Shakespeare's The Tempest

Prospero has been given considerable power as a magician and as the controller of the spirits of the island, and his enemies have been delivered to him by the tempest. Brockbank refers to such devices as "self-conscious artifice" and says that Shakespeare's last plays tend to make use of such elements. In The Tempest, these elements are used to develop deeper meanings and relations among characters and ideas:

There is a multiple, complex allegory. It has to do with the social and moral nature of man, with the natural world, with the ways of providence, and with the nature of art. Yet this very complexity is the source of the play's simplicity--of its power to entertain, to move, and to satisfy our playgoing a

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e and vulnerability of the real world, which will also fade away as life fades away, leaving not even a cloud behind. This masque occurs at the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda. This masque offers "a figuration on Gonzalo's utopia and enacts on a mythological level the human action of the play" (Felperin 199). This is significant because it occurs at the betrothal, with the prospective wedding thus seen as a new beginning, a healing event, and the culmination of the romance of Ferdinand and Miranda. This also suggests that Prospero views this romance in the same terms--a new beginning and part of a process of healing. Ferdinand himself represents a new beginning to Miranda, and he is viewed differently by different characters: For the court party, Ferdinand is a lost heir, forever sunk beneath the seas. For Miranda, by contrast, he has been born from the seas and has found in Prospero a second father. Alonzo seeks Ferdinand in the muddy depths of the ocean; Ferdinand seeks to remain in paradise forever (Patrick 75). When Ferdinand and Miranda first meet, they mistake each other for something not human: "Miranda mistakes Ferdinand for a spirit; he mistakes her for a goddess" (Traister 125). Their subsequent relatio
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Approximate Word count = 2627
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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