The Power of Magic: From Endimion to The Tempest

Summary

With almost Pinteresque insistence The Tempest dramatizes conflicts of dominance and subservience. ‘Where’s the master?’ (1.1.9–10) – this is the question the first scene raises. With Prospero’s decision to present himself as he was, ‘sometime Milan’ (5.1.86), the last act seems to provide an answer. These conflicts The Tempest embodies variedly and invariably in the relationships of father and child, master and servant, ruler and subject. Even young love is discussed in terms of freedom and bondage (3.1.88–9) and is objectively, if playfully, correlated with the checkings and matings of rival kings and queens. Small wonder that recent criticism has considered The Tempest first and foremost as a political play, emphasizing its patriarchal structures or lodging it within ever-widening contexts of colonial discourses. That the play deals with problems of power, of authority, and their representation, these studies have made abundantly and convincingly clear. They have laid bare many of the material and ideological assumptions and contexts within which the play’s meanings unfold.