The Tempest and the Renaissance Idea of Man

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o r LOST students of Tempest are agreed that there is more to Shakespeare's last play than charms eye and delights ear.1 Some have regarded its deeper meaning as autobiographical in nature, communicating Shakespeare's view of his own art End announcing his withdrawal from active professional life. Others have found it a covert commentary on England's colonizing efforts in New World, or more generally, on impact of civilization on primitivism. Some have explained its significance in terms of Christian concepts of ethical and political morality, some in terms of neoplatonic doctrine, and some in terms of Renaissance ideas about white and black magic. Almost all concur, however, in a general feeling that beneath its splendid surface of poetry and theater Tempest is somehow concerned with man's effort to overcome his worser self. Or as John Middleton Murry put it, The Island is what would be if Humanity-the best in man-controlled life of man. And Prospero is a in whom best in has won victory: . In their efforts to define the best in man as exemplified in Tempest, all but a few commentators have tended to ignore ideas on nature of widely held in Shakespeare's day and frequently expressed in treatises on moral philosophy, learned and popular alike. Theodore Spencer, among few, has suggested that Renaissance ideas about animal, human, and intellectual elements in can be made to account respectively for character and actions of Caliban, of conspirators, comics, and lovers, and of Prospero. Ariel is not clearly incorporated into this scheme.8 With similar reference to sixteenthcentury thought about nature of man, Donald Stauffer equated Caliban with instinct and passion, Ariel with Imagination, and Prospero with Noble Reason in interpreting Tempest as a drama symbolically portraying (among other autobiographical and moral concerns) ultimate triumph of ethical control over passion.4