The conflict and contrast between the utopian ideals and Elizabethan politics presented in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”

The play opens with a description of a terrifying and relentless storm that wrecks the ship belonging to the King of Naples, Alonso. The wreck drifts onto the shore of Propero’s island but the force of the sea is insuperable, and the boatswain appeals to the noblemen, crying out that they are hindering the others. He calls to Gonzalo,

If you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more.

Antonio and Sebastian are also rebuked by the boatswain, and reminded of the inefficacy of their social status is nothing in such a critical situation, invoking their wrath, while simultaneously hinting at the bias of the play. We suspect the boatswain will be proven right, and that Shakespeare gently asks us to heed the rude wisdom of the common pragmatists, even – or especially- the context of ostensibly decadent theatricality. Hence from the start we are presented with an intriguing balance of high romantic drama, opinionated political commentary, and fragile idealism. The shipwreck symbolises considerably more than what it appears to at first. It is no mere vehicle for the themes of the play to hitch a lift on, it is representative of an entire society’s collapse into irretrievable disarray. Indeed, it may be representative of the doom faced by all faulty societies. As such it is a moral vehicle, carrying an apparently disparate group of frightened and confused figures to their identical destiny. As Soji Iwasaki writes,

A voyage is often a symbol of the progress of a man’s life, and the sea is symbolic of Fortune; a shipwreck is a typical instance of bad fortune, while a ship sailing before a fair wind is an image of good fortune. Sometimes a ship at sea serves as a symbol of the Church, in which the whole congregation sails over the sea of ProvidenceIn The Tempest it is Goddess Fortune (1.2.178) that drives Alonso’s ship towards the island of Prospero, where a tempest is caused by Prospero’s magic.

Prospero judges the ship to be full of sinfull soules, a reference to the political crimes of the characters on board. The King of Naples was guilty of usurping the Milanese dukedom, Antonio betrayed Prospero- his own brother, while Sebastian, Stephano and Trinculo are all intrinsically evil. In fact the only figure to escape judgement is Gonzalo, a harmless courtier. These figures will not find their arbitration in the next life, by some god-figure, though, as Shakespeare takes pains to emphasise. Prospero is the only figure with deific power, literary or figurative, in the play: his magical powers, clearly, serve a metaphorical purpose, symbolising the power of rhetoric and the force that lies behind absolute righteousness. Since Prospero has been wronged, Shakespeare seems to (fatalistically) say, he will vindicate himself using the power that comes from knowledge and wisdom- just synonyms for what is called magic in the play. Prospero knows how to rebuke and is wise enough to find forgiveness in his heart.

As the ship will eventually return to Naples, the plays theme arguably evolves into dealing with the ruin and rebirth of a commonwealth. Between the first, highly symbolic tempest scene, and the final heraldic manoeuvre, the play’s action all occurs on the island. Prospero reveals to Miranda the truth he has kept from her for twelve years, since her infancy. He tells her of his brother, her uncle, Antonio’s usurpation of his dukedom of Milan and the hardship they were forced to endure as a result. While Antonio behaved callously by acting on his jealous desire to take over his brother’s dukedom, Prospero was partially to blame too, since he had been preoccupied with his private, obsessive studies of cultivation of the mind, neglecting all the state business (1.2.89-97) to which he admits he should have been more committed. By handing the state affairs over to Antonio and investing so much trust in him, Prospero unwittingly sewed seeds of ambition in his brother, instigating his own downfall. As Iwasaki describes it, Prospero committed a double offence: he forgot the balance between action and meditation that, as sovereign ruler, he should remember, and he also made a mistake in trusting the wrong person, a mistake which a ruler should never make. Ficino reports on the same problem.

No reasonable being doubts that there are three kinds of life: the contemplative, the active, and the pleasurable (contemplativa, activa, voluptuosa). And three roads to felicity have been chosen by men: wisdom, power, and pleasure (sapientia, potentia, voluptas).

Renaissance humanists aspired to a harmony of the three. Prospero chides himself for his youthful pursuit of the contemplative, where his preoccupation with esoteric learning came at the price, eventually, of his political power. Prospero may be paying some kind of price, but it is very difficult to read the Tempest as a cautionary text. Shakespeare’s attitude to power and wisdom is not so clear cut, there appears to be more than one kind of power and more than one kind of wisdom, after all, and although this is not recognised explicitly by the characters in the play (who operate on the Ficino model), Shakespeare wryly alludes to the holes in the world-view of his people. Shakespeare knows that there is power beyond and after usurpation, a power beyond the political and more powerful than any government- and it is a sort of wisd