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    Prospero's Powers: A Short View of Shakespeare's Last Phase
    Prospero's Powers: A Short View of Shakespeare's Last Phase
    Prospero's Powers: A Short View of Shakespeare's Last Phase
    Ebook62 pages43 minutes

    Prospero's Powers: A Short View of Shakespeare's Last Phase

    By John O’Meara

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    About this ebook

    As the third part of his trilogy on Shakespeare, Prospero's Powers extends the study of the late plays O'Meara offered in Othello's Sacrifice, to consider more closely how Shakespeare fulfills his personal artistic development in The Tempest.

    The play is seen as expressing in its structure the whole of Shakespeare's tragic development up to that time. Great powers of self-knowledge and of inner knowledge of the cosmos are shown to have emerged from this development, which Prospero now embodies. Structural links are pursued that further connect Prospero's powers with the mysterious process of self-growth that is dramatized in The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.

    Behind both works, and the Renaissance alchemical tradition they mediate, lies the mystery of the sacrificial death of the Sophia into human consciousness that was taking place at the time Shakespeare was writing. From the event of this death come the great possibilities of self-development and inner power over the world that Shakespeare was boldly prophesizing in the play that brings his artistic career to consummation.

    "an excellent and profound study"-Richard Ramsbotham, Who Wrote Bacon?: William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateOct 29, 2006
    ISBN9780595853540
    Prospero's Powers: A Short View of Shakespeare's Last Phase
    Author

    John O’Meara

    Born in Montreal, Canada, John O’Meara received his Ph.D in 1986 from the University of East Anglia. He taught for over 20 years in the English departments of the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa.

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      Book preview

      Prospero's Powers - John O’Meara

      PROSPERO’S POWERS

      A Short View of Shakespeare’s Last Phase

      John O’Meara

      iUniverse, Inc.

      New York Lincoln Shanghai

      Prospero’s Powers

      A Short View of Shakespeare’s Last Phase

      Copyright © 2006 by John O’Meara

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

      Lincoln, NE 68512

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Detail illustration from Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb.

      Insert text from The Tempest, IV.i.265.

      All quotations are taken from The Tempest, ed., Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

      ISBN-13: 978-0-595-41000-2 (pbk)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-595-85354-0 (ebk)

      ISBN-10: 0-595-41000-6 (pbk)

      ISBN-10: 0-595-85354-4 (ebk)

      Contents

      Acknowledgments 

      I 

      The Relation to Pericles and The Winter’s Tale

      II 

      Study of the Liberal Arts

      III 

      The Freeing of Ariel

      IV 

      ‘Rapt in Secret Studies’

      V 

      The Alchemical Extension and the New Life

      A Further Note on the Higher Ego in Shakespeare 

      Works Cited 

      Acknowledgments 

      Acknowledgments, first, to the students at the University of Toronto who, in seminar, lent their enthusiastic support to the view of Shakespeare’s late plays expounded on in these pages.

      To Alexandra Barbara Gunther for opening up greater perspectives on the mysterious figure of Christian Rosenkreutz.

      To Richard Ramsbotham and Emerson College, England, where I had the chance to develop my ideas further, in lectures and workshops I had the privilege to give there.

      And to A.F.—my one true thing—who inspirited the whole presentation that follows.

      In memory of my mother.

      Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow. (I.ii.170)

      I 

      The Relation to Pericles and The Winter’s Tale

      Prospero’s mysterious ‘studies’ continue to baffle readers, I want to suggest because of a failure of structural curiosity on our part that seems to be growing more widespread in our post-modern civilization. This civilization has become so external in its concerns, we assume that Prospero’s powers will have something to do with his ‘books’, of which we should need to know more; in the meantime, we are content to think that some hermetic tradition or other, which one supposes irrecoverible, will, in the end, account for the possibility of such powers, if only these ‘books’ could be known. Yet Prospero’s ‘studies’ are not just another, independent part of the story that ranges from his wife’s death through his later abduction. These ‘studies’ constitute an altogether intrinsic part of the same story. And it is to this story that we must look to discover the sources and operations of Prospero’s powers.

      Beginning with Miranda who, when the abduction takes place, is ‘not/Out three years old’ (I.ii.40-41), we are reminded of the mother who in this period has died. We then hear of Prospero’s reputation in the liberal arts, which now become ‘all [his] study’, to the point of a temporary renunciation of state. From here Prospero grows all the ‘stranger’ to his state, as he finds himself further ‘transported/And rapt in secret studies’ (I.ii.73-77). It is all too easy to overlook, in this fast-concatenating story, the role that Prospero’s intensifying ‘studies’ have played as a response to the mother’s death.

      It is the very effort from which Prospero is dissociated when Antonio casts him out to ‘sea’ where Prospero must again live out the great sorrow of loss and dispossession that, over a great many years, had continued to engage Shakespeare himself, up to this point:

      There they hoist us To cry to the sea

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