SOURCE: Cantor, Paul A. “Shakespeare's The Tempest: The Wise Man as Hero.” Shakespeare Quarterly 31, no. 1 (spring 1980): 64-75.

In the following essay, Cantor probes Shakespeare's depiction of Prospero as the contemplative hero of The Tempest, a figure who displaces the drama's conspiratorial, comic, and romantic subplots in favor of his philosophical return to power.

‘Go to the Poets, they will speak to thee More perfectly of purer creatures;—yet If reason be nobility in man, Can aught be more ignoble than the man Whom they delight in, blinded as he is By prejudice, the miserable slave Of low ambition or distempered love?’ 

(Wordsworth, The Prelude, XII, 68-74)

Anyone who has seen a good production of The Tempest knows how effective the play can be on the stage. But if one were merely to recount the plot to someone otherwise unfamiliar with it, he might begin to wonder how such...