Shakespeare's The Tempest: Prospero, the magician who renounces magic

Prospero, Ariel and Caliban: Renaissance magic in Shakespeare's The Tempest, between the John Dee hypothesis and the magician's farewell to power.

The Tempest is probably the last play William Shakespeare wrote without collaborators. It was performed at court, at Whitehall, on 1 November 1611, and appeared in print in the First Folio of 1623, where it stands in first place. At its centre is Prospero, Duke of Milan, deposed by his brother Antonio, who for twelve years has lived on a remote island with his daughter Miranda and commands the spirits by means of his books.

A learned magician, not a witch

Shakespeare carefully distinguishes two forms of occult power. Prospero is a learned magician who neglected the government of his state to devote himself to secret studies: his art rests on knowledge, books and discipline. Opposed to him is Sycorax, the witch from Algiers who died before the action begins, mother of Caliban, who had imprisoned Ariel in a cloven pine. Prospero freed him and has kept him in his service ever since.

This distinction reflects a debate of the period. In the Renaissance, natural magic and occult philosophy, developed by authors such as Marsilio Ficino and Cornelius Agrippa, were presented as noble sciences, while witchcraft was considered a pact with the devil and was harshly prosecuted by courts throughout Europe, both Catholic and Protestant.

The shadow of John Dee

Many critics have seen in Prospero a reflection of John Dee, mathematician, astrologer and adviser to Elizabeth I, who together with the medium Edward Kelley had tried to communicate with angels. In the twentieth century the scholar Frances Yates linked the character to the Hermetic and Kabbalistic tradition of the English Renaissance. There is, however, no proof that Shakespeare had Dee in mind, and the hypothesis should be regarded as an interpretation, not a fact.

Ariel, a spirit of the air able to become fire, music and storm, recalls the hierarchies of spirits described in Renaissance treatises on magic. Caliban, bound to the earth and to the instincts of the body, is his opposite. Between the two, Prospero seems to embody the Hermetic ideal of the man who masters nature through the mind and the knowledge of its hidden laws.

The stuff of dreams

In the fourth act Prospero interrupts a masque of spirits and delivers one of his most famous lines: «We are such stuff as dreams are made on». The world, the palaces, the great globe itself will vanish like the pageant just dissolved. The magic of the island thus becomes an image of the theatre, and the theatre an image of life, brief and illusory.

Many readers have noted that the theatre of Shakespeare's company was called the Globe, and that the word recurs in Prospero's speech. We do not know whether the allusion was intended, but the identification between the magician who creates illusions and the playwright who moves the actors runs through the whole play and has been taken up by generations of directors.

Breaking the staff

In the fifth act, having obtained his enemies' repentance, Prospero announces that he will abjure his «rough magic», break his staff and drown his book deeper than any plummet ever sounded. In the epilogue, left without powers, he asks the audience to release him with their applause. Many have read this leave-taking as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage, although the author went on to collaborate on other works.

The Tempest thus remains one of the highest literary portraits of the Renaissance magician. It shows no rites or formulas, but an idea: secret knowledge has meaning only if it leads to reconciliation and, in the end, to the renunciation of the power it has granted. Prospero does not punish his enemies, he forgives them, and he gives freedom back both to Ariel and, in a sense, to himself.