SOURCE: Simonds, Peggy Muñoz. “‘Sweet Power of Music’: The Political Magic of ‘the Miraculous Harp’ in Shakespeare's The Tempest.” Comparative Drama 29, no. 1 (spring 1995-96): 61-90.

In the following excerpt, Simonds focuses on analogies between Prospero and Orpheus, the mythical demigod who employed music and eloquence to civilize brutish men and induce harmony in his kingdom.

In a recent paper critical of the logical discrepancies between “new historicist” theory and practice, Robin Headlam Wells argues that a true historical approach to The Tempest would focus on the mythological topos of Orpheus as the conventional prototype of Prospero rather than on modern views of colonialism and demonized otherness.¹ In response to this important suggestion, I shall discuss here the conflation of two such traditional topoi in Shakespeare's tragicomedy: (1) the benevolent and thus successful ruler as Orpheus, a magician in control of Nature and the poetic civilizer of barbaric peoples...