Shakespeare's Poetics of Play-Making and Therapeutic Action in "The Tempest.".

Abstract

This study practices Kenneth Burke's rhetoric of empathic identification to read and understand six levels of consubstantiality between Shakespeare and his Elizabethan audience blueprinted by the authorized text of The Tempest. These levels reveal Shakespeare's agent of healing, Prospero, composing new, fluid dialogues that unfold the ritualized movement of therapeutic action inherited from the medieval theatre art of mumming. Burke's rhetoric also reads Shakespeare's theatre art—the alternating movements between identification and detachment—and finds his art continuing and developing the mummers' play-making practice. These findings offer implications for the contemporary practices of poetry and drama therapy with participants capable of self-differentiation.