Good and Evil Wizardry
Renunciation in Tolkien and Shakespeare
This week, I completed my first summer term toward an M.A. in English. I wrote a research paper comparing the magic-wielding characters in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (LoTR) and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I figured I’d post an adapted version of the paper here on my Substack.
The question that nagged at me after reading The Tempest was why Prospero, the powerful wizard in the play, decides to give up his magic at the end. His power grows to its peak, and he is about to take his rightful revenge on his enemies who are trapped on his island, but instead, he breaks his staff and drowns his books after forgiving everyone. This reversal is interesting, and I saw parallels in LoTR. The paper took me in an interesting direction. I wound up using a Jungian framework to analyze the characters in both Tolkien and Shakespeare. While Tolkien works through the doubling of characters, Shakespeare builds enough complexity into the single character Prospero, who seems to be in internal conflict with himself. I also explored one of my favorite and iconically melancholic elements of Tolkien’s world—the waning of power for the Elves, who have to depart to leave the world to humankind. This felt very connected to the Biblical fall of Adam and Eve, so I brought in a bit of Milton. Anyway, here’s the paper:
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Lady Galadriel, an Elvish queen and sorceress, finds herself within arm’s reach of the all-powerful ring. She rises up in foreboding darkness, as if to take up her long-coveted power, but shrinks back down in time to reject the power of the ring. “I pass the test,” she says. “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.” Galadriel exhibits a kind of restraint in that moment that forms a dividing line between the virtuous and non-virtuous characters in LoTR. We see a similar restraint in Frodo and in Faramir—a restraint that tends to come with a host of other traits in Tolkien’s world, including embracing freedom, mercy, and humility. It seems that these magic-bearers and magic-wielders in Tolkien have an antecedent in the character Prospero in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, written in 1610. Prospero is an outcast wizard living on an island with his daughter when we meet him. Strikingly, in the early stages of the play, Prospero exhibits characteristics of a sort of tyrant with magical abilities. He keeps a spirit and a slave in servitude and executes an elaborate project of revenge in which he restrains his natural human empathy. As the play progresses, however, Prospero becomes increasingly pricked by his conscience. By the end of the play, he abandons his project of revenge and renounces his magical abilities, ready to return to Milan as a Duke to live out the rest of his mortal life. In this paper, I will compare Prospero’s arc to Tolkien’s morality play in LoTR, in which Tolkien, in Jungian fashion, models virtues and their opposites primarily through the good characters Gandalf and Galadriel, and the evil characters Saruman and Denethor. By renouncing magic at the height of his powers, Prospero answers to what I call “the Prospero test,” an act that is an antecedent in the fantasy tradition for superhuman wielders of magic who learn to walk a moral path.
Let us establish first the basic Jungian framework through which we can properly analyze the characters and their opposites in LoTR. I start with the fantasy pioneer Ursula Le Guin, who was a deep admirer of Tolkien. In an essay called “The Child and The Shadow,” Le Guin responds to critics who find that Tolkien has too cleanly divided the inhabitants of Middle-earth into good people and evil people. She writes,
When you look at the story as a psychic journey, you see something quite different… You see then a group of bright figures, each one with its black shadow. Against the Elves, the Orcs. Against Aragon, the Black Rider. Against Gandalf, Saruman.” (Le Guin 57)
This is a compelling interpretive lens through which to read Tolkien. While The Tempest also forms striking doubles—the earthly Caliban against the airy Ariel, or Antonio and Sycorax against Prospero—I will only focus on the opposing traits within Prospero himself. Prospero offers enough complexity and evolution to contain his own shadow. In other words, Shakespeare’s wizard is both Saruman and Gandalf.
Prospero starts The Tempest as a controlling and vengeful wizard. He designs a shipwreck, but his daughter Miranda feels pity when she hears the cry of the men on board. “Oh, the cry did knock / Against my very heart!” she says (1.2.8-9). Prospero feels no pity, however, and assures Miranda there is no need for it—the sailors are safe enough. He gets to work quickly, calling his servant spirit Ariel to perform another task. Ariel objects at first, pleading for his freedom. In response, Prospero recounts how he saved Ariel, lording it over him with a final threat: “If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak / And peg thee in his knotty entrails till / Thou hast howled away twelve winters” (1.2.296-298). It is unclear whether Ariel’s request was inappropriately bold given their terms of service, but what’s clear is the magician’s nerves are frayed. Prospero is similarly harsh with Caliban, though his short temper with the savage is perhaps more justified since Caliban—a “born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick”—attempted to court and possibly rape his daughter (1.2.188-189). It is worth noting here that Prospero abdicates responsibility for Caliban after having taught him religion and astronomy, possibly suggesting some father-like neglect. Prospero does eventually accept Caliban to some degree later in the play, which I will discuss. Another side of Prospero’s early cruelty is revealed when he meets Ferdinand, whom he quickly labels a traitor and promises to put in chains before paralyzing him altogether. Miranda becomes a clear foil here for Prospero’s unfeeling disposition. As the imprisoned Ferdinand notes, Miranda is “Ten times more gentle than her father’s crabbed / And he’s composed of harshness (3.1.7-9). Thus, Shakespeare’s early portrait of Prospero is one of an unyielding and merciless captor with magical power that helps him wrest both humans and spirits under his control. While Prospero has been wrongly usurped and thus deserving of revenge, we might wonder whether his project should be this callously carried out.
This oppressive version of Prospero finds a parallel in Tolkien in two characters specifically—the wizard Saruman and Lord Denethor—both of whom are foils to the good wizard Gandalf. While Sauron and his henchmen are also clearly evil and at odds with Gandalf, Saruman and Denethor form clearer doubles to the good wizard based on evidence in the text. Besides both being wizards, Saruman and Gandalf share a common appearance to such a degree that in The Two Towers (TT), Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli take the reincarnated Gandalf to be Saruman when he appears in the evil wizard’s characteristic white robes. Gimli comments on the garments, and Gandalf responds, “‘Indeed I am Saruman, one might almost say, Saruman as he should have been’” (TT 98). Here, Saruman is outed as a corrupt figure against the newly risen Gandalf. In fact, the two have a clear ideological disagreement. Trying to sway Gandalf into a project of control over Middle-earth—not unlike the way Prospero discusses his project across his isle—Saruman proclaims,
“The time of the Elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which We must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see… As [a new] power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it.” (FoR 253)
This “new Power” that Saruman refers to may be Sauron’s unique power or the shared power that Sauron promises his confederates. Regardless, Gandalf swiftly rejects Saruman’s offer, partly perhaps because he knows that “‘only one hand at a time can wield the One [ring],’” and that control of Middle-earth would ultimately funnel to Sauron, but also because it is against Gandalf’s very nature (FoR 253). Gandalf refrains from exerting control over others. When Frodo laments that Bilbo didn’t kill Gollum when they met, Gandalf responds
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” (FoR 58)
To Gandalf, wisdom consists in understanding one’s limits to affect the world, and especially to deal out justice. These words could just as well be used to caution a vengeful and controlling Prospero. Robert Egan writes of Prospero that, “in presuming to substitute his own sense of morality for cosmic law he has designated to himself a higher order of being and the authority to damn and destroy his fellow men: in effect, he has usurped the divine prerogative of vengeance” (Egan 177). On his isle, Prospero dictates the terms of life and death against Gandalf’s dictum; he causes the shipwreck, but spares the men from death, and puts a sleeping Alonso at risk before sparing him from Antonio’s treachery (Ariel says, “My master… sends me forth—/ For else his project dies—to keep them living” (2.1.295-7)).
Another possessive controller set against Gandalf in LoTR is Denethor. When the two have a standoff in the throne room in The Return of the King (RoK), Tolkien writes,
[Denethor] turned his dark eyes on Gandalf, and now Pippin saw a likeness between the two, and he felt the strain between them, almost as if he saw a line of smouldering fire, drawn eye to eye, that might suddenly burst into flame. Denethor looked indeed much more like a great wizard than Gandalf did, more kingly, beautiful, and powerful; and older. Yet by a sense other than sight Pippin perceived that Gandalf had the greater power and the deeper wisdom, and a majesty that was veiled.” (RoK 29)
To Pippin, the two figures are relative equals, and yet what sets Gandalf apart is that he carries a “deeper wisdom.” The nature of this wisdom emerges when Denethor tightens his grip on the stewardship of the throne. Gandalf replies, “the rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care… For I also am a steward. Did you not know?’” (RoK 30). Here Gandalf models a stewardship based not on control, but on care and regard for others. Likewise, when Denethor later tries to burn both himself and his son Faramir on a flaming pyre, Gandalf admonishes him with words that echo his earlier advice to Frodo: “‘Authority is not given to you, nor to any other lord, to order the hour of your death’” (RoK 129).
Thus both Denethor and Saruman seek control in ways that mirror an early Prospero bent on revenge. As The Tempest progresses, Prospero extends his magic as his enemies draw closer. He summons an illusory banquet, a trick on Alonso and his company, and, pleased with his power, he remarks, “My high charms work, / and these mine enemies are all knit up / In their distractions. They are now in my power” (3.3.89-90). Prospero later gathers his captive spirits for a performance and, halfway through, he suddenly recalls Caliban’s plot to take his life. He then delivers an agitated, Hamlet-like soliloquy about the futility and insubstantiality of his art. If these revels have entertained him in the past, their luster is starting to wear off. Ferdinand says, “This is strange. Your father’s in some passion / That works him strong.” Miranda says, “Never till this day / Saw I him touched with anger so distempered” (4.1.142-145). The source of his distempered anger is unclear, but we know at least that an unprecedented change is brewing inside of him. Very soon, Caliban and his party fall into Prospero’s trap. The wizard says, “Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour / Lies at my mercy all mine enemies” (4.1.264-265). Ariel reports that Alonso and his company are imprisoned, and that Gonzalo weeps over them. Then comes a pivotal moment. Ariel tells Prospero he would feel sorry for them if he were human, which sends the wizard into a humane reflection. He feels fellowship with his captives, as he is “one of their kind, that relish all as sharply / Passion as they” (5.1.23-24). He continues:
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’
quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury
Do I take part. The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance. (5.1.25-28)
He releases Alonso and the others from his paralyzing magic, so that “they shall be themselves” again (5.1.32). As Ariel goes to fetch the newly freed men, Prospero delivers a long soliloquy, first summarizing his prowess as a mage before he concludes, “But this rough magic / I here abjure.” He breaks his staff and drowns his books, and his mercy flows out unrestrained. To his murderous, treacherous brother he says, “I do forgive thee, / Unnatural though thou art” (5.1.78-79). Prospero frees Ariel and says about Caliban, “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.278-279). Though he had repeatedly insulted and cast out Caliban earlier in the play, he now takes some measure of responsibility for him, commanding him to go back into his own quarters in the cave. Caliban’s fate is unclear, but we do know that he too repents, saying, “I’ll be wise hereafter / And seek for grace” (5.1.298-299). This is resolution enough for an embittered father-son relationship. And finally, when all loose ends are tied, Prospero delivers a final speech to the audience, ambiguously asking for either prayer or applause (or both), and to be released. His “charms are all o’erthrown,” and his strength is merely that of an aged human now. He is in a place of quasi-paralysis now, mirroring the bewitched characters earlier in the play, as he asks for mercy and his own release from service.
Much has been made of Prospero’s renunciation of revenge and of magic. What exactly prompts his change of heart? Why must he renounce his magic? Why does this renunciation come at the height of his power, as his project of revenge “gather[s] to a head” (5.1.1)? To get an answer, we might turn to another magic wielder in Tolkien, the Elvish queen Galadriel, who at the zenith of potential power treats her renunciation of that power as a passing of a test. When Frodo offers her the ring, she tells him, “I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer” (FoR 350). Soon she reaches a height of power and terror both. Tolkien writes, “She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illumined her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful” (FoR 356). There is an ambivalence and uneasiness about Galadriel’s power from the outset, voiced primarily by Boromir who first expresses fear about entering her golden forest and, after meeting her, says, “I do not feel too sure of this Elvish Lady and her purposes” (FoR 349). Her shadiness resurfaces when Frodo offers her the ring, and her power seems to tip most overtly into potential oppression. It’s also interesting that Galadriel is described as both “terrible” and “beautiful beyond enduring.” Tolkien’s characterization here calls to mind Edmund Burke’s Romantic notion of the sublime “as a deeply emotional experience that mixes awe, terror, and admiration in equal measure” (4815 Tyagi). Galadriel is a beauty universally admired, even by the obstinate dwarf Gimli, and yet when mixed with too much power, it curdles into something worthy of terror. And then, like a balloon deflating, Galadriel “let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! She was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad. ‘I pass the test’” she says. She will “diminish, and go into the West” (356 Tolkien).
Galadriel’s rising shadow is a striking moment of potentiality, followed by a sadness and feebleness that calls to mind Prospero’s epilogue, where his “charms all o’erthrown” and his strength now is the strength of his withered human frame, “which is most faint” (Epilogue 3). Prospero’s speech of renunciation actually follows Galadriel’s rise and fall. His abjuration of magic follows only after he recounts his swelling list of powers that include producing thunderbolts and raising the dead. There are, however, some differences between Galadriel’s and Prospero’s tests. Galadriel’s challenge is to resist the temptation of ultimate power, while Prospero’s task is not only to resist power, but to resist vengefulness and to return to a modestly human constitution based on empathy for fellow humans. There’s also the question of legacy for Prospero, who, having arranged a proper marriage for Miranda to Ferdinand, is ready to step out of the role of overbearing father. And yet a crucial element that Galadriel and Prospero share in passing their test is a new acceptance of their ephemerality. I avoid the word “mortality” since it’s more complicated with Elves, who are indeed immortal in Tolkien’s universe. Still, Galadriel must “diminish” and depart from Middle-earth. One can argue that part of Prospero’s return to his conscience is tied to his newfound awareness of his ephemerality. Once his spirit play is interrupted, he remarks:
the great globe itself… shall dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” (4.1.153-158)
This moment seems to mark a major inflection in Prospero’s thinking, which is connected to an awareness of his own insubstantiality. After abjuring his magic and reinstating himself as Duke in Milan, Prospero says, “Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.313-314). His tone and language here echo Galadriel’s gentle, “soft and sad” voice after she passes her test.
It seems that Prospero, like Galadriel, turns down a potentially corrupting power, and yet we could also rework the causal chain in his renunciation. Is it possible that rather than abjuring his magic in order to pass the test, his abjuring is the result of his having failed a test? This second interpretation is a convincing argument made by Duke Pesta in the article, “This Rough Magic I Here Abjure: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Fairy-Tale Body.” Pesta’s evidence depends on a close reading of the abjuration speech in which Prospero touts his magic as a “so potent Art” before abjuring that same art— his “rough magic”—in the space of two sentences (5.1.50). Pesta explains that by using the word “rough,” Prospero either expresses self-disgust at his general use of magic—in which case he feels his magic-dependent project should be abandoned—or, by rough, he means his magic is unrefined and might yet one day lead to magical success. In the latter case, what he abandons is a particularly crude form of magic, and we are not to assume that he condemns magic altogether for leading to moral dubiousness. Scholars like Frank Kermode support this position, claiming there is nothing damnable about Prospero’s art. His renunciation might simply mark the moment the magician will move on to his next stage of sorcery (Corfield 33).
Critics like Anthony Harris, however, argue for the first interpretation on the grounds that Shakespeare borrows from Medea’s incantations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (The accepted source of the “Ye elves speech”). Harris argues that this borrowing clues us into the fact that Prospero is becoming aware of the dark elements in his art (Corfield 32). This would characterize him as a magician confronted with a Faustian challenge and in danger of becoming like Sycorax, which is an even more compelling reading if we see Prospero through Caliban’s eyes. According to Stephen Orgel, Caliban’s complaints about Prospero—“the rage, the demand for unwilling servitude, the continual threats of constriction and painful imprisonment” (Orgel 20)—link Prospero strikingly to “the foul witch” herself (1.2.259). According to this reading, in renouncing magic Prospero comes to understand its evil nature and thus wants to distance himself from it.
Harris’s reading is tempting, but it seems to reduce Prospero’s complex attitude towards his magic to one Faustian dimension of good and evil. It’s unclear, after all, that the wizard recognizes that his magic is steeped in immoral tendencies. In his article “Why Does Prospero Abjure His ‘Rough Magic’?”, Cosmo Corfield turns to the duality of Ariel and Caliban to answer the question. Corfield claims that the difference between the two characters helps establish a framework in which Prospero is situated between the world of angels and beasts. He cites Prospero’s half-joking remark to Miranda about Ferdinand: “To th’ most of men this is a Caliban, And they to him are angels” (1.2.483-84). Here the earthly Caliban is set in opposition to heavenly spirits, a class to which Ariel belongs. Corfield understands Prospero’s remark to reveal a larger allegory operating in his mind, which includes a tension between base beings like Caliban and more enlightened beings like Ariel. According to this reading, Prospero’s concern with purity—evidenced by the measures he takes to protect Miranda’s chastity—becomes more important. Corfield paints Prospero not as a practitioner of the dark arts, but as a disciplined self-seeker “dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of [his] mind” (1.2.89-90). To Prospero, Ariel’s status as a spirit might be emblematic of a kind of Neoplatonic ideal of refinement, and thus Prospero’s fundamental aspiration might be to transcend his own impurities in a like manner. After all, this difference of purity in beings might help explain why Caliban remains imprisoned in the end while Ariel bounds away easily after being released from service.
Under Corfield’s reading, Prospero’s reluctant acceptance of Caliban and bittersweet parting with Ariel are significant. It signals that Prospero has not, in fact, achieved his initial ends. His threats and open anger toward Caliban across the play might reflect an impurity in his soul that renders him more similar to the half-devil than to Ariel. This impurity would explain why Prospero’s attempts to civilize Caliban actually helped corrupt him. Caliban says to Miranda, “‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse” (1.2.362-367). Orgel writes that “Caliban represents a striking failure of Prospero’s art; not his only failure…but the only failure he acknowledges in the play” (Orgel 23). Prospero might indeed have failed in trying to refine Caliban, but maybe his more consequential failure—apart from the fact that he doesn’t get any bit of repentance from his brother—is his failure to refine himself, something that plausibly leads him to abandon his magic altogether.
Early on in the play, Prospero says to Miranda, “I find my zenith doth depend upon / A most auspicious star, whose influence / If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes / Will ever after droop” (1.2.178-84). Here it seems that Prospero attaches his fortune to a coming high point in his magic. His “Prospero test” might somehow be initiated by the coming of the auspicious star. And so, while Prospero does overcome his passion for vengeance, Corfield argues that he comes to realize that he cannot remove the contamination created within him, something that compromises his magical career. Corfield writes:
Prospero has lost all sense of direction for his magic. To continue his misguided project any further would be to realize a degrading goetic nadir, rather than the cherished vision of a theurgic ‘zenith.’ A few lines later he abjures his magic—a magic that is ‘rough’ because it has become irreparably tainted. (Corfield 42)
Because Prospero realizes that he has courted an auspicious star not to pursue noble theurgic ends, but to pursue a revenge plot, he understands himself to have failed a big test. This reading changes how we understand Prospero’s transformation. While his former controlling self still mirrors Saruman or Denethor, and his later, evolved self, a merciful and wise Gandalf, his story arc bears more resemblance to Tolkien’s Boromir. After all, it is Boromir who aspires to do good, but succumbs to his impulse to seize the ring. His own human nature, his fallibility— his inner “Caliban-ness”—surfaces. When he comes out of his spell, Boromir realizes the damage he’s done.
He rose and passed his hand over his eyes, dashing away the tears. ‘What have I said?’ he cried. ‘What have I done? Frodo, Frodo!’ he called. ‘Come back! A madness took me, but it has passed. Come back!’ (FoR 390)
Boromir fails Galadriel’s test, and yet he finds redemption by defending Merry and Pippin and dying a martyr. In his final moments, Aragorn kneels beside him and Boromir confesses that he tried to take the ring from Frodo. “‘I am sorry. I have paid,’” he says to Aragorn before uttering his final words. “‘I have failed,’” he says (TT 16).
Boromir’s honesty and repentance in his final moments are striking, since they are rare for his character. His words resonate with Prospero’s in his final speech, in which the former wizard seeks the audience’s forgiveness and release. Aragorn—the Christ-like, king-healer—is a fitting person to offer Boromir his redemption. He does so in two ways: first, by comforting Boromir: “‘You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace!’” (TT 16). And secondly, when Legolas and Gimli arrive, Aragorn omits Boromir’s grave sin from his story, preserving the fallen hero’s good name. “‘He fell defending the hobbits, while I was away upon the hill,’” he says (TT 16). Though Boromir has proven corruptible, he dies an honorable death. If you accept Corfield’s interpretation of Prospero’s test, you can tell a parallel story about the magician. Prospero discovers he is corruptible, but his honor is preserved. He abandons his revenge plot, all are forgiven, and Ferdinand and Miranda are wed in classic comedic form. Prospero also demonstrates a new consciousness of his mortality, and his admission about Caliban (“This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.278-289)) even reflects that he might be at peace with a part of his baser nature. These outcomes suggest Prospero’s test comes to a bittersweet resolution, something echoing Galadriel’s resolution to diminish and go West.
In fact, Galadriel’s diminishing calls to mind a striking parallel between Tolkien’s world and Shakespeare’s in The Tempest: the notion that a potential utopia must be melancholically abandoned. We learn from The Silmarillion (S), Tolkien’s bible-like prequel to LoTR, that Galadriel was born in an age when Elves were happy and innocent, dwelling in the land of the gods. The Elves rebel against the gods, and though Galadriel does not join the rebellion, the gods punish her kind collectively: “The Dispossessed shall they be forever” (S 88). In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson quote Tolkien, who wrote in a posthumously published work, that Galadriel had tried to make Lórien “a refuge and an island of peace and beauty, a memorial of ancient days” (Bassham and Bronson 84). She names her new home in Middle-earth “Lórien” after a favored region in her homeland. The island of The Tempest, though it means dispossession for the stranded men, still holds an allure and chance of utopia for Gonzalo where “all men idle, all / And women too, but innocent and pure” (2.1.157-158). Gonzalo’s observation here is patently naive, as Alonso’s party points out, and in this he might have something in common with Galadriel. Galadriel seems to represent for Tolkien a character who both hopes to recreate an ideal state and lives in constant disappointment at its lack of fulfillment. In her sad song on the river, she says, “O Lorien! Too long I have dwelt upon this Hither Shore / And in a fading crown have twined the golden elanor” (FoR 363). To Frodo, Galadriel seems “present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time” (For 364). She is in a state of limbo and displacement in which she strains fecklessly after the beauty of her original Elvish home.
There’s something analogous in Prospero’s failed attempt at a masque, a scene that echoes Galadriel’s liminality in Middle-earth. Prospero calls the magic play his “vanity,” and he later laments the masque’s lack of reality and substance (4.1.153-158). Perhaps his disenchantment relates to his painful awareness of his deficient magic. Egan notes that the masque may represent something of a moral ideal that idealizes and therefore misjudges the reality of human experience. Egan writes:
As a comprehensive image of the real world, the masque is bound to fail. Since it ignores the realities of post-Lapsarian existence, it is incapable, as art, of comprehending or coping with the propensity for evil in fallen man.” (Egan 179)
This would help explain why Prospero is troubled when his masque is interrupted with the remembrance of Caliban. Like Galadriel, unable to reconcile her memories of a pre-Lapsarian Eden with her keen knowledge of a darkening world, Prospero might similarly struggle to reconcile his lofty moral ideals for humanity with the intruding realities of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo—characters who set their minds on rape and murder.
Interestingly, the court masques themselves—at least in Ben Jonson’s productions at which Shakespeare would have been present—incorporated antithetical elements into their structure, “contrasting darkness with light, ugliness with beauty,” so that Shakespeare might have done something similar by allegorizing Ariel and Caliban as opposites (Orgel 45). Prospero seems to subscribe to this clean binary of beings, but it causes him inner turmoil. The masque, his idealized dream of refinement, is interrupted, and so when he finally does abandon his vengeance and accept his fellow men as essentially fallible, he cures himself of a troubling dissonance. Newly clear-eyed and tethered to reality, it is only natural that he then breaks his staff and abandons his “vanity” for stoking his delusion. And similarly in Tolkien, Frodo’s coming with the ring to Lothlorien forces Galadriel to acknowledge that it’s time for the Elves to move on. “‘For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy,’” she says. “‘Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlorien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away’” (FoR 356). She tells Frodo wistfully that it might have been better that the ring were never made or that it remained lost forever. The ring’s appearance on her “island of peace and beauty”—like the human reality of moral impurity to Prospero—is difficult to bear since it signals that the growing evil in the world can no longer be denied and must be dealt with. There’s even a parallel in Prospero’s and Galadriel’s denial of the significance of time and timing. As an elf, Galadriel’s immortal nature seems to trap her in her fantasy; the “tides of Time” are of less consequence to Elves than they are to mortals, and so, naturally, Galadriel is inclined to live in the past and stall the natural course of events in Middle-earth. Prospero, a wizard usually attentive to the timing of his auspicious star—and who keeps Ariel working by a strict clock—seems to lapse even more dramatically when he gets caught up in his imaginative creation. Galadriel’s immortality becomes a liability impeding her full awareness of the realities of change, and Prospero’s imaginative art violates his art for good timing, which seems to be a major source of his power throughout the play.
It is worth noting that there is interesting fatalism in Galadriel about what must be done. When Frodo asks Galadriel what she wishes, she answers stoically, “that what should be shall be” (FoR 356). She recognizes that the departure of the elves from Middle-earth is something that is sad, but necessary. It seems like Milton is at work here. Of the newly expelled Adam and Eve, Milton writes, “Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon; / The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide” (Milton Book XII). The progenitors of humankind make irrevocable mistakes, but look to their new world with a sense of possibility. This is the paradox that Arthur Lovejoy refers to as the “fortunate fall” (162 Lovejoy). This combination of tragedy and fortune is reflected again in a doubling in Shakespeare. While Prospero has his thoughts on death to come in Milan (“Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.313-314)), Miranda rejoices about her life to come: “Oh, brave new world / That has such people in’t!” (5.1.185-186).
Thus, there is something of Milton in Shakespeare too. Prospero’s abjuration of magic and acceptance of his mortality are coupled with Miranda’s happy marriage and the real beginning of her life. In the end, Prospero seems indeed to have failed his test of moral purity in the way Boromir has, and so just as Boromir pays with his life, Prospero must pay with his magic. But Prospero’s is a fortunate fall, or rather a fortunate sacrifice. By renouncing his magic, he returns to us, to humanity, with his new project being finally reconceived in the Epilogue as a project “to please” (Epilogue 13) and to win our mercy. Galadriel’s own departure echoes the departure of the Elves from Middle-earth, a bittersweet event that will signal the official ending of the world’s Third Age and beginning of the Fourth Age, the age of man. In both Tolkien and Shakespeare, mortal humans will inherit a new world in which magic has been left behind—a sad but redemptive reality. With Aragorn as King, and Prospero reinstalled as Duke, these respective rulers will live out their lives as humble humans serving fellow humans. And when they pass on their legacy to future generations, there may be a Prospero test for their children’s power too. It seems, after all, that only after the powerful choose to undertake a serious inner reckoning can they deliver a free and merciful world.
Works Cited
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