Day: July 30, 2023

“Ye shall know them by their fruits”

“How came we ashore?” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He was the Duke of Milan but preferred his books in the study of natural philosophy to the mundane duties of running his dukedom which he had delegated to his brother, Antonio.. Betrayed by his brother, who in cahoots with Alonzo, the King of Naples, usurped his dukedom, Prospero and Miranda are set adrift on the seas on a derelict raft. Never mind that Milan is not an Italian port city! They wash up on an island – “the Bermoothes” – Bermuda, as it turns out. Not such a bad place to come ashore, I suppose. The play is the only play of Shakespeare that is set outside the Euro-Mediterranean world. Miranda at the time in the play was three. Now at fifteen she learns who she is, the daughter of the Duke of Milan. Prospero’s answer to her question “how came we ashore?” is “by providence divine.”

The play explores the ambiguities of Prospero’s intent. His knowledge of nature in Renaissance eyes is a kind of magic – so-called ‘white magic’. It belongs to early modernity in different ways to see knowledge as conferring a power over nature. We should be only too well aware of the deadly consequences of such knowledge in our own times. Prospero conjures up a storm, a tempest, to bring his betrayers to the island and under his power. But to what end? Revenge? Or something more? Reconciliation?

There is a nice sense here of the interplay between natural and moral philosophy. On the ship are not only his betrayers but also the son of one of his betrayers, Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, King of Naples. As well there is the noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, who gave Prospero his books as he was being set adrift. On the island, there is Caliban, the symbolic image of the indigenous cultures in their encounter with European culture. Shakespeare not only explores the complexity of that encounter but provides a Euro-critique of itself that derives from the indigenous cultures themselves.

The play unfolds the love theme between Ferdinand and Miranda that leads to forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness and reconciliation are extended even towards those who show no remorse, no change, such as Prospero’s brother, Antonio, and Alonzo’s brother, Sebastian, unrepentant scoundrels and miscreants both. Yet grace is greater than those who resist it; they are sustained by what they refuse to embrace but, at the same time, what they cannot enjoy. There’s the rub.

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