ABSTRACT
Neoromantic readings of The Tempest (Negri, Palfrey, Witmore) wrongly seek support in Spinoza’s philosophy in order to smuggle political possibility into metaphysical potentia. My essay is an attempt to restore Spinoza’s amenability to Shakespearean hermeneutics. Since possibility is for Spinoza an index of our ignorance of the causal necessary binding all natural things, to champion possibility as the locus of freedom is a mistake. Freedom, for Spinoza, means awareness of necessity. Thus, the conception of a limited human being (Prospero) that seeks to cling to absolute power by feigning illusions and yet becomes aware of the cognitive and ontological limitation of the imaginary worlds he has conjured harbors a profoundly Spinozistic lesson on the poverty of possibility.
