Prospero's Wife *

This essay is not a reading of The Tempest. It is a consideration of five related moments and issues. I have called it “Prospero’s Wife” because some of it centers on her, but in a larger sense because she is a figure conspicuous by her absence from the play, and my large subject is the absent, the unspoken, that seems to me the most powerful and problematic presence in The Tempest. In its outlines, the play seems a story of privatives: withdrawl, usurpation, banishment, the loss of one’s way, shipwreck. As an antithesis, a principle of control, preservation, re-creation, the play offers only magic, embodied in a single figure, the extraordinary powers of Prospero.