The Labyrinth and the Oracle

Abstract

In both Pericles and The Tempest, the first and last of his romances, Shakespeare resorts to a kind of sovereign gaze, somewhat similar to Pythagoras’s in the Metamorphoses, in order to work on the maze of time in which human beings wander in the vain search for final meanings. In the first play, the medieval poet Gower is called back “From [his] ashes” (Prologue 2) to preside over a theatrical version of a legendary story, whose events are to be seen as ordained, step by step, by chance (that here stands for Providence), and can therefore finally make sense, due to this a posteriori narrative point of view. Prospero’s gaze, by contrast, can still dominate natural time, but only at the cost of creating a magical suspension in which time should flow only according to his point-by-point arrangement. He is therefore in the action, in the quality of both transcendental author and main protagonist of the events. Still, as we shall see, he has to grasp a fortunate chance, offered to him by natural time, and must therefore hurry up to bring to a conclusion his plan addressed to retrieving and redeeming the past in view of a better future.