Prospero as Author of The Tempest.

The mainstream of scholarship for some 300 years, on Shakespeare's play The Tempest, has considered the character Prospero to be a portrait of the playwright himself. He is a magician in that the imagination that goes into writing plays is a magic. It is an overt theme of The Tempest, itself, that it is a product of his magical powers, an orchestrated sequence of events having only the appearance of real life. His books are the library he consults for the stuff of his spells.

J. W. Mackail, perhaps, gets at this most precisely.

He is the magician — one might almost go further and say the playwright — and the other figures are his puppets. This peculiar character of Prospero’s has gone far in its unconscious influence towards creating the belief that Prospero is in effect Shakespeare himself, that we can hear in The Tempest Shakespeare speaking in his own voice rather than giving speech to a dramatic creation.

There is much, certainly, towards the end of the play, to suggest this view and impress it on us; and with due caution, it may be largely accepted. It is based not only on the epilogue; not only on Prospero’s announcement of his own purpose to retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave; not only on the earlier passage where he orders Ariel to introduce the masque of goddesses and the dance of nymphs and reapers, with the curious soliloquizing words:

                                            I must

Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple

Some vanity of mine art: it is my promise.

And they expect it from me;

Though, indeed, ‘my Milan’ we must inevitably think of as Stratford, and this young couple’ as the new generation. Nor is it only in that marvellous passage — the most famous as it is the most magnificent in all Shakespeare if not in all literature — beginning ‘Our revels now are ended’.... Not only in those concluding scenes, but more subtly throughout, Prospero is, as I have suggested, the playwright; controlling, evolving, suspending, varying, interrupting, or resuming the action; the other characters, though alive with the full Shakespearian vitality, being, so far as concerns their action, figures that move at Prospero’s manipulation. The dramatist has projected himself bodily into the drama.¹

The masque that is the fourth act will manifest these facts. The play is Prospero / Shakespeare's present life. The fourth act is the magic of the play directly emerging in a fairy-world, fully imagination, unhindered with flesh, then melting away to leave behind but humans living their quotidian lives

Mr. Makhail's insightful passage unintentionally highlights yet another aspect of Prospero / Shakespeare. Being unaffected by the Authorship Controversy Makhail equates Prospero's exile to Shakespeare's having been away from Stratford-upon-Avon though it would be difficult to make the case for an exile from someplace he chose to leave and visited with some regularity each time choosing to leave again. The Stratford man having no daughter of sufficient status to merit a wedding masque, Makhail sees Prospero's daughter is a symbol representing a new generation. When Stratford is unquestionable orthodoxy, all roads, by definition, lead there, no matter the map Shakespeare himself actually provides, no matter reality.

Those present who are affected by the Controversy and cling to the Stratford man would likely point out that “lack of evidence is not the same as evidence of lack” — their popular rejoinder to the near total lack of evidence for his authorship outside of some theater shares and the assertion in the First Folio.

Mark Harvey Liddell, editor of the Elizabethan Shakespeare annotated Tempest, avoids the uncomfortable fit of the e-word and makes the matter one of retirement:

Prospero himself is such a wholly Shaksperian creation that many critics have found in him the artistic counterpart of Shakspere himself wonder-working through a cycle of plays and quietly laying aside his magic robe preparatory to a well-earned retirement to Stratford.²

But, still, Prospero is Shakespeare, his exile a metaphor for “the bitter jealousies of his rivals,” whatever evidence there might be of such a thing, or whatever a “sanity of temper” might specifically mean in this context.

The representative potentiality of The Tempest has led to all sorts of allegorical interpretations of the play. The most interesting of these is the identification of Prospero with the mature and ripened Shakspere. Whether intentional or not, the resemblance is interesting. For the sanity of temper which marks the magician of The Tempest must have been conspicuous in Shakspere, who defeated the bitter jealousies of his rivals by the commanding magic of his genius. Indeed, the very name of Prospero in the Italian of the sixteenth century means 'the sound one,' 'the healthy one. ' And Prospero' s farewell to his art might easily have been Shakspere' s own leave-taking as he retired to his Milan to dwell no more on the bare island of the Elizabethan stage: not a studied farewell, but a mere unconscious inclusion of himself in the situation he imagined.³

No mention in either commentary — or any that I am aware of — of how it is the Stratford man's brother and agent Gilbert took control of his lands in Stratford and Blackfriars and left him stranded in a disused theater somewhere in Southwark. Neither does the next eldest brother Richard serve, who is nothing but an un-usurping name in a few scant records. The youngest, Edmund, moved to Prospero's island, as it were, became an actor and died in 1607. Not only is exile at best an inapt metaphor but Stratford has no usurper-Antonio, no daughter for whose wedding to write the masque.⁴

Liddell does mention the theories of Dr. Richard Garnett⁵ which were hotly debated at the time. He even informs us that “The theory itself was first proposed by Tieck in 1826.”⁶ Garnett chose King James I, himself, as the model for Prospero, the one probable performance of which we may have a record being part of the festivities around the marriage of his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to the Count Palantine, in 1613. These theories turn out to offer some surprising insights into the masque.

1 The New Clarendon Shakespeare The Tempest (1939, 1978). J. R. Sutherland, ed. 161-2. Citing Mackail, J. W. The Approach to Shakespeare (1930)

2The Elizabethan Shakespeare: The Tempest, (1903). Mark Harvey Liddell. xv.

3Ibid. xix.

4Susan married in 1607, too early for Stratfordian dating. Judith in 1616, in Holy Trinity, Stratford, to a Vintner. No records of any sort for a masque exist.

5Purdy, Gilbert. “Mr. Garnett's Theory on Shakespeare's The Tempest.” Virtual Grub Street. January 31, 2023.

6Ibid. ix.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Edward de Vere Birthday Backgrounder: April 12 (2023). April 7, 2023. "Edward De Vere was born April 12th, in the year 1550, at Hedingham Castle, in Essex, to John De Vere, the 16th Earl of Oxford, and his second wife Margery De Vere (née Golding)."

• The Viscount Dungarvan's “Epitaph on Shakespeare” Cookbook. April 1, 2023. “It is excruciating to be that boring (for soon you resemble what you do).”

• Edward de Vere in the Lives of his Daughters. February 27, 2023. "At least they take some comfort from their belief that De Vere had no demonstrable relationship with his daughter, the Countess of Montgomery, Susan de Vere."

• Shakespeare’s Character Names: Shylock, Ophelia, etc. July 13, 2021. “The name Ophelia was, by all indications, quite rare in the 16th century.”

• A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years.  Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.