ABSTRACT
Given that metaphor is the pursuit of meaning via association, The Tempest is the supreme Shakespearean model of metaphor in action. The play demonstrates this not through the accumulation of figures classifiable as metaphor [Troilus and Cressida is the major instance) but rather through its dramatic essence, which is the experience of half-perceiving, half-grasping for truth. It is natural that this quality of The Tempest should lead to so much allegorical criticism. Dowden observed a long time ago that the play ‘has had the quality, as a work of art, of setting its critics to work as though it were an allegory; and forthwith it baffles them, and seems to mock them for supposing that they had power to pluck out the heart of its mystery.’1 That is an observation of fact. But today’s critics have largely renounced the task of describing a finite system of correspondences, which is what ‘allegory’ indicates. Nuttall’s position, ‘The mystery is never allowed to harden into an ontological dogma’,2 is in harmony with current thinking. I agree with this, and would merely stress that the possibility of allegory is part of the intellectual experience of the play that we still acknow ledge. It could scarcely be otherwise, when we contemplate an action centred on a being in command of everything save the mental responses of his subjects, and we receive insistent impressions of varying corre spondences — Prospero as God, as impresario, as schoolmaster, for instance. Each of these possibilities implies a structure of correspondences radiating out from it. Our intellectual impression, then, is that if at a given point we could stop the action and concentrate on the uppermost association in our minds, we could manufacture a coherent schema round it. But the play moves on and the kaleidoscope shifts.
