Prospero’s Magic, a Model for Fantasy Lit

William Hamilton, “Prospero and Ariel”

Teaching Shakespeare’s Tempest in my British Fantasy class has been revealing. We have approached the play from numerous angles, from talking about the kinds of magic practiced by Prospero to 17^th century England’s views regarding magic and science to why Shakespeare would conclude his career by writing fantasy (his late romances).

I assigned my students Barbara Mowat’s 1981 essay “Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus” to better understand the nature of Prospero’s magic. Mowat argues that, at different points in the play, Prospero is a white magic magus, a black magic sorcerer, a repentant wizard, and a street magician.

White magic magi were interested in using the intellect to reveal higher truths in the natural world while black magic sorcerers were more interested in controlling this world for their base ends. The wizard was regarded as a pagan figure (think Merlin) who would eventually embrace Christianity and “burn his books.” Street magicians, finally, were like our own sleight of hand entertainers.

For much of the play Ariel, whom Prospero has released from the tree in which the witch Sycorax has imprisoned him, appears to represent the magic of the magus. Released from the material world that bound him, Ariel carries out cerebral magic. The tempest occurs within the minds of the shipwrecked company, just as the wedding masque arranged by Ariel is designed to ensure that Ferdinand and Miranda rise about their lustful desires and the music he conjures up awakes the king and company from their trance and brings them—or at least some of them—to a higher understanding. As Prospero describes this latter process,

The charm dissolves apace,
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason. 

Black magic is not interested in clearer reason but in manipulating the natural world and is mostly associated with Sycorax, Caliban’s mother. There are moments, however, where Prospero too sounds like a sorcerer, such as in this passage in Act V:

I have bedimm’d
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art. 

Ariel, however, does not appear to be involved in this particular magic, nor do we ever see Prospero actually carry it out. In fact, Mowat sees Prospero at this juncture as more the penitent wizard returning to the orthodox fold.

The fourth possibility—of Prospero as street or parlor magician—certainly fits Prospero when he orchestrates various scenes. In these instances, Ariel is less spirit and more magician’s assistant, helping his master engineer illusions until the term of his indenture expires.

Perhaps by having Prospero shift between the different registers, Shakespeare is making his fantasy alternately serious and light, both an absorbing drama and a lark. Of course, this describes as well the magic of the theater, which feels simultaneously like intense experience and “play.” Of Shakespeare’s plays, Tempest and  Midsummer Night’s Dream are the two that most reveal to us the strings behind the production.  In Prospero we see the delight of the stage manager.

In exploring differences between white and black magic, Shakespeare is also foretelling the dual sides of modern science as it will emerge in the 17th century, science both as illumination of truth and as ego-driven desire to control. Contemporary fantasy has a decidedly anti-science, anti-technology bent because, as I have noted in previous posts, our emphasis on scientific reason seems to close down certain possibilities within us that fantasy opens back up. It is therefore interesting to examine a fantasy written at the beginning of the age of science. Prospero’s white magic, unlike science as we may experience it today, liberates and reconciles rather than shuts down.

That being said, however, Prospero is not always a benign figure, at times using his magic to mete out punishment. We can use our powers for ill as well as good. Indeed, once Prospero acknowledges his kinship with Caliban (“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”), he gives up his magic altogether. By magnanimously foregoing revenge and choosing forgiveness, he has discovered a greater magic and can release both his aerial and his earthly servant.

Aside from magic within the play, it is interesting to think of The Tempest and Shakespeare’s other magic-filled late romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale) as an attempt to do justice to the restorative dimensions of the human spirit, which get short shrift in the tragedies that came before (Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens). Many of the elements that lead to those tragedies can be found in Tempest, such as irresponsible kings, jealousy, usurpation, and a settling of scores. But in this most delightful of resolutions, Shakespeare is able to reconcile the warring sides and end with a vision of harmony. Courts masques, music, and enchanting verse signal that a lost unity that has been lost can be regained. Fantastical though it may sound, there is more to humans than agony and death.

We sense this about fantasy generally, which is why it attracts us. When the world seems broken, we find something healing in our favorite fantasy works. More than escapism, fantasy reminds us of a part of ourselves that, in our resigned surrender to external reality, we have lost sight of.

Further thought: Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces makes a useful contrast between tragedy and “unrealistic” comedy/fantasy that applies well to Tempest. Think of it as the enlightenment Prospero achieves as he moves from thoughts of revenge–which would only add to the brokenness of the world– to acceptance and forgiveness:

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest–as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars. Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.

And further on:

It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are fantastic and “unreal”: they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs…The passage of the mythological hero [Prospero in our application] may be overground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward–into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. This deed accomplished, life no longer suffers hopelessly under the terrible mutilations of ubiquitous disaster, battered by time, hideous throughout space; but with its horror visible still, its cries of anguish still tumultuous, it becomes penetrated by an all-suffusing, all-sustaining love, and a knowledge of its own unconquered power. Something of the light that blazes invisible within the abysses of its normally opaque materiality breaks forth, with an increasing uproar. The dreadful mutilations are then seen as shadows, only, of an immanent, imperishable eternity…

Or as Prospero articulates his new revelation,

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.