BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL

Prospero and his enchanted wand.

PART I I

PROSPERO’S BOOKS: EMPI RI CAL AND TEXTUAL RESEARCH

Now I arise.

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.

Here in this island we arrived, and here

Have I thy schoolmaster made thee more profit

Than other princes can, that have more time

For vainer hours and tutors not so careful.

(Prospero to Mirander as he puts on his magic cloak. The

Tempest, I ,ii,170).

The figure of Prospero in The Tempest sits well as a motif in this thesis
because within the whole Shakespearean corpus it is Prospero who comes closest to
being a shaman. A physician of souls, from the beginning of the tale, Prospero
reveals his purpose: “This swift business I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
make the prize light ...” (I , ii, 453), and, like the writer, he exercises his power to
reveal eternal truths.
The Tempest is a paradigmic, albeit Gnostic, portrayal of all women and men
under the influence of instinctive and divine knowledge. I t is about modes of
ecstasy and also moral judgements emanating from above and below the levels of
ordinary consciousness, discovered through figures of the air (imagination) and
earth (place). I t is about exile (Prospero’s exile is metaphorically also to an interior
place) and elemental forces, where the spirit, Ariel, represents the imagination and
Caliban represents the archetypal primitive archaic man. I ndeed, the play and its
characters serve as metaphors for my research, both empirical and textual. Like
Prospero, the mythopoeic writer is an enchanter and like him their fantasy images
and places are constructions, models for a possible realm which can only come into
existence with the contrivance of an Ariel, in this case, the reader, for Ariel is