ABSTRACT
Books are deeply loved and greatly feared in The Tempest. Prospero praises his enemy’s counselor Gonzalo for having given him volumes from his own library. (Gonzalo extended this kindness while piling the Duke and his daughter into an unseaworthy little boat and setting them adrift at sea.1) As the play unfolds, the volumes come to seem almost worth the prizing. For one thing, Prospero loves them; if we take him at his word, his affection for them has remained undiminished, even after all that he has suffered. In his account of his banishment, he uses the present tense only about his books: “so of his gentleness, / Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me / From mine own library with volumes that / I prize about my dukedom” (1.2.16568).2 When he promises to renounce his magic, he uses the singular word “book” (“I’ll drown my book” [5.1.57]), so perhaps he means to take the rest of them back to Milan. Indeed he might be wise to do so since books are also instruments of power in the world of the play. Caliban warns his fellow conspirators that no act of violence can succeed against Prospero unless his books are first taken from him. Leslie Fiedler, perhaps sharing a certain fantasy of literary power with Prospero, calls the books “those symbols of a literate technology with which the ruling classes of Europe controlled the subliterates of two worlds.”3
