Prospero

Abstract

But Prospero is a Renaissance Mage, a theurgist, ‘whose Art is to achieve supremacy over the natural world by holy magic’ (Kermode 1964, p. xl). ‘His Art is … the disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge … a technique for liberating the soul from the passions … the practical application of a discipline of which the primary requirements are learning and temperance, and of which the mode is contemplation’ (xlvii–xlviii). He sums up Shakespeare’s life-long interest in magic: he is a magician like Rosalind’s, ‘most profound in his art and yet not damnable’ [As You Like It, v.ii.60]. His magic is only ‘rough’ in that it is ‘unsubtle by comparison with the next degree of the mage’s enlightenment’ (Kermode, p. 115; and see Sisson 1970; Yates 1975). Indeed, his benevolence can be made to be so cloying that he is in danger of standing on stage like one of Dickens’s Cheeryble brothers in fancy-dress, presiding over rather energetic home theatricals. In one jump we seem to be a long way from the sadistic absolute ruler of black slaves, in modern Caribbean experience and fancy.