SOURCE: Mebane, John S. “Magic as Love and Faith: Shakespeare's The Tempest.” In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare, pp. 174-99. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Mebane concentrates on the theme of magic in The Tempest as it relates to Renaissance conceptions of human nature. The critic stresses Prospero's status as a benevolent magician who employs his powers for the good of humanity.]

In his Jacobean tragedies Shakespeare calls into question the idealistic conception of humanity which had been developed by Renaissance humanists and carried to its logical extreme in the occult tradition. Hamlet's discovery of lust and treachery begets his profound disillusionment with human nature, and he tells Ophelia that he himself, as a representative of humankind, is “proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?” he continues, “We are arrant knaves, believe none of us” (III.i.126-29).¹ He tells her to enter a nunnery, to abandon the world and the flesh which Hamlet sees as thoroughly corrupted. In his earlier speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Hamlet juxtaposes the eloquent praise of humanity which we find in earlier Renaissance thinkers such as Pico and Ficino with his own intense awareness of human mortality and corruption: “What [a] piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor women neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so” (II.ii.303-10).

King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, and other plays of the early 1600s dramatize the discrepancy between the noble ideals of Renaissance philosophers and the actual world in which we live. In theory, human beings are rational creatures who can control their own souls and the world around them. They are capable of being motivated by love, faith, and honor. In reality, these plays at times seem to imply, we are subject to bestial lust and selfish ambition, and the world we create in attempting to fulfill our desires is one of anarchy. Although it is difficult to say precisely what answers the tragedies may or may not offer to the questions raised within them, it is readily apparent that many Shakespearean plays of the first decade of the seventeenth century center upon a crisis of faith.

A loss of faith in humanity in Shakespeare is often paralleled by a loss of faith in Providence and by an inability to love. Human nature at times threatens to become merely a part of an amoral realm of nature which is ruled by totally selfish appetites. Perhaps the most powerful, desperate statements and questions occur in King Lear:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport.

(IV.i.36-37)

If that the Heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame [these] vild offenses,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

(IV.ii.46-50)

The catastrophe of Othello is caused by the protagonist's loss of faith in Desdemona and, by implication, in the values with which she is associated. One recalls the magnificently suggestive lines,

                                                            Perdition catch my soul
But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again.

(III.iii.90-92)

In the romances Shakespeare reaffirms the faith in humanity which he permits us to question in the tragedies.² The final plays are a series of experiments in developing a genre which encloses the perspective of the tragedies in a broader frame of reference, permitting us to acknowledge the consequences of human evil while simultaneously emphasizing that such consequences are not ultimate. The romances affirm the possibility of regeneration in a more emphatic manner than most of Shakespeare's previous works: the villains of Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest inflict genuine suffering upon others, but the emphasis—especially in The Tempest—falls upon the process of restoration rather than the period of destruction. While we are never permitted to forget the bestial, potentially destructive dimension of human nature, we are reminded forcefully of the human capacity for love, faith, and spirituality, and each of these plays suggests that human beings, as they exert the transforming power of love, can choose to act as agents of a beneficent providential order.

It is quite natural that in The Tempest, the most fully realized of the romances, Shakespeare would focus upon the figure of the magus, the most fully developed expression of Renaissance hopes for the development of humankind's moral, intellectual, and spiritual potential. Through years of study, contemplation, and reflection upon his experience, Prospero has brought his own soul into harmony with the cosmic order, and consequently his art is a means through which God's will is accomplished. On one level of the play Prospero's magic orders the vital forces of nature so as to make them fruitful rather than destructive. It strives to bring about the harmonious union between the natural and the supernatural dimensions of reality which is symbolized by the marriage of earth and heaven in Prospero's hymeneal masque. But it is highly significant that the masque is never quite completed: the final, harmonious dance is interrupted by “a strange, hollow, and confused noise” (IV.i.138 SD), and at this crucial moment Shakespeare stresses the limitations of Prospero's art. By forcing Prospero to halt his spirits' enchanting performance in order to deal with Caliban's plot against his life, the playwright reminds us that there are some creatures on whose nature nurture will never stick. Because there are dimensions of evil in human nature which can never be entirely eliminated from it, the magicians' vision of universal harmony will never be perfectly realized in this world. In his portrait of Prospero Shakespeare confirms the belief of the magicians—and of many of the civic humanists, as well—that human art can become a vehicle of divine power, and he also affirms the importance of the visionary imagination. Shakespeare's conception of human nature is more conservative than Ficino's or Pico's, however, as he suggests that no one can live entirely the life of the mind and thus escape the limitations associated with our physical nature. In addition, The Tempest questions the sometimes excessive emphasis on self-assertiveness which we often find in the occult tradition. Pico's Oration and Conclusions, we recall, placed greater emphasis upon self-assertion in the process of spiritual purification than upon an attitude of submission or repentance, and even for Ficino the awareness of one's divine potential could rationalize the desire for conquest: the individual's unwillingness to serve and the desire to dominate others were the consequence of “the immeasurable magnificence of our soul.”³ To some degree Shakespeare is similar to Jonson—and to Pico, Agrippa, and perhaps even Marlowe at certain moments in their lives—in that he returns to a more traditional emphasis upon confessing one's mortal passions and excessive ambitions. He is unlike Jonson, however, in the extent to which he believes that once the individual is fully aware that there are elements of human nature which must be disciplined and restrained, one can exert considerable control over one's own personality and one's destiny. We fulfill ourselves not by escaping the physical aspect of our nature, as some of the occultists had believed, but by bringing it into harmony with the spiritual. It is well to remember that Prospero is a mortal who must continually struggle to maintain the degree of self-mastery which he has attained, but we may also recognize that it is Prospero's attainment of an unusual degree of harmony within his own personality which has conferred upon him his magical power. By mastering his passions and cultivating his higher faculties, Prospero has obtained the power to command the forces of nature, and in the course of the play he brings all of the other characters under his control. But the most impressive of his feats—indeed, the one to which all of his other powers serve as means to an end—is his power to bring others toward the same self-knowledge he has found within himself.

The fact that Shakespeare does not adhere in a doctrinaire fashion to the details of magical theory has led some very well-informed and sensitive readers to suggest that the relationship between Prospero's art and the benevolent magic described by Renaissance occult philosophers is ambiguous. Robert West, while conceding that Prospero in many ways resembles the beneficent Renaissance magus, argues that Prospero and his art are, nonetheless, of ambivalent moral status. Shakespeare does not stress the relationship between the magician's art and divine providence, West believes, and, since Prospero commands spirits, he must have attained his power through ceremonies—not depicted on the stage—which orthodox theologians condemned as damnable. “No magician, however ‘white,’” West writes, “could be supposed to rule in the hierarchy of being all the way to its top. At some stage he had to supplicate, and unless he was a ‘holy magician’ like the Apostles, this supplication was directed well short of the Christian Godhead. Prospero's impious need to pray to finite spirits the Globe audience could have been well aware of, for it was an item of pulpit theology that all spirit magic was illicit because all required such praying.”⁴ Ariel himself is of ambiguous nature, West argues, especially because Prospero refers to him at I.ii.257 as “malignant,” and in Prospero's description of his “rough magic” at V.i.33-57 he includes magical acts of dubious moral character:

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

(V.i.41-50)

Professor West, always admirably faithful to the evidence of the primary sources, concedes that some Renaissance texts assert that there are means of raising the dead which derive directly from God and which consequently hold the status of miracle rather than of evil magic. Although raising the dead typically was condemned by orthodox demonologists as evil necromancy, he continues, “Prospero's claim, made but in passing, saying nothing of ends and little of means, may be held ambiguous rather than clearly evil. But it is hardly redeemable for an effect of an unmixedly good magic, and certainly Shakespeare makes no effort to redeem it. It must, then, signify the dubiety of Prospero's magic” (92).

Barbara Mowat, in a thoroughly researched and carefully reasoned essay which builds upon West's prior arguments, emphasizes that Shakespeare has drawn not only upon the Hermetic and Cabalist sources which were the foundation of Renaissance occult philosophy, but also on classical myth and legend, the wizards of medieval and Renaissance romances, and popular entertainers, or “jugglers.” Professor Mowat believes that this conflation of sources, as well as Prospero's abjuration of his art, underscores the ambiguity of magic in The Tempest, a mysteriousness which is appropriate, she suggests, for a work which reveals the ambiguities of life itself. While C. J. Sisson felt that the lines quoted above (V.i.41-50), based on Ovid's portrait of Medea, reveal that Shakespeare has been careless in introducing apparently negative elements of his source material into an otherwise positive characterization of Prospero, Mowat sees the ambivalence as the essence of the play.⁵ In view of the work of West, Mowat, and others, it no longer seems tenable to view Prospero and his magic as essentially evil, but the arguments in favor of the ambiguity of Shakespeare's magician and his art are formidable.

I would certainly agree that in The Tempest as in other plays Shakespeare drew on a variety of sources in an eclectic fashion, adapting and transforming what was appropriate to his own unique artistic vision and ignoring what did not suit his purposes. Yet, as I shall endeavor to show in greater detail in the following sections of this [essay], our knowledge of specific ideas from the occult tradition can illuminate many important facets of the play. Our awareness of the significance of Hermetic/Cabalist magic in Renaissance intellectual history is of fundamental importance in encouraging us to recognize the extent to which one of Shakespeare's central purposes in The Tempest is to reflect upon the vision of humankind initiated by Renaissance humanists and carried to its logical extreme in the occult tradition. In addition, while I shall emphasize that Prospero's art is a multifaceted symbol which must be interpreted on several parallel levels, an awareness of the influence of Renaissance occult philosophy upon The Tempest helps to confirm that on all of these levels Prospero's art is benevolent, and Shakespeare is affirming—although with significant qualifications—the belief of Ficino and his successors that human beings obtain genuine power by aligning themselves with the order of Providence. Shakespeare draws upon a panoply of sources, and his response to the occult tradition is complex, but it does not necessarily follow that The Tempest is characterized essentially by unresolved conflict; instead, I would suggest, Prospero's magic functions on several harmonious levels simultaneously. On one level Prospero's art is, quite literally, Hermetic magic; on another, as Frank Kermode has recognized, it is “art” in the broadest sense of the term, the civilizing power of education and moral self-discipline. On yet another, Prospero's magic is theatrical art, which Shakespeare sees as analogous to magic not only in that it creates visions, but also in that it strives to effect moral and spiritual reform. One of the most fascinating aspects of The Tempest is the manner in which Shakespeare correlates all of these dimensions of the play, so that they complement and enrich one another. He draws upon those aspects of occult philosophy which reinforce the parallels among magic, learning, and drama as forms of art which endeavor to perfect nature.

PROSPERO AS BENEVOLENT ARTIST

Doubts concerning the benevolence of Prospero's art derive in part from many interpreters' emphasis upon the attitudes of the orthodox “pulpit theologians,” to use Professor West's term, rather than on the attitudes of Ficino's Theologia Platonica, Pico's Oration and Conclusions, Agrippa's Occult Philosophy, or other works in the occult tradition which had captured Shakespeare's imagination at the time he wrote his last plays. Magical acts of the kind Prospero describes in the lines prefacing his promise to abjure his “potent art” (V.i.50) were precisely those which, Ficino tells us, the perfected magus, as agent of God, can perform: a human soul dedicated to God may be granted the power to “command the elements, rouse the winds, gather the clouds together in rain,” cure human diseases, and perform other miraculous feats which may suit God's purposes.⁶ In prominent references to “Providence divine” (I.ii.159; cf. V.i.189), Shakespeare carefully aligns Prospero and his art with the workings of the cosmic order. In this context, as Agrippa and others tell us, even Prospero's raising of the dead could be sanctioned. As Jackson Cope has recognized, the lines may be read in connection with “a motif of miraculous resurrection” which becomes prominent in Pericles and Cymbeline, as well as The Tempest, as a corollary of Shakespeare's intensified concern with the visionary and potentially redemptive character of art; like Ariel's mysterious song at I.ii.397-405, the image of resurrection may remind us, on one level, of the process of regeneration which Prospero's art endeavors to bring about as it leads Alonso and others to reflect upon their past transgressions.⁷

Prospero's application of the term “malignant” to Ariel is a major consideration, for in Shakespeare's day one of the most common meanings of the word was “disposed to rebel against God or against constituted authority; disaffected, malcontent” (OED). In context, however, “malignant” probably refers to Prospero's somewhat exaggerated accusation that Ariel is resistant to the magician's orders, not that he is essentially evil, and the accusation itself evokes speeches from Ariel which develop the contrast between Prospero's art—which the airy spirit does, in fact, obey—and the witchcraft of Sycorax, with which Ariel had refused to comply. Moreover, Prospero's intellectual and spiritual self-purification has given him a degree of control over his spirits which is based not on supplication of these lower spiritual orders, but on the participation of the awakened human soul in the very highest levels of the cosmic hierarchy. … [O]ccult philosophers had asserted that the magus becomes aware of the innate ideas within the Mens, the intuitive, suprarational faculty within the soul, and once this occurs, the magician possesses the power to connect, in contemplation and/or transitive magic, the things of this world with the archetypal forms that govern them. Alchemy, in particular, is an attempt to purify the fallen world by bringing earthly creatures into more perfect unity with their governing ideas, and Shakespeare may well have been aware of the alchemical meaning of the term tempest: it is a boiling process which removes impurities from base metal and facilitates its transmutation into gold. Because the human Mens is a part of the series of minds which constitutes the order of Providence, the magus gains intimate knowledge of God's providential purposes and consequently becomes an agent of the divine Creator. Through assent to Providence the magus could then liberate himself from the control of Fortune, gaining the true freedom which comes from aligning oneself with the will of God. The magus possesses the power to manipulate stellar influences and to contribute to the course of earthly events, but the power of the benevolent magician consists solely of the ability to help fulfill providence, never to thwart it: Ariel's assertion that he and his fellows are “ministers of Fate” (III.iii.61) is literally true. An evil magician, such as Faustus or Sycorax, might obtain rudimentary powers, but never anything approaching Prospero's. In fact, many Renaissance occultists agreed with orthodox theologians that an evil magician's powers are almost entirely illusory.⁸

Prospero's renunciation of his art suggests a qualification of the ideals of the magicians, but not a fundamental doubt concerning the moral status of the art. Although Renaissance occultists themselves stressed that the magician must use his art in the service of humankind, they nonetheless placed somewhat more emphasis on the virtues of pure contemplation than Shakespeare wishes to do at the end of his play. Prospero's promise to drown his book before he returns to Milan and resumes his political office suggests that contemplation, book learning, and theatrical art are not permanent escapes from life, but preparations for it. Just as Prospero removes his magic robes in scene 2 before his intimate paternal conversation with Miranda, he resolves to make involvement in the human community, not the retreat into his library, his first priority after he dons once again his ducal robes. If one notices the many assurances throughout the play that Prospero's aim is to reform his enemies, not to seek vengeance, his promise to renounce his “rough magic” appears as a part of his initial plan, rather than a change of heart. In order to ensure the success of his project he continues, in fact, to practice his magic until the very end, closing the final scene itself with an order to Ariel that he provide “calm seas, auspicious gales” (V.i.315) for the journey homeward. The adjective “rough” quite probably carries the meanings of “rigorous, severe,” or perhaps “stormy, tempestuous” (OED), with reference to the literal and the psychological tempests which Prospero creates in order to stimulate reflection upon human limitations. Professors West and Mowat have clearly established that among the members of a Renaissance audience one could expect to find a variety of attitudes toward magic, and I certainly agree that our appreciation of the play is enhanced if we retain a sense of wonder in our response to Prospero's art. In my reading of the play, however, the text as a whole encourages us to see Prospero as benign from the very outset, and Shakespeare is affirming the position enunciated in The Winter's Tale's scene of apparently magical resurrection: “If this be magic,” Leontes proclaims after witnessing Hermione's apparently magical restoration to life, “let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (WT V.iii.110-11).

Those who see Prospero's promise to renounce his art as a suggestion of its moral ambivalence often argue that Prospero suffers from excessive pride and vengefulness in the beginning of the play and that he undergoes a transformation in act 5, scene 1, when he tells Ariel that he will feel compassion for all of those—even his enemies—who are now in his power. There is little or no motivation, however, for a major change of heart in Prospero at the outset of act 5, nor do the magician's plots assume a new direction at this point. The dramatic climax of the main action occurs not when Prospero converses with Ariel, but in act 3, scene 3, when Alonso's repentance makes it possible for the magician to free Milan from its subjugation to Naples and to reassume his position as duke. If Prospero had initially planned vengeance, he could easily have annihilated his enemies in the initial storm scene; instead, he endeavors to bring the wrongdoers to repentance. At the outset of the play he takes pains to demonstrate that the magician intends to harm no one:

                                                  Wipe thou thine eyes, have comfort.
The direful spectacle of the wrack, which touch'd
The very virtue of compassion in thee,
I have with such provision in mine art
So safely ordered that there is no soul—
No, not so much perdition as an hair
Betid to any creature in the vessel.

(I.ii.25-31)⁹

Central to The Tempest are symphonic variations upon two major symbols: the first is the storm, which is associated with tragic experience and which can, if we perceive events appropriately, become a blessing in disguise. Prospero's initial shows of severity are mere pretenses, and they provide a specific instance of the general principle that events which appear threatening can, if we respond properly, lead to spiritual rebirth. The second major symbol is the “sea-change” of which Ariel sings in act 1:

Full fadom five thy father lies,
                    Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
                    Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

(I.ii.397-402)

As G. Wilson Knight has suggested, the song may intimate a change from a mortal state to an eternal one. Most obviously, however, it foreshadows the change of heart in Alonso which, in turn, makes possible the restoration of proper order in Milan. In the broadest terms, the changes which Prospero's art facilitates are from discord to harmony, tragedy to comedy, and they occur on the psychological, political, and spiritual levels. The agent of change, the sea, is time and experience, as Shakespeare draws upon the traditional analogy between life and a sea voyage, and simultaneously it is the mind, as suggested by the lines which announce the rising consciousness of Alonso and the court party in act 5:

                                        Their understanding
Begins to swell, and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable [shores]
That now lie foul and muddy.

(V.i.79-82)

Changes must sometimes occur in modes of human perception before the restoration of harmony can occur in human history. Prospero's art seeks to restore love and faith, qualities which lead to creativity and to genuine self-fulfillment within the human community; these powers are contrasted throughout the play with the destructive forces of self-aggrandizement, vengefulness, and cynicism. Shakespeare draws a close parallel between the faith which envisions a benevolent order beneath the apparent meaninglessness and disorder of earthly events, and interpersonal faith, an ability to see the potential for goodness, as well as evil, in human nature. Only those who are willing to develop their capacity for this kind of vision can respond to Prospero's art or participate in the harmonious order which it helps to establish.

Acting in concert with the cosmic order, Prospero's magical art provides experiences through which various characters are granted an opportunity to acknowledge their mortality and, consequently, learn that the human community must be based on mutual forgiveness. Through the storm, which is itself an instance of magical/dramatic art conceived by Prospero and enacted by spirits whom he subsequently terms his “actors,” Alonso and the others in his party are confronted with events that impress upon them the limitations of human power. Prospero himself had learned of his mortal limitations years prior to the opening of the play, when he, like King Lear, was deprived of his throne and began his own tempestuous, redemptive voyage. An example of his awareness of the subordinate status of his art within the cosmic order occurs when he informs Miranda that his success

                                                                                          doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop.

(I.ii.181-84)

Although the entire plot of The Tempest is in a sense a product of Prospero's magic, there are several brief theatrical performances within the larger play which assist the characters in interpreting the events of their own lives and which consequently exert a potentially redemptive influence. One of these is the broken feast in act 3, which symbolizes the communion from which Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio have exiled themselves. Obviously this spectacle, along with the admonitions composed by Prospero and spoken by Ariel, is intended not merely to torment Prospero's enemies, but to teach self-knowledge and evoke repentance. In Alonso's case the scene has the desired effect:

                                                                      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.

(III.iii.95-99)

At the moment when Alonso feels remorse, his perception of events begins to change. In his imagination the discordant sounds of the tempest are miraculously transformed into music.¹⁰ The storm is a mysterious song that whispers to Alonso the secret of his own soul.

Awareness of our mortality and our capacity for evil is only one component of the self-knowledge which Prospero's art endeavors to convey to us. The other is an awareness of the spark of the divine which Antonio correctly associates with the moral conscience but refuses to acknowledge as his own. When asked by Sebastian how his “conscience” could permit him to supplant Prospero, Antonio reveals his thoroughly materialistic conception of human nature:

Ay, sir; where lies that? If 'twere a kibe,
'Twould put me to my slipper; but I feel not
This deity in my bosom.

(II.i.276-78)

Much of The Tempest is a dramatic debate over the question of whether humanity is bestial or godlike, Caliban or Ariel; the implied answer is that we are both and that our lower faculties must be guided and disciplined by the mind and spirit. One of the central symbolic scenes of the play is the masque of Juno, Ceres, and Iris, which reveals to us that the power of heaven both stimulates creativity and, at the same time, restrains nature within its proper boundaries. The symbolic union of earth and heaven suggests, among many other things, that the marriage between higher and lower faculties within the human personality can create a harmonious and properly ordered life. In the occult tradition, the metaphor of marriage refers to the magician's ability to reform nature by bringing earthly creatures into more perfect conformity with their governing Ideas.¹¹ In The Tempest, Shakespeare stresses the reformation of the self which may occur as a consequence of the harmonious union of higher and lower faculties within the individual personality. In spite of Prospero's reference to it as a “vanity of mine art” (IV.i.41), the masque reveals to us an essential aspect of the vision of The Tempest as a whole.

The disruption of the concluding dance of the masque by Prospero's remembrance of the rebellious plot of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo does not entirely invalidate the scene's symbolic vision. Quite recently A. Lynne Magnusson has argued that the interruptions of various scenes and speeches in The Tempest suggest that Shakespeare is confessing that art expresses the need of the human mind to create more order and coherence than exists in external reality. Like many modern critics, Magnusson feels that The Tempest dramatizes relativism rather than revelation.¹² While the interruption does remind us that Prospero's “majestic vision” (IV.i.118) excludes the destructive forces ever-present in human life, The Tempest as a whole, I believe, suggests that the masque embodies an ideal which may be fully realized in the lives of those who choose to align themselves—as Prospero has done—with the order of Providence. The interruption of the masque reminds us that in the fallen world not all mortals will choose to assume their rightful places within the natural order, and consequently the power of Prospero's art to reform life is limited: the artist is genuinely powerful, but he is far from omnipotent. As both Alvin Kernan and Barbara Traister have emphasized, Shakespeare is intensely aware that the artist has no power over the minds and souls of members of the audience who do not respond with a sympathetic imagination.¹³ Throughout Shakespeare's canon there are oracles, ghosts, and prophetic visions which are associated both with fantasy and with a genuine spiritual dimension of reality, and faith in Providence in Shakespeare very often entails a willingness to trust these objects of imagination. In The Tempest, the plays enacted by Prospero and his spirits serve much the same function that dream visions or other forms of prophecy and magic serve in Julius Caesar, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and other plays.¹⁴ Ferdinand and Alonso respond positively to Prospero's art and consequently learn profound truths from it; Antonio and Sebastian resist the power of Prospero's magic and remain unaffected by it.

Shakespeare emphasizes the subjective element in our perception of reality itself, as well as art, in the scene in which we first see Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, Gonzalo, and the others after their shipwreck. As the scene opens, Gonzalo and Adrian are attempting to persuade the other members of Alonso's party to count their blessings. Although they have been stranded on a mysterious island, Gonzalo says, they somehow have been miraculously preserved, and therefore they have cause to rejoice. “The air breathes upon us here most sweetly,” Adrian comments, and Gonzalo points out that the isle contains “every thing advantageous to life.” To Sebastian and Antonio, however, the air breathes “As if it had lungs, and rotten ones” or “as 'twere perfumed by a fen” (II.i.47-9). Even the physical appearance of the island is subject to dispute:

GONZALO.
How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green!
ANTONIO.
The ground indeed is tawny.
SEBASTIAN.
With an eye of green in't.
ANTONIO.
He misses not much.
SEBASTIAN.
No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.
GONZALO.
But the rariety of it is—which is indeed almost beyond credit—
SEBASTIAN.
As many vouch'd rarieties are.
GONZALO.
That our garments, being (as they were) drench'd in the sea, hold notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, being rather new dy'd than stain'd with salt water.
ANTONIO.
If but one of his pockets could speak, would it not say he lies?
SEBASTIAN.
Ay, or very falsely pocket up his report.

(II.i.53-68)

Shakespeare provides several hints that Gonzalo's view of things is the correct one. In the scene just prior to this one, for instance, Ariel has already assured Prospero that the travelers have been protected, and “On their sustaining garments not a blemish, / But fresher than before” (I.ii.218-19). Another confirmation of Gonzalo's perspective occurs as the conversation turns to the marriage of Alonso's daughter, which has just taken place at Tunis, and Gonzalo remarks that the city has not had a comparable queen “since widow Dido's time.” The remainder of the party are surprised by the mention of Dido, since she was queen of Carthage and not, they insist, of Tunis. Gonzalo replies, “This Tunis, sir, was Carthage,” but Sebastian and Antonio are incredulous:

ANTONIO.
His word is more than the miraculous harp.
SEBASTIAN.
He hath rais'd the wall, and houses too.
ANTONIO.
What impossible matter will he make easy next?
SEBASTIAN.
I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and give it his son for an apple.

(II.i.87-92)

The point here is that the site of Tunis actually is contiguous with the site of ancient Carthage, and in the Renaissance the two cities were often referred to as one and the same; many geographers used the term “Tunis” to refer to the entire region in which both cities were located. More importantly, historians such as Leo Africanus, whose account was incorporated into Richard Hakluyt's Voyages and Richard Eden and Richard Willes's The History of Travayle in the West and East Indies (from which Shakespeare apparently took the name “Setebos”) asserted that the survivors of the ruined Carthage founded Tunis, so that the latter city was, in a sense, Carthage reborn.¹⁵ Gonzalo is correct, despite the incredulity and cynicism of Antonio and Sebastian, and the action of The Tempest as a whole confirms that he is correct in his optimism concerning the events of the shipwreck as well. The Tempest not only suggests that there are subjective elements in our perception of the world; it endeavors, furthermore, to persuade us that some interpretations of life are more valid than others: events which seem “impossible” or “miraculous” to some observers may eventually be proven literally true.

Norman Rabkin is correct when he points out that “Shakespeare reminds us in his last plays of the Renaissance commonplace that the artist is a second God creating a second nature … in order to share a more profound perception that God has created our universe as a work of art”;¹⁶ Prospero's description of the physical world, “the great globe itself,” as an “insubstantial pageant” which shall one day “dissolve, / And … Leave not a rack behind” (IV.i.153-56) underscores the analogy between the playwright's art and that of the divine Creator. Moreover, Shakespeare also suggests that the human artist, working in concert with the divine, can help us to interpret life correctly. Just as the drama of the broken feast revealed to Alonso the meaning of the previous events of his life, the art of The Tempest as a whole is intended to assist the audience in seeing beyond the literal level of the events of earthly history and apprehending their significance; the purpose of genuine art in The Tempest is to reveal which interpretation of reality is genuine. In the epilogue, however, when the analogy between Prospero's art and Shakespeare's becomes most prominent, the playwright makes clear that he has no power without the audience's imaginative participation—our faith, as it were—in the work of art. It is our “gentle breath”—our higher faculties, associated with the airy spirit, Ariel—which will either confer a degree of reality upon the play, and hence send Prospero to Naples, or leave him confined upon the “bare island” of an empty stage. Prospero's closing lines draw attention to the very close similarity between participation in a community of grace and willing participation in a work of theatrical art:

                                                                                Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

(Epilogue, 13-20)

As Prospero responds charitably to those within his power, so he requests from us a charitable response and an exertion of our visionary imagination which will permit us to assist the artist in his miraculous transformation of the brazen world in which we live into the Golden World of art.

SHAKESPEARE, OCCULT PHILOSOPHY, AND RENAISSANCE CONCEPTIONS OF HUMAN NATURE

The Tempest arrives at its final vision of human nature through a dialectical process which initially presents us with two diametrically opposed extremes of the Renaissance debate concerning the limits of the human personality. The first clear statement of the pessimistic view of humankind occurs in Miranda's description of Caliban in act 1, scene 2: he is an “Abhorred slave / Which any print of goodness wilt not take, / Being capable of all ill” (I.ii.351-53).¹⁷ If Miranda's lines on Caliban remind us of Jean Calvin's view of fallen human nature, her response to her first sight of Ferdinand recalls Pico's Oration: “What, is't a spirit?” she exclaims, “Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir, / It carries a brave form. But 'tis a spirit” (I.ii.410-12). Prospero seeks to qualify her naive enthusiasm about Ferdinand by telling her that although “A goodly person,” he is still—at least in part—a mere mortal: “it eats, and sleeps, and hath such senses / As we have” (I.ii.417, 413-14). Unaffected by the moderate words of her father, the young, enraptured lover remains awestruck:

                                                            I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble.

(I.ii.418-20)

Miranda retains her innocent faith in humankind throughout the play. When she first sees Alonso and his company in the final scene, she expresses her admiration in what may well be the most famous lines in The Tempest:

                                                                                          O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!

(V.i.181-84)

Although Shakespeare places these lines in the mouth of a naive adolescent, they nonetheless epitomize the sense of exhiliration felt by those early Renaissance humanists and philosophers who proclaimed that they were entering a new era in which human nature would fulfill its divine potential. Since the audience has become familiar with Antonio, Sebastian, and the others by this point in the play, we hardly need Prospero's line, “'Tis new to thee” (V.i.184), to underscore the irony of the speech; and yet I do not believe that Shakespeare's aim is to discredit Miranda's assessment of humankind entirely. Her faith needs to be qualified, not destroyed, and her innocence and trust are necessary components of the genuine charity which exerts its transforming power throughout the play. Such innocence can be destroyed by experience, but it may subsequently be restored in a more mature form, as it has been in Prospero, whose trial, like that of Pericles and of Leontes in Shakespeare's previous romances, restores to him the somewhat qualified trustfulness and the ability to love which enable him to forgive his enemies in spite of his awareness that some of them may not respond to his clemency. The difference between Miranda's faith and her father's is that Prospero is always aware of the tragic discrepancy between what human beings can become and what most of them actually are; the similarity between Miranda and her father is their shared awareness that humankind possesses a divine spirit which confers upon us a potential for benevolence and creativity. When Miranda tells us that “nothing ill can dwell in such a temple” as Ferdinand's “brave form” (I.ii.457, 412), we should recall Saint Paul's well-known words in his first letter to the Corinthians:

Know ye not, that your bodie is the temple of the holie G[h]ost, which is in you, whome ye have of God? and ye are not your owne.

For ye are bo[u]ght for a price: therefore glorifie God in your bodie, and in your spirit: for they are God[']s.¹⁸

An echo of this same passage reverberates in the final line of Gonzalo's summary of the events of The Tempest:

                                                                                In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero, his dukedom
In a poor isle; and all us, ourselves,
When no man was his own.

(V.i.208-13, my emphasis)

Shakespeare emphasizes humanity's divine potential in his romances much more insistently than he had in most of his previous works, and this change of emphasis correlates with a striking alteration in Shakespeare's treatment of magic. In the history plays and the tragedies, from the witchcraft of Joan of Arc in Henry VI, Part One, and the sorcery of Owen Glendower in Henry IV through the player-villain's poison produced by “natural magic” in Hamlet (III.ii.259) and the evil witches of Macbeth, Shakespeare typically associates magic and sorcery with subversion of proper order and with deception. In Love's Labor's Lost he suggests that the ambition to seek knowledge of “Things hid and barr'd … from common sense” (I.i.57) springs from a proud and foolish attempt to distinguish oneself from ordinary mortals, whom Dumaine terms “the gross world's baser slaves” (I.i.30), and in this early comedy Shakespeare repeatedly mocks the suggestion that study can make us “godlike” (I.i.58).¹⁹ While there is some precedent for benevolent magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream and for a positive view of Paracelsian medicine in All's Well That Ends Well and elsewhere,²⁰ only in the romances does Shakespeare affirm boldly the belief that humankind possesses a divine potential which may be fully realized through knowledge, self-discipline, love, and faith. The most explicit statment occurs in act 3 of Pericles, when Cerimon, a magus like Prospero, tells us that “Virtue and cunning” are “endowments greater / Than nobleness and riches,” since the latter are things which one's worldly heirs can dissipate, whereas “immortality attends the former, / Making a man a god” (III.ii.27-31). To the sound of mysterious music, Cerimon miraculously resurrects Thaisa; his art, inspiring wonder in those who witness it, is a means through which heaven rewards those whose love and faith are constant. Similarly, Paulina, in the final scene of The Winter's Tale, instructs the repentant Leontes to awaken his faith as she calls for music and restores to him his lost queen in a scene obviously modelled on the account of the magical animation of statues in the Hermetic Asclepius. Although Paulina's art is not literal magic, as is Prospero's, the scene suggests the extent to which Hermetic sources have stimulated Shakespeare's imagination as he seeks to perfect a genre which will affirm the power of love and faith to dignify humankind and to renew life. Paulina's art achieves its effect through an illusion which becomes reality as Leontes responds to it, and the scene thus suggests the same metaphorical identification between benevolent magic and theatrical art which Shakespeare develops in further detail in The Tempest.

Aware of the dangers of asserting individual freedom, dignity, and power to the exclusion of the value of sustaining the human community, Shakespeare distinguishes carefully in the romances between true and false conceptions of human nobility. In act 2 of The Tempest, when Antonio endeavors to persuade Sebastian to kill Alonso, he tells him, in speeches which may remind us of Tamburlaine or Dr. Faustus, that a man who bears a noble mind should assert his power over his fellow human beings. If Sebastian boldly seizes the opportunity which Fortune has offered him, Antonio suggests, he can master his own destiny. As I suggested in the previous section, Antonio's false conception of nobility is a corollary of his materialistic and cynical conception of the human personality, his denial of the “deity” within the human bosom (II.i.278). Genuine awareness of one's spiritual potential in The Tempest, tempered by an acknowledgment of human passions and limitations, leads not to the desire to dominate, but to the desire to serve; the attempt to destroy the bonds which unite the individual with all of humankind leads, ironically, to enslavement to one's own passions and ambitions.

False conceptions of human nobility and freedom are associated with goetia, such as the evil magic of Sycorax, a travesty of Prospero's benevolent art. Although I am indebted to Frank Kermode's discussion of this contrast between magia and goetia in his important introduction to The Tempest, I would qualify his suggestion that the goetia of Sycorax is “natural” magic, whereas Prospero's is “supernatural” (xxiv-xxv, xl-li); the contrast, as I perceive it, is between evil magic, which is unnatural, and benevolent magic, which draws upon both natural and supernatural powers in order to bring nature to fulfillment. Benevolent art such as Prospero's is in a sense “natural” in that it restores harmony within the natural order. In addition, benevolent art is effected through the human mind, itself a product of nature, although disciplined by art and enlightened by grace. A pertinent explanation occurs in The Winter's Tale, when Polixenes explains to Perdita that

Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean; so, over that art
Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This an art
Which does mend Nature—change it rather; but
The art itself is Nature.

(IV.iv.88-97)

Polixenes' explanation of how art “mends” or “changes” nature is similar to Pico's description of benevolent magic in his Oration and to Prospero's art in The Tempest. It is an art which improves uncultivated nature—“the wildest stock”—by marrying it to something more noble. The change occurs when art releases the potential of nature and guides the development of that potential purposefully. It is helpful to recall the emphasis in The Tempest upon marriage as a means of guiding natural creative powers into constructive channels: the physical dimension of nature becomes fulfilled through institutions which are associated with the controlling power of our higher faculties, and the process is completed through religious ceremonies which invoke the aid of divine grace. Our natural powers are gifts which, if used properly, enable us to participate in the process of creative love which defeats time and change; if we abuse them, they become destructive. Prospero's repeated admonitions to chastity, although they may seem overly zealous or even comical to a modern audience, are in accordance with this principle: if Ferdinand keeps his procreative desires within the bounds of the divinely sanctioned institution of marriage, his union with Miranda will be harmonious and fruitful; if not, it will be barren and filled with discord (IV.i.13-22). The marriage ceremony itself is a form of divinely inspired art, just as Prospero's masque or Ariel's music is. It is a means through which grace effects a miraculous change in nature.

The second scene of The Tempest introduces several important terms which help to convey this conception of magic as an art that amends or reforms uncultivated nature. When Prospero describes Antonio's usurpation of Prospero's dukedom, he says that Antonio,

Being once perfected how to grant suits,
How to deny them, who t' advance, and who
To trash for overtopping, new created
The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang'd 'em,
Or else new form'd 'em; having both the key
Of officer and office, set all hearts i' th' state
To what tune pleas'd his ear, that now he was
The ivy which had hid my princely trunk,
And suck'd my verdure out on't.

(I.ii.79-87)

Antonio's “art” is of course evil, a form of goetia which saps the life of the proper order rather than invigorating it, and it is thus an inverted parody of Prospero's benevolent art, but the words “perfected,” “new created,” “changed,” and “new formed” nonetheless help to establish at an early stage of the play the central emphasis on transformation. The passage also alludes to the magician's marriage of the elm and the vine, and to music, both of which refer in the occult tradition to the influence of heavenly powers upon earthly creation. Music, in particular, was widely believed to possess the power to restore harmony among the faculties of the human personality.²¹ The passage thus contributes to our growing awareness that Prospero's art seeks to effect restorative transformations. To summarize the contrast between magia and goetia in The Tempest, one should say that benevolent magic fulfills and perfects natural processes, whereas evil magic endeavors to destroy or pervert them. Prospero's art brings nature into conformity with the rational and spiritual planes of reality and thus with Providence. It renews the bonds uniting the human community, whereas goetia seeks to destroy those bonds in order to confer illegitimate power upon a single individual.

The subplot involving Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano dramatizes a comic version of the goetia which parodies Prospero's benevolent art. Caliban ironically subjugates himself to Stephano in an attempt to escape his true master, Prospero, and his false sense of freedom is contrasted with the genuine liberation found by Ferdinand when he submits to Prospero's discipline. While Ferdinand and Miranda become united through mutual service and devotion, the characters in the subplot are united only by self-interest, and hence their union is unstable and transitory. And just as Ferdinand and Miranda perceive each other as godlike, so Caliban regards Stephano as “a brave god” who “bears celestial liquor” (II.ii.117). He wonders whether Trinculo and Stephano have just dropped from heaven. The irony of his remarks is underscored by Stephano's gross jest (II.ii.105-7) that Trinculo, who has been hiding under Caliban's cloak, appears to be the monster's excrement. The episode reminds us of Prospero's reference to Caliban himself as “filth” (I.ii.346). The effect of the scene may be to render absurd—at least temporarily—the idea that the individual is a kind of deity, but the absurdity is relevant only to those characters who exist on a level of development far below Prospero's. The low humor contributes to the debate concerning human nature by reminding us of the basest elements of the human personality, but the purpose of the comic plot, with its perverted worship and its attempt to commit murder in an effort to further the ambitions and lusts of a trio of misguided fools, is to contrast the genuine magic and genuine fulfillment dramatized in the main action. The use of liquor is prominent in the subplot because drunkenness tends to extinguish the higher faculties and leave the appetites without conscious control.²² The clowns' drunkenness also produces a false sense of self-expansion which contrasts with the true self-fulfillment found by Ferdinand and Alonso. This false sense of self-realization entails severing one's ties with one's fellow human beings, whereas true self-fulfillment entails a commitment to the good of the human community.

As Arthur Lovejoy and others have pointed out, The Tempest is in part a satirical commentary upon the optimism concerning uncultivated human nature which Montaigne seemed to express in his essay “On the Cannibals.”²³ This “soft” primitivism, which claims that art corrupts rather than perfects nature, is expressed in somewhat whimsical fashion by Gonzalo when he says that if he had “plantation” of the isle, he would establish an ideal commonwealth that would “excel the golden age” (II.i.144, 169). His scheme, reminiscent of the utopianism mocked by Jonson in The Alchemist, would restore humankind to its lost innocence and thus eliminate the need for law or social organization. There would be no hierarchy, no private property, no learning. Although it is possible that Gonzalo is expressing his own naive optimism, it seems more likely that he himself is aware that he is indulging in a fantasy and that Shakespeare is utilizing Gonzalo's speeches to introduce a more extreme optimism concerning the possibility of social reform than any character in the play would seriously profess. Sebastian and Antonio's cynical commentary provides immediate qualification of this naive point of view, not least because we are soon reminded of the human capacity for brutality embodied by Antonio in particular. But perhaps the most devastating critique of the apparent idealization of “natural” humankind is Shakespeare's characterization of Caliban, who serves as a flesh-and-blood example of what uncultivated human nature is really like. Although Caliban develops into a character who eludes complete categorization, he is, in part, representative of human nature in a fallen and perverted condition, a reminder of what human beings may become if our baser elements are uncontrolled. In the tragedies, perhaps most notably King Lear, unnatural cruelty and egotism are repeatedly described as “monstrous”; in The Tempest, the verbal image is replaced by a visual one, an actual monster whom we find to be “as disproportion'd in his manners / As in his shape” (V.i.291-92). One of the ways in which The Tempest contains the potential for tragic destruction epitomized in Caliban is by the creation, in Prospero, of a character who has attained the power to master the destructive potential of such a beast. Moreover, The Tempest suggests the process through which such mastery is achieved, as we watch Prospero teaching both Ferdinand and Alonso to remember not only their potential for godlike benevolence but also the guilt which is their mortal inheritance. As Prospero admits his own mortal limits when he points to Caliban and says, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (V.i.275-76), the play closes with an admonition that our better selves can be liberated only if we remember those aspects of our personalities which must be controlled if they are to be fulfilled and, perhaps, transcended.

Each of the works explored in this study is unique in its artistic methods and its philosophical implications, and it is obvious that no final comparison can be exhaustive. Yet I would venture to say that the distinctive character of The Tempest derives in large part from its calm—one is tempted to say serene—sense of balance. The play permits us to entertain the possibility that humankind possesses an unknown, perhaps indeterminate, creative potential, and yet the heart of the work is its insistence that we cannot fulfill ourselves until we discover our proper relationship with our fellow human beings. One of Shakespeare's most impressive achievements is his ability to face the truth about the human capacity for destruction, yet leave us with a feeling of hope. As we appreciate the intricacy of the symbolic structure of The Tempest, we may also feel that the quality of our aesthetic experience is derived from the play's power to make us feel with renewed intensity the validity of those insights, attitudes, and values which confer upon human life its deepest significance.

Eugenio Garin has described with moving eloquence the essential motivation behind the studies and the teaching of the humanist movement initiated in the Renaissance. To the humanists, Garin writes,

antiquity was indeed not only a field in which to exercise their scholarly curiosity, but also a living example. In their eyes, classical antiquity had achieved a wonderful fullness of life and of harmony and had both expressed these achievements and handed them down in works of art and thought as perfect as that life itself. To come into contact with these monuments and with the minds behind them was like an ideal conversation with perfect men and allowed one to learn from them the meaning of existence. If one opens one's heart humbly to those wonderful works and transforms oneself, as it were, through love into them, one can regenerate oneself by absorbing so much human richness and thus reconquer the mastery over all the treasures of the mind.²⁴

The critical habits of mind which Professor Garin himself admires make it difficult for us to accept the word “perfect,” and modern criticism has raised formidable doubts concerning the possibility of the form of communion which Garin describes. The Tempest itself makes us aware of the limitations of art, and it encourages us to affirm the revelatory and redemptive power of Shakespeare's work only with significant qualifications. And yet the play also invites us to an act of faith. It suggests that if we exert our imagination, our vision may, in fact, coincide with that of the artist. If such a miracle does in fact occur, it may contribute to a magical transformation of our perception of ourselves and the world around us.

Notes

1. References to Shakespeare's plays are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and others.

2. Douglas Peterson provides fine commentary on the restoration of faith in the romances in Time, Tide, and Tempest, esp. 3-36. I should add, however, that I do not think it necessary to abandon altogether G. Wilson Knight's suggestion that the last plays embody what Knight terms “the triumphant mysticism of the dream of love's perfected fruition in eternity stilling the tumultuous waves of time” (The Crown of Life, 26). Professor Peterson implies (e.g., 45) that he feels obliged to disagree with Knight in this respect, arguing that in Shakespeare's view of time, “the Augustinian dichotomy between the eternal and the temporal no longer separates this world from eternity, but is now manifest in things. Thus man can no longer simply dismiss temporality for the sake of contemplation” (21). While I agree with much of Peterson's commentary, I would stress that Renaissance thinkers often regarded the eternal as both immanent and transcendent; an ambivalent attitude toward the mutable world is therefore characteristic of much of Renaissance literature, including Shakespeare. Moreover, the central, unifying metaphor of the “sea-change” in The Tempest points toward the operation of universal principles of order on more than one ontological level: love and faith renew life both on the level of the world of generation on which Professor Peterson focuses and on the transcendent level with which Professor Knight is concerned.

3. Ficino, Theologia Platonica, 2:260.

4. West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery, 86, emphasis altered. My contention, of course, is that Prospero is a “‘holy magician’ like the Apostles,” in accordance with Renaissance Neoplatonic theory.

5. Mowat, “Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus”; C. J. Sisson, “The Magic of Prospero.” See also Mowat's The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances, esp. 30-31. The comparison of the magus to the benevolent monarch is developed in various ways by Sisson; Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 44-49; Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic; and R. A. D. Grant, “Providence, Authority, and the Moral Life in The Tempest.” Additional discussions of Prospero's art as corrupt or ambiguous include Cosmo Corfield, “Why Does Prospero Abjure His ‘Rough Magic?’”; Patrick Grant, “The Magic of Charity: A Background to Prospero,” esp. 8-9; and David Young, The Heart's Forest, 146-91.

   Barbara Traister, in Heavenly Necromancers, 1-64 and 125-49, recognizes the multiple sources of The Tempest while developing a convincing argument concerning the benevolence of Prospero's art. Walter Clyde Curry's Shakespeare's Philosophical Patterns, 141-99, contributed much to our understanding of the nature of Prospero's magic, but his book was written long before the important recent research on Renaissance occultism. Relying more heavily on ancient and Hellenistic philosophers than on Ficino, Pico, or Agrippa, for example, Curry asserts that the goal of the magician was to attain the impassive status of the gods (cf. also Traister, 140-43); more characteristic of Renaissance occultists—and of The Tempest—is the conviction that the magus imitates God by caring providentially for the lower world.

   I am indebted to Derek Traversi's discussion of the pattern of disruption and restoration of harmony in “The Last Plays of Shakespeare” and his Shakespeare: The Last Phase, 193-272; and to Frank Kermode's treatment of Prospero's art as a civilizing force in his Introduction to The Tempest, xxiv-lxiii. While specific points of indebtedness and disagreement appear below, I may say in general that whereas Traversi and Kermode tend to stress Prospero's rational control of the passions, my own primary emphasis is on the suprarational and visionary dimensions of the magician's art.

6. Ficino, Theologia Platonica, 2:229: “Hinc admiramur quod animae hominum Deo deditae imperent elementis, citent ventos, nubes cogent in pluvias, nebulas pellant, humanorum corporum curent morbos et reliqua.” All of bk. 13, chaps. 4 and 5 (2:229-45), is relevant.

7. Jackson Cope, The Theater and the Dream, 236-44. Barbara Mowat, in “Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus,” points out correctly that Agrippa is, quite typically, inconsistent on the matter of raising the dead, condemning it in his initial disclaimer and subsequently “claiming that sometimes the magus ‘receiveth this miraculous power’ to ‘command the Elements, drive away Fogs, raise the winds … raise the dead’”; this quotation from Agrippa (obviously revealing Agrippa's debt to Ficino's Theologia, 2:229 et passim) is from the 1651 translation, 357, quoted by Mowat, 288, n. 14.

8. See Ficino, Theologia Platonica, 2:206 and 243-45; and cf. Curry, 177 ff. On the “tempest” as an alchemical process, see Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance, 191. On the limitations of evil magic, see Pico's Oratio (De hominis dignitate), ed. Garin, 148-54; Lambert Daneau, A Dialogue of Witches, sigs. F1r-G2v et passim; William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, 157-59; and James I, Daemonologie, 4 et passim.

9. See also I.ii.217. Prospero's concern extends not only to Ferdinand, whom he wishes to marry Miranda, but to every soul on the ship.

10. On this scene, see Reuben Brower's “The Mirror of Analogy: The Tempest,” 116-17, and Traversi, Shakespeare: The Last Phase, 251-54.

11. See Pico's Oratio, ed. Garin, 152: “Et sicut agricola ulmos vitibus, ita Magus terram caelo, idest inferiora superiorum dotibus virtutibusque maritat” (“As the farmer marries elms to vines, so the magus marries earth to heaven, that is, lower things to the gifts and virtues of higher things”). Pico also refers to humankind as the intermediary between the spiritual and material worlds, the “nuptial bond” which unites “the steadfastness of eternity and the flow of time”: “Horum dictorum rationem cogitanti mihi non satis illa faciebant, quae multa de humanae naturae praestantia afferuntur a multis: esse hominem creaturarum internuntium, superis familiarem, regem inferiorum; sensuum perspicacia, rationis indagine, intelligentiae lumine, naturae interpretem; stabilis aevi et fluxi temporis interstitium, et (quod Persae dicunt) mundi copulam, immo hymenaeum, ab angelis, teste Davide, paulo deminutum” (Garin ed., 102). Pico goes on to praise the human soul's marvellous powers of self-transformation as the basis of human dignity and freedom.

12. A. Lynne Magnusson, “Interruption in The Tempest.” Among the most important and closely reasoned arguments in favor of the relativism and/or ambivalence of The Tempest are those of Barbara Mowat's “Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus,” David Young's The Heart's Forest, 146-91, and David Lindley's “Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest.” D. D. Carnicelli has argued, in “The Widow and the Phoenix: Dido, Carthage, and Tunis in The Tempest,” that Shakespeare's art “stands closer to Pirandello and to Beckett and Ionesco and the Theatre of the Absurd than to the techniques we have come to expect of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama” (433).

13. See Alvin Kernan, The Playwright as Magician, 129-59; and Traister, Heavenly Necromancers, 125-49. Robert Egan, in Drama within Drama, 90-119, has argued that because Prospero himself cannot initially accept human imperfections, his art, throughout most of the play, is too highly idealized to withstand the intrusions of reality.

14. Cf. Kenneth J. Semon, “Fantasy and Wonder in Shakespeare's Last Plays”; Cope, The Theater and the Dream, 236-44. Joan Hartwig, in Shakespeare's Tragicomic Vision, 137-74, comments perceptively on the “transference of ultimate control to a human actor” (137) in the play, as well as upon Prospero's art as an effort to expand the vision of other characters. My own previous study of dream visions in Shakespeare occurs in “Structure, Source, and Meaning in A Midsummer Night's Dream.”

15. On the geography of the region, see, for example, Abraham Ortelius, Epitome of the Theater of the World, sigs. 106v-107r. I am also indebted to Professor Carnicelli's thorough reserch in “The Widow and the Phoenix” on the historical and geographical works by Africanus, Hakluyt, and Eden and Willes. (Richard Eden's Decades of the New Worlde was enlarged by Eden and his follower Richard Willes and published as The History of Travayle.) Professor Carnicelli argues, however, that because there were various traditions concerning Dido's moral character and, to a lesser extent, the question of whether Tunis and Carthage were identical or merely contiguous, the scene suggests a form of relativism rather than a confirmation of Gonzalo's point of view. I find it difficult to see how this conclusion follows from Carnicelli's research on Carthage and Tunis, especially in view of his own important observation that among the texts available in Shakespeare's day there was “an almost eerie unanimous willingness—almost an eagerness—to accept Carthage as a vivid example of the endless process of historical decay and renewal” (432).

16. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning, 139.

17. Many modern editors (G. B. Harrison, for example, in Shakespeare: The Complete Works) have attributed Miranda's speech to Prospero. Except for sentimentality with regard to Miranda, however, there is little justification for thus altering the reading of the folio. In fact, assigning this speech to Prospero tends to diminish the contrast between Miranda's lines on Caliban and her description of Ferdinand.

18. 1 Cor. 6:19-20, quoted from the Geneva Bible. On Shakespeare's use of the Geneva Bible, see Peter Milward, Shakespeare's Religious Background, 86.

19. See also Berowne's comic reference to himself as being “like a demigod” at IV.iii.78. Occult philosophy is only one of several kinds of false learning which Love's Labor's Lost satirizes, however; studies such as Frances Yates's A Study of Love's Labor's Lost and Muriel Bradbrook's The School of Night, although they offer some tantalizing suggestions, ultimately become lost in speculation concerning topical references rather than focusing upon the spirit of the plays as a whole. Similar problems occur in Yates's discussion of the romances in Shakespeare's Last Plays.

20. Allusions to the Paracelsian emphasis on spiritual and psychic harmony are explored by J. Scott Bentley in “Helena's Paracelsian Cure of the King: Magia Naturalis in All's Well That Ends Well.”

21. On the role of music in magical theory, see above, Chapter 2. In addition to the uses of music in Shakespeare's romances, one may recall the prominence of music in the restoration scene in act 4 of King Lear.

    The relationship between magia and goetia in The Tempest illustrates yet another facet of Shakespeare's use of parody and analogical structure, techniques which have been explored in detail by Joan Hartwig in Shakespeare's Analogical Scene; for Hartwig's discussion of these devices in The Tempest, see 182-90.

22. See Traversi, “Last Plays,” esp. 444-45.

23. Arthur Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, 238, cited by Kermode, xxxiv. Kermode expands Lovejoy's point on xxxiv-xliii.

24. Garin, Italian Humanism, 77.

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