New York, [1949]), pp. 304-305.

5. In the following summary I have relied mainly on Ruth L. Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare's Plays (Iowa City, 1927); Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (Cambridge, 1930), pp. 51-72; and Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, 1951), pp. 1-20. The last contains a useful bibliography of primary and secondary works on the subject (pp. 189-197).

6. Nosce Teipsum (1599), ed., from the 1622 edition, by A. B. Grosart, The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies (London, 1876), I, 63. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.

7. The Elizabethan Malady, pp. 4-5.

8. Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, pp. 66-67.

9. The Elizabethan Malady, p. 19.

10. Cf. Spencer, pp. 1-50.

11. Cf. note 1, above, to which should be added J. E. Hankins, “Caliban as the Bestial Man”, PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], LXII (1947), 793-801, and N. Coghill, “The Basis of Shakespearian Comedy”, Essays and Studies (1950), pp. 1-28.

12. “Caliban as the Bestial Man”, p. 799.

13. Cf. note 1, above, to which should be added W. Stacy Johnson, “The Genesis of Ariel”, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], II (1951), 205-210.

14. The Elizabethan Malady, p. 3. Babb cites M. W. Bundy, The Theory of the Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (Urbana, 1927), Chap. IX, as a fuller account of the subject.

15. Cf., for example, Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images, p. 305: “Ariel has no human feelings, though he can observe them clearly”.

16. Cf. note 1, above, to which should be added F. D. Hoeniger, “Prospero's Storm and Miracle”, SQ,, VII (1956), 33-38; G. H. Durrant, “Prospero's Wisdom”, Theoria, VII (1955), 50-58; and Harold Wilson, “Action and Symbol in Measure for Measure and The Tempest”, SQ, IV (1953), 375-384.

17. Cf. Babb, The Elizabethan Malady, p. 19.

18. Utopia (London, 1910, “Everyman's Library”), p. 73.

19. Translated by Rycharde Morysine (London, 1540), sigs. Dii-Diii, quoted in Babb, The Elizabethan Malady, p. 17.