Austin ThomasEssay 1, Prompt 1

Magic and Metamorphosis: Prospero’s Change in The Tempest

As Shakespeare’s last completely self-written work, The Tempest occupies a

unique place in the Bard’s corpus. And like other last words, it offers a certain

poignant glimpse into its speaker’s “life”—the career of a solo playwright—and into

his craft. So it is especially interesting that he should choose to give such a

prominent role to magic—prominent, but also problematic. Magician protagonist

Prospero shows just enough goodness and just enough oppressiveness to keep

readers unsure of his true nature, and the methods he and his fairy servant Ariel

use are often morally ambiguous. Furthermore, the play concludes with the

audience’s being asked to decide whether Prospero has undergone the change he

purports. He all but claims metamorphosis, and indeed, Shakespeare’s reuse of

Medea’s speech from Book VII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is necessary to give

meaning to Prospero’s use and renunciation of magic.

Texture would hardly be lacking even without paraphrasing Ovid. Magic in

the early modern period was a bifurcated business, with white magic that was

“nothing else but the highest realization of natural philosophy” and black magic

that consisted “wholly in the operations and powers of demons” (Pico par. 34), to

borrow the words of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In The Tempest, Prospero implies

that difference between him and Sycorax is an example of this white-black split

(1.2.272-287). Unfortunately, it is a poorly delineated distinction. We hear that

Sycorax was banished “for mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible / To enter

human hearing” (1.2.267-268), but none of these sorceries are enumerated. It

seems her magic differed from Prospero’s, however, because although Ariel “[was]

a spirit too delicate / To act her earthy and abhorr’d commands” (1.2.275-276), he

obeys Prospero in everything.

To complicate matters, Prospero seems not to perform much magic himself.

Ariel, who

becomes fire (1.2.213), invisible (3.2.41), a harpy (3.3.56), and Ceres (4.1.88-150),

is also able to control a storm (1.2.228), make men drowsy (2.1.164-180), cause

them to follow him (4.1.169-172), and conjure up glittering clothes (4.1.185), In

fact, Ariel does most of the magic in the play, and Prospero’s main ability seems to

be able to persuade Ariel and other spirits to do his bidding, although he says that

he rifted a tree (presumably with lightning [1.2.277-280]), and we see him flying

while invisible (3.3.24). Readers are later told that Prospero’s charm “strongly

works” (5.1.17) his prisoners Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebastian, and Antonio, but it is

never revealed how he did charm them. Because of how little magic Prospero

actually performs, contemporary theatregoers may have found it difficult to

determine whether he was a good magician or evil. Indeed, since Ariel’s magic

seems very much demon-influenced, and it is not obvious whether Ariel actually

exists or is simply a figment of Prospero’s dispossessed-ruler imagination, it might

have remained forever unclear whether Prospero was benevolent or malevolent. But

the magician’s Metamorphoses monologue at the beginning of the fifth act resolves

the issue nicely.

“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves” (5.1.34), Prospero

begins, and the events he proceeds to describe seem at first incongruous. They can,

with some effort, be bent to the play’s action: Prospero purports to have enlisted

the help of various spirits in order to perform magic. He “called forth the mutinous

winds…to the dread rattling thunder / Have I given fire” (5.1.43-46). These are the

things that Ariel claimed earlier to have done—perhaps, we hope, he is just a player

in Prospero’s head! Then Prospero says that he “rifted Jove’s stout oak / With his

own bolt…and by the spurs plucked up / The pine and cedar” (5.1.46-49). Ariel

needed to be removed from a pine tree, so if Prospero did these things, it is more

likely that Ariel exists.

Prospero’s final claim, that “graves at [his] command / Have waked their

sleepers, oped,

and let ‘em forth” (5.1.49-50), returns the speech to incongruity. This is almost

certainly evil magic, and if Prospero actually did raised the dead, he would seem to

be quite evil—on the order of Sycorax, and possibly too evil for Ariel to take his

orders. Better to look at the speech from the speech in terms of its likenesses and

differences with Medea’s in the Metamorphoses.

Considering it in this way allows a middle ground between merely good magic

and merely bad magic. The speech draws heavily from thirteen lines in Latin as

translated into English by Arthur Golding, and it is possible that Shakespeare

included it more on the basis of his having learned it in grammar school than on any

special meaning he wanted to convey. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s earlier

plays are “lavishly decked out with Ovidian mythological references in [a] sweet

witty style,” and his later plays contain more nuanced interpretations of the

Metamorphoses.1 It seems likely that Shakespeare was at least familiar with the

story behind Medea’s monologue, and so had a certain agenda in writing so much of

it into Prospero’s words. It seems equally likely that Shakespeare neither intended

to center the whole play around Prospero’s abdication speech nor intended the

speech to center around the whole of the Metamorphoses, or even their Book VII.

But certain similarities and contrasts are simple and obvious: that the speeches

conclude differently, that their speakers are at very different points in their stories’

action when they orate, and that the speakers share some fundamental similarity or

difference that made Shakespeare want to compare them in the first place.

Shakespeare’s choice to interrupt Prospero’s speech is only apparent in

comparison with Medea’s. In Shakespeare’s Ovid, the difference is not apparent2,

but a recent translation by A.S. Kline3 shows that only about half of Medea’s speech

is used as the basis for Prospero’s, which diverges shortly after he claims to be able

to raise the dead. The speeches’ different conclusions give an impression of

fundamentally similar characters taking divergent paths, an idea bolstered by the

differences in the speeches’ locations. Medea’s monologue comes as she prepares

to do magic more noteworthy than any she has done before, whereas Prospero’s is

delivered in preparation to renounce magic. Again, Shakespeare’s desire to

compare Prospero to Medea indicates that he saw some common or distinct quality

in their situations that merited attention. This trait, it seems to me, is a difference:

Prospero, for all his artifice, is ultimately accountable to both the audience and to

himself; Medea is accountable to no one.

Consider Prospero’s most immediate reaction to Ariel’s telling him that he

ought to feel sorry for the crazed prisoners (5.1.18-19)—he promises to give up his

magic (including, presumably, command of magical spirits). From there, he

produces music to soothe the prisoners as they return to the stage. In the epilogue,

he admits a vulnerability to the audience, as he “must be here confined by you / Or

sent to Naples” (5.Ep.4-5). And whether because of Shakespeare’s intentionally self-

conscious playwriting or a desire to create a genuinely metamorphosed character,

1 A. B. Taylor, ed. Shakespeare’s Ovid. 212-213. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.2 Ibid., 156-1573 Kline, A.S. Metamorphoses (Kline) 7, the Ovid Collection, Univ. of Virginia E-Text Center. 28 Sep. 2012 <http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph7.htm>.

Prospero confesses that he has planned to please the audience (5.Ep.12). Medea,

meanwhile, remains unrepentant to the end: after killing the king who usurped her

lover Jason’s father, she flees to Athens and marries—only to try to kill her

husband’s son! In all of this, too, she is never punished. It is possible (if improbable)

that Shakespeare meant this to be a reversal of his inspiration’s title, for it seems

that Prospero has undergone real metamorphosis and Medea continues to, well,

prosper.

Shakespeare appears to succeed where his model Ovid failed, reworking a

protagonist’s key speech to realize change where none had been before—a fine

way, certainly, to spend his last words.