> Prospero is
>living out every man's fantasy of being stranded on a desert island with
>a beautiful young woman, only in this case the woman is his own
>daughter. He tries to deal with the guilt by projecting it on Caliban,
>or you might say he creates Caliban to split off the part of himself
>that lusts for Miranda: "I have used thee, filth as thou art, with
>human care, and lodged thee in mine own cell, till thou didst seek to
>violate the honour of my child."
>Like so many (all?) of Shakespeare's plays it is
>ultimately about fatherhood, and it ultimately enforces a fundamentally
>Freudian interpretation. I'm quite aware that the foregoing will elicit
>the sneers of the ignorant.
Jon, this is somewhat reductive of that magical play - I mean magical in
the most serious possible sense. A psychological interpretation may sit
in there, Shakespeare is large enough, but to claim it as an ultimate
interpretation you have to ignore so much of the play. The restoration of
Prospero's power is also crucially a renunciation, and a bitter
renunciation, hedging the "redemption" in his famous final speech with
serious qualifications; an incestuous desire on the part of Prospero may
well be part of his fatherly emotions, but is hardly the whole of it,
hardly the _secret_; and the play itself _enforces_ no such
interpretation. Prospero is surely a Renaissance Magus with access to
that knowledge and power (Kott argues the play is a challenge,
interpretation and finally a rejection of the myths of the Aeneid) which
argues a somewhat wider stage than the merely psychological. The Tempest
also is a very sophisticated piece of theatre, as much as anything a
meditation on the illusions of the stage itself: one example: the play
lasts for _three hours_, and the time is marked exactly during the course
of the play; theatrical time and literal time are the same. And so on.
Shakespeare's play are so multifaceted it seems ridiculous to say they're
all about fatherhood. Of course they are; but they're also about power,
sex, masks and personae, politics, death, failure, daughters, sisters,
mothers, memory, theatre, etc etc. I recommend Harold Pinter's essay on
him, The Peopled Wound, which is at once very short and very beautiful,
and doesn't try to pin him down like a Dead Poet.
Alison
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