Magic

Abstract

Prospero is not only a coloniser, however. He is also a magician. It is when we consider Caliban and Ariel in the context of the supernatural that the savage and the spirit assume a quite different significance. Shakespeare uses Caliban as a pointer to the evil black magic which is the antithesis of the beneficent white magic Prospero employs. However sympathetic we may feel to the exploited native, Shakespeare does not allow us to experience anything but repugnance and fear in considering his birth and the function of his mother’s sorcery. Sycorax — a figure all the more disturbing because we do not see her — personifies all the terrors and horrors which the Elizabethans and Jacobeans channelled into their savage hunting of witches. She enables us by contrast to see Prospero as a quite different exploiter of the supernatural, as a man of wisdom seeking to employ his knowledge for the betterment of the world around him.