study entitled Caliban: the Missing Link. "Caliban seems indeed the half human link between the brute and the man." "He is not a brutalized, but a natural brute mind. He is a being in whom the moral instincts of man have no part; but also in whom the degradation of savage humanity is equally wanting." Superior in intellect to the highest animal, he dreads the power of Prospero; 66 we shall all be turn'd . . . to apes, with foreheads villanous low." Browning's Caliban upon Setebos; or Natural Theology in the Island is a keen satire upon anthropomorphic conceptions of God. Caliban's god, Setebos, is made in his own image, and is therefore cruel, malignant, irresponsible. As it likes me each time, I do; so He. Structure and Allegory. - In The Tempest the unities of time and place are closely observed. The action occupies less than the time 'twixt two o'clock and six. After the shipwreck the scene is either " before Prospero's cell" (back scene) or in "another part of the Island" (front scene). In The Winter's Tale, perhaps written immediately before The Tempest, Shakespeare completely disregarded these two unities. It must be a trustworthy instinct that leads students of The Tempest to see in Prospero the counterpart of Shakespeare at the close of his career as a dramatist. Graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth The great magician was ready to abjure his art and to break his staff, then to retire to his dukedom, at Stratford, where Every third thought shall be my grave. "The Tempest," says Lowell, " is an example of how a great poet should write allegory; " and he remarks that "Poets are always entitled to a royalty on what we find in their works." Lowell1 has given one interpretation of the allegory; Professor Dowden,2 another; both see in Prospero Shakespeare bidding farewell to the stage and returning to Stratford. Against adverse circumstances he had struggled bravely, and had achieved greatly. Like Prospero, he was ready to say, We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life 1"Shakespeare Once More" in Among My Books, Vol. I. Prose Works, III, 60. 2 Shakspere; His Mind and Art, pp. 371-380. |