ABSTRACT
Prospero’s colorful spectacle in Act IV of The Tempest is a potent political tool meant to subjugate, control and renew the mind of Ferdinand, the heir of a ruling class that has just proved to be unfit to rule. Ferdinand’s reaction to the spectacle proceeds according to Prospero’s will, as he sees Prospero’s invention as a prodigious vision: “Let me live here ever; So rare a wonder’d father and a wise / Makes this place Paradise” (4.1.123-24).
Obviously, the spectacle is an allusion to James’s political practices and propaganda, and Prospero recalls James’s self-portrait as a magician. However, Prospero’s magic is also associated with James’s claim to absolute power iure divino.
My paper intends to investigate the relationship between 1. the long-lived Machiavellian political theory according to which the Prince who wants to rule in a declining republic must go back to its original religious principles, 2. the role of visual art in the seventeenth-century political theory and practice, and 3. the notion that Prospero’s artistic miracles meant to subdue and renovate a bankrupt ruling class.
