Prospero in The Tempest: the magician who gives up his books
Ariel, Caliban and the broken staff: the magician of The Tempest between Renaissance magic, John Dee and theatre as a spell that bids its audience farewell.
The Tempest, written by William Shakespeare around 1610-1611 and published in the 1623 Folio, is the only one of his plays built entirely around a magician. Prospero, Duke of Milan, deposed by his brother, lives on a remote island with his daughter Miranda and commands the elements through his books and his art. From the opening storm, which wrecks his enemies on the island's shores, the whole action is driven by his will.
A Renaissance magician
Prospero is not a sorcerer who makes pacts with the devil, like Marlowe's Faustus. He is rather a scholar who neglected government to devote himself to secret studies, and his magic appears as a learned art, made of books, a mantle and a staff. The Jacobean audience knew well the distinction, much debated at the time, between natural and philosophical magic, considered lawful by some authors, and demonic witchcraft, condemned by all.
Some twentieth-century scholars, among them Frances Yates, suggested that Prospero may reflect the figure of John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's mathematician and astrologer, known for his attempts to communicate with angels. It is an evocative but unproven hypothesis: the text contains no explicit references, and Prospero can also be read as the synthesis of a whole Renaissance imagination.
Ariel and Caliban
Two opposite creatures live alongside the magician. Ariel is a spirit of the air whom Prospero freed from a pine tree in which the witch Sycorax had imprisoned him, and who serves him while awaiting his promised freedom. Caliban, Sycorax's son, is bound to the earth and to matter and lives his subjection with resentment. The two characters have been read in many ways: as elements of nature, as aspects of the soul or, more recently, as images of colonial relationships.
In the tradition of Renaissance magic, command over spirits was the supreme sign of knowledge. Shakespeare stages this idea but also shows its limits: Ariel obeys while longing to leave, and Prospero's power provokes resistance and resentment. Even Miranda and Ferdinand, the young lovers, are moved by the magician like pieces on a board, until Prospero himself recognises that art cannot replace freedom and compassion.
Renunciation and farewell
In the last act Prospero announces that he will break his staff and drown his book deeper than any plummet ever sounded. The magician renounces magic to become a man among men again, forgiving his enemies instead of punishing them. Shortly before, watching the end of a show performed by spirits, he had said that we are such stuff as dreams are made on.
Many critics have read this renunciation as Shakespeare's own farewell to the theatre, although it was not his last play and the interpretation is traditional rather than documented. In the epilogue Prospero turns to the audience and asks to be set free by their applause. Magician and actor coincide: both create illusions that last the length of a performance and then dissolve, leaving the spectators the task of remembering them.