Peter Howard seems to be the only one who understands what a
heuristic argument is, though Alison Croggins' post illustrates some of
the benefits which can come from engaging one. I keep forgetting that
most of you are academics at least by training if not by profession and
therefore will make the mistake of believing that if I say that one
interpretation is true I must also be saying that any other
interpretations which it logically precludes are false.
The fantasy of being stranded on a desert island with a beautiful
woman is an archetype which goes back from Odysseus and Calyso to a
zillion contemporary magazine cartoons and has always been
stereotypically sexual. If you don't like being Freudian or Jungian
about it you could just ask yourself what are likely to be the feelings
of an adult man living apart from the constraints of society and with no
female companionship except for his own nubile daughter and whether
Shakespeare knew enough about life to understand such things. Taking
this view Prospero's rather strident exhortations on delaying the
consummation seem uncomfortably obsessive.
Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban form a neat superego/ego/id trinity
which allows Shakespeare to work out with great precision the mechanics
of psychic reintegration in Freudian terms. This interpretation of the
play is the only one which any of you are allowed to believe.
But seriously folks fatherhood and especially the doubled denied, or
false father seems to be something of an obsession with Shakespeare.
Claudius is Hamlet's father but not really his father and Adam is a
father to Orlando even though Orlando isn't his son and Egeon is
Antiphous of Ephesus' father but Antipholus of Ephesus says he's lying
and Cordelia is Lear's only true daughter but he disowns her and
Jessica abandons Shylock saying "I have a father, you a daughter, lost"
and there are probably other examples I can't think of right now.
Whether or not Shakespeare is mostly about fatherhood, if you read the
plays with that assumption you'll learn more than that the assumption
isn't correct.
====
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it
is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
-- T. S. Eliot
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