ABSTRACT
In traditional criticism, often eager to represent the play as Shakespeare’s valediction to his own art, the pivotal moment of the final scene of The Tempest has been when Prospero renounces his magic, resolving to break his staff and drown his book.1 The emotional appeal of the gesture has come from the aging magician’s acceptance of his mortality, underlined by the implicit tension between the pastoral world of the island, governed by his ‘potent art’, and the quotidian life of Milan, where ‘every third thought shall be [his] grave’.2 Contemporary critics have become more concerned with the fate of Caliban, as Prospero’s grudging acknowledgement of his ‘thing of darkness’ embodies the master-slave dialectic of nascent colonialism.3 Here, the magician’s assertion of his dominance over nature, where he has ‘bedimm’d /The noontide sun, [and] call’d forth the mutinous winds’, effaces his systematic tyranny
1 For an important critique of sentimentalized interpretations of the play, see Harry Berger jr. in ‘Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Studies 5 (1969), pp. 255-83.
