The Enigmatic Nature of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Abstract

Prospero in Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest, written around 1611 and first published seven years after the dramatist’s death, in 1623, is not a duke who has failed in his task of ruling, but a man who has gained power to direct and discipline others. To that sense, he tends to be the god-man like who rightly castigates and strictly scourges. The magician appears to be so humane at times and too harsh at other times that he dazzles, leads astray or terrifies the island’s dwellers, an ambivalent mission that further intensifies the enigmatic nature of the play. While he has intentionally raised a storm to cause the disorder of the drunken sailors' minds and bodies, thus leaving them on shore at the mercy of chance, instead of winds and waves as before, he has laboriously established order towards the end of the play. Prospero's white magic helps him bring together characters speaking their true character irrespective of their social classes: princes, courtiers, and sailors. When disharmony begets harmony, humanism emerges from the tragi-comic elements, and when the concept of colonization exists, it strikingly embodies the notion of resistance, where the relationship between the self and the other, the centralized and the marginalized, is perhaps blurred. Such are some of the facets the reader is presented with in The Tempest. This paper is yet an attempt to explore the many facets of Shakespeare’s last masterpiece. Within the framework of being a keynote to harmony, the paper would study the play in light of humanism, colonialism, drama genres and other aspects.