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Edited by
ALWIN THALER and NORMAN SANDERS

THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS

KNOXVILLE
1964
 Copyright 1964 by

The University of Tennessee Press

L. C. Catalog Card #58-63252

 Ceremonial Magic in
The Tempest
By Robert H. West

I
lj|J|hen Samuel Johnson wrote his notes to The Tempest he looked
as did other Restoration and eighteenth-century critics, with an
unfavoring eye at its magic—an art “which in reality was surely
never practiced.” He acknowledged, nevertheless, that before “the
character and conduct of Prospero may be understood, something
must be known of the system” of this art. He gives several hundred
words to a remarkably accurate digest of the “system” as the Renais¬
sance conceived it and to its major applications to The Tempest.
The uncompromising substance of Johnson’s statement is that Pros¬
pero ruled fallen angels, though the “least vitiated” of them, and was,
then, in a measure guilty and knew it. “The art was held by all,
though not equally criminal, yet unlawful,” so that though, as Casau-
bon said of Dee, Prospero was perhaps “one of the best kind who
dealt with [spirits] by way of command,” yet he “repents of his art
in the last scene.”1
Plainly Dr. Johnson wished Shakespeare free of such Gothic stuff
as the magic; but however disdainful of these “trifles” he may have
thought himself, he was close enough still in milieu to Renaissance
demonology to feel its force in the play. In this he differs from
nineteenth and twentieth-century critics, who incline to view the
magic as comprehensive analogy or symbol that parallels or stands
for some such abstraction as government, art, or science. “Prospero
to the Elizabethan audience, was as comprehensible in his feats of
magic as a chemist or an electrical engineer is to us moderns,” says
Kittredge. “His art is merely a method of controlling the forces of
nature. It is white or natural magic. . . .” Bernard Knox felt that
the Yale Dramatic Association made a “point . . . well taken” when
it presented The Tempest as science fiction, and Stopford Brooke
that “Today we might call [Ariel] electricity.” Northrop Frye thinks
63
64 Robert H. West

that “Prospero’s magic ... is an ‘art’ which includes, in fact largely

consists of, music and drama,” and G. Wilson Knight that “Prospero
is the great composer whose implements are natural forces and whose
music the music of creation.” George Gordon says, “When we come
to speak of the magic of The Tempest we are at once sensible how
difficult and almost impossible it is to separate the practical magic
of the play from the ideal, the magic of Prospero from the magic of
Shakespeare. The practical magic of the play is visibly and audibly
in the charm-working music, the taboring, singing, and dancing. . . .”2
Frye and Gordon are evidently using the term magic in a derived
sense. By the “ ‘art’ which . . . largely consists of music and drama,”
the “practical magic” in “the taboring, singing, and dancing,” they
seem to mean the “charm” that the play’s embellishments so wonder¬
fully cast over the audience. But these delights, though they often
signal the enchantments that Prospero directs, are not the substance
of his practice. When Gordon goes on to say that “The study of
demonology . . . left no traces in The Tempest” (p. 92) he is flying
in the face of evident fact. Prospero is a Renaissance magician of
some sort, and his magic has more than “traces” of contemporary
demonology. To call Prospero’s magic natural, too, is misleading
from the point of view of Shakespeare’s time. Spirit magic was not
natural magic, much less simply a version of “science,” and least of
all was it the poet’s art.a When early seventeenth-century writers
spoke of spirit magic they usually meant an established relation be¬
tween spirits and a man who ruled them, or seemed to, for traffic in
marvels. The magic of Prospero suits this literal meaning in the
most direct and inescapable way, whatever significance it may have
beyond it.
Critical acknowledgment of the magic in The Tempest does not,
perhaps, require the whole detail that Professor Walter Clyde Curry
weaves into his account of it as the “sacerdotal science” of Iamblichus
and Proclus.4 But it does require at least Dr. Johnson’s admission
that to understand “the conduct and character of Prospero” we must
recognize many of the phenomena in the play as common in Renais¬
sance descriptions of magical processes and effects, and recognize
also something, at least, of the general “system” by which Renais¬
sance thinkers accounted for them and evaluated them. It “is a
matter of importance,” says C. J. Sisson, “that the magic which lies
at the dramatic heart of the play should find a response in the serious
attention of the audience.” The Tempest, like Macbeth, “requires
of the reader some belief in the bases of its magic. In both plays
 Ceremonial Magic in The Tempest 65

the existence in real life of the forms of magic represented is a neces¬

sary condition of their dramatic effect. The treatment is throughout
literal and serious.”5
To Sisson’s statement and Johnson’s I would add an important
qualification: the treatment is so “literal and serious” that it nowhere
quite ratifies for the play any self-contained thaumaturgic “system,”
however it may suggest one. This reticence is the way of the play
as it is, perhaps, the way of reality, which also never quite yields to
our “philosophical patterns.” Magic counts in The Tempest and
counts there in Renaissance terms, but the play stresses the phenom¬
ena and merely glances at the speculation on them. Certainly it
suggests Neo-Platonism and Cabalism rather than scholasticism for
the pattern of its demonology, but it builds on their practices and
experiences, leaving their rationalizations merely latent. Certainly
the reader may—perhaps must—have a preferred view, and if he is
well-informed on Renaissance magic he will probably favor a his¬
torical and self-critically consistent one. But though his construction
may be critically defensible and important, it will be when applied
systematically to the play still a level away from the whole view the
play gives of its magic, for this view includes not only a real cor¬
respondence to some Renaissance practice and theory but also a
final reserve: magic in general and Prospero’s in particular is here at
last darkly mysterious—-to the characters, to the audience, and even
to the author.
One important feature of this reserve is that Shakespeare does
not connect Prospero’s magic overtly with religion. Prospero is
himself a believer—at least he says feelingly that blessed providence
helped him and Miranda to the island. But the question of whether
his magic, like Friar Bacon’s somehow countervails his God goes
nearly unmentioned.6 In The Tempest’s magic, as in most of his
other treatments of the supernatural, Shakespeare keeps his dramatic
world secular and empirical except for a profound intimation that
the unfathomed outer mystery does indeed exist. Shakespeare makes
as much and as dramatic use of our inevitable doubt of theological
and metaphysical constructions as of our inevitable need of them.

II

Some things about the “system” of its magic The Tempest con¬
veys less obscurely than others, and the plainest thing about it, per¬
haps, is that it is not “natural” magic nor “mathematical” magic nor
66 Robert H. West

the magic of “fascination,” but predominantly spirit magic. Prospero

does nearly all that he does through Ariel. Some critics ascribe part
of the executive power to Ariel as agent and another part directly
to Prospero, as though by the strength of his gaze or, as one writer
says, by hypnotism Prospero could put Miranda to sleep or freeze
Ferdinand’s sword or make himself invisible. Professor Goddard
noticed that bringing the lovers together “is Ariel’s accomplishment,”
and went on to say that it is “nothing of Prospero’s magic at all.”7
But the summoning and directing of Ariel seem in the main what
Prospero’s magic is. Except for his reading of the stars, the power
we actually see Prospero exert or hear him speak of seems almost
all in his command of spirits.
This links to a self-evident fact about Prospero’s magic: he does
command spirits, not lure them or persuade them. The distinction
which King James and most other orthodox demonologists mention
as fictitious—that magicians rule spirits whereas witches have them
but ex pacto8—is real in The Tempest. Hardly anyone denies this
now, and the evidence of it is too plain to need reciting. In The
Tempest’s world, contrary to Christian orthodoxy, whether Protestant
or Catholic, a human being genuinely coerces spirits.
The rest of The Tempest’s magic is not so plain, and most im¬
portantly obscure are its means: if Prospero coerces spirits, how
does he do it and what spirits are they? The answers, properly in¬
decisive most of them, matter for the play because they suggest the
deficiencies, moral and executive, in Prospero’s magic that are, as
Dr. Johnson saw, at the heart of Shakespeare’s serious treatment and
that besmirch a little the Neo-Platonic “whiteness” of it. Certainly
Prospero’s magic seems at last to be good in its aims, and it is in
every way an improvement on Sycorax’s magic. Some passages sug¬
gest, nevertheless, that the “secret studies” in the “liberal arts” which
Prospero says “transported and rapt” him while he was Duke were
in the end, for all his righteous success against his enemies, a dis¬
appointment to him, and that his processes were an anxiety and a
danger. These things Shakespeare does not force on us; they belong
to the shading rather than to the bold and fixed outline of the action.
They are part of the uncertainty, the mystery, that Shakespeare usu¬
ally maintains in his use of the supernatural.9 Man’s traffic with
spirits, he seems to indicate, is explicit only in its phenomena, never
in its means or its extent.
Some of the terms that critics apply to Prospero might seem to
 Ceremonial Magic in The Tempest 67

signify that in extent his magical power almost parallels deity’s and
so in itself tends to fix a moral pole for the play. They call him
“almighty as destiny,” a “god-man,” a “visible providence,” and say
that he “has become as a god” and controls “his world without in¬
ternal conflict.”10 These opinions reflect a sense of Prospero’s domi¬
nating dramatic role; surely a simultaneous sense of the literal limits
of a magician’s power and knowledge and especially of the moral
defects of his unhuman abilities ought to temper it greatly. Northrup
Frye is right to mention that “we distort the play if we think of
Prospero as supernatural” (p. 19). He certainly manages the action
and brings it to a moral conclusion. But the morality of the con¬
clusion results from his aroused humanity, not from the force or
methods of his magic. That Prospero is at once a dominating and
a sympathetic character does not certify his magic as even allowable,
much less as good in itself. If we take the standard contemporary
definition that white magic is that which is for good ends by good
spirits,11 Prospero’s qualifies only most doubtfully, for of his pur¬
poses he is not himself sure until near the end, and just how he rules
his spirits or what spirits they are the play leaves faintly ambiguous.
His returns from his art, furthermore, though not so deadly or so
disappointing as those of Dr. Faustus, hardly include the “assimila¬
tion to the gods” that Curry takes to be the real one among them
(pp. 196-7). In the always alluring and always blighted theory of
magic, particularly of such exalted magic as Curry (p. 166) and
Sisson (p. 75) assume Prospero’s to be, the dubiety of the means and
the infection of the ends is very noticeable. Prospero rescues his
good purpose, but the occupational dubiety of magic’s means The
Tempest gravely reflects.
That spirit magic—any spirit magic—was most probably illicit
was surely an item of pulpit theology12 that Shakespeare’s audience
could hardly forget. Sisson notices that the strain between the “meas¬
ure of assent” The Tempest required “should be given by the audi¬
ence” to its “portrait of a magician” if the play was not to be “pure
fantasy” and the equal requirement that “Prospero as a magician
should be disassociated from the evil manifestations” of magic (p.
74). “The activities of men like Forman and Savory were a sinister
and notorious feature of English life. . . . The stage was bound to
have a care in its representation of magic to confine itself to its less
offensive forms” (p. 73). Yet Savory and Forman and others like
them provided a “basis of popular belief for Prospero’s powers. . . .”
(p. 74). Because of practicing London enchanters, then, the audi-
68 Robert H. West

ence could the more effectively receive a stage magician; but because
of them, too, a sympathetic stage portrait needed careful shading
away from their base likeness.
Shakespeare certainly keeps Prospero free of most of the image
of the London enchanters. The workaday offenses that stained their
activities—fraud, avarice, political malpractice—The Tempest does
not even hint at. But it does preserve about Prospero’s magic some¬
thing of the real world’s profound uncertainty on this most aggressive
of man’s relationships with the supernatural. It conveys a doubt of
the compatibility of magic’s means with human sentiment and a fear
of a blasphemous disproportion between magic’s powers and the
pious human will. The question is whether the power Prospero
wields will move him to the unworthy gratifications of revenge or
leave him eventually empty of all further employment for it, and
whether his knowledge is of reasons and beings beyond man’s sym¬
pathy. He does not take revenge, and certainly Ariel is dramatically
engaging. But Prospero does part with Ariel and with his magic in
a way that suggests that whatever the glories and enlargements of
such excursions as his into the outer mystery, he must in the end,
short of utter destruction, turn back to the world of pathos and the
grave.
The necessary antagonism between magic and a pious humanness
appears in the play’s intimations that Prospero must have some less
inoffensive traffic with his spirits than any that reaches the stage.
Though never a surrender to evil, Prospero’s magic has many circum¬
stances in common with that which is. Sisson notices that Prospero
owns “all the implements of the professional practitioner, a book of
secret magic learning, a magic staff, and a magic robe. . . .” Yet
though so equipped, “Prospero does not ‘cast figures,’ and he does
not work with incantations. He does not draw circles or utter spells”
(p. 75). The implements of Prospero’s magic are for conviction,
then, and its feats are the skeleton of the dramatic action; but the
processes of it are too suggestive of suspect persons, means, and ends
to show Prospero at them. Even in “white” magic the names of
God might be “racked,” and the most blameless theory that Ficino
and Agrippa distilled out of Iamblichus and the Cabala had to admit
a kind of worship to the great remote spirits whose minion, if we
believe occult pneumatology, Ariel must be. No magician, however
white, however masterful, could be supposed to rule in the hierarchy
of being all the way to its top. At some stage he had to supplicate.13
 Ceremonial Magic in The Tempest 69

This impious necessity of spirit magic the Globe audience must have
been well aware of.
The indications in the play that Prospero trafficked in prayer
with superior spirits are few, and no critical reason exists to overtax
them. On the other hand, if they conveyed something of importance
to the original audience that is a critical reason not to ignore them.
They are standard in the general schemes of magic to which the play
makes shadowy but unmistakable appeal. Sycorax confined Ariel
by “her more potent ministers”; this may suggest that Prospero freed
him by others greater still. Sycorax brushed “wicked dew” with
“raven’s feather from unwholesome fen,” whereas Prospero sent
Ariel to fetch a no doubt superior product from Bermuda; both
needed dew for its occult properties—or so folklore, anyway, would
lead us to think. We never see incantations or figured circles in
The Tempest, but Prospero’s books should be full of them, for books
of spirit magic were. “I must to my book;/ For yet ere supper time
must I perform/ Much business. . . .” What can we think of Pros¬
pero’s robe but that it is the painfully purified initiate’s robe that
helps to gain affinity with higher spirits and to overcome lower ones?
Surely his staff is of virgin elderwood or some other magically
significant growth. And the word “cell” for his dwelling may hint
not only at his studiousness but at a hierophantic “dignification”
such as superior magicians were supposed to need as a ground for
their feats of alliance with superior spirits.14
Robe, book, and staff are but a fraction of the standard equip¬
ment of a ceremonial magician, and any ceremonial use Prospero
makes of them is in the unstaged privacy of his cell, about which
we have little license to guess. But Shakespeare does not need to
inventory Prospero’s equipment or to tell us in so many words of
his ceremonies to give the impression of the time’s ceremonial magic
with its never-eluded shadow of moral and metaphysical uncertainty.
Shakespeare shows the feats and the implements of the magic, and
he intimates its processes. Together they signify a general rationale
of it as it might appear to its time: effective, dangerous, mysterious,
and at last barren.

Ill

Part of the doubt of Prospero’s spirit magic derives from a doubt

of his spirits. Did Shakespeare raise such a doubt deliberately?
Virgil Whitaker thinks that the doubt results from Shakespeare’s
70 Robert H. West

being “badly confused.” Ariel, Whitaker says, is “of . . . ambiguous

status. He is clearly an elemental spirit or daemon . . .” conceived
according to the pneumatology of Neo-Platonism and so “delicate
and benign” that it “comes as a shock when Prospero calls him
‘malignant thing’ . . .” for malignant “must reflect confusion of the
neo-Platonic system with the traditional demonology, of elemental
daemons with demons operating in the elements. So far as Ariel is
the latter, he is a devil. ...” To back his case for Shakespeare’s
“confusion” Whitaker contends that the begetting of Caliban upon
Sycorax by “the devil himself,” as Prospero says, is pneumatologic-
ally consistent with Christian thought and consequently inconsistent
with the Neo-Platonic pneumatology that Shakespeare suggests in
most of his showing of Ariel.15
The fact is, though, that Christian orthodoxy did not allow true
issue from the factitious union it admitted between devil and woman,
whereas antiquity and Renaissance occultism, holding sometimes
for a true cohabitation, did allow true issue.16 So if the play does
indeed make Caliban a devil’s actual son, then Shakespeare was,
after all, here faithful enough to some occult pneumatology and not
necessarily “confused” about it.
As for Ariel, certainly the phrase “malignant thing” applies
oddly to him, for, as Whitaker says, it suggests devilishness whereas
he seems quite distinct from Christianity’s fallen angels. The sepa¬
rated intelligencies that Aquinas conceives “malignant” spirits to
be could surely not be caught or suffer in a cleft pine, and a devil
must have felt an interest in Prospero’s soul that Ariel never mani¬
fests. Far from pursuing his master as Mephistophilis did Faustus,
Ariel wants to the very end nothing of Prospero but permission to
quit him. The general showing of Ariel in relation to Prospero would
seem to indicate that “malignant thing,” like “dull thing” that follows,
is largely a phrase of Prospero’s exasperation. Besides that, the
phrase comes so early in our acquaintance with Ariel that it can
be no “great shock” without a re-reading of the play.
Still, “malignant thing” is, as Whitaker says, so suggestive of
devils that the question of Shakespeare’s reason for using it is in¬
escapable. I believe that the “ambiguous status” it helps to give
Ariel is not from any “confusion” on Shakespeare’s part, but quite
deliberate. “Malignant thing” and other equivocal items in the pic¬
ture of Ariel are Shakespeare’s reminders to the audience that “ele-
mentals” (a most ill-defined lot),17 be they never so charming, are
 Ceremonial Magic in The Tempest 71

essentially alien to man, and that the magic which involves them is
a violence to both nature and supernature.
Ariel is bound for a term of service (a routine arrangement in
magical rituals, both the white and the black) and bound apparently
by oath (also common in the rituals)18 rather than by assignment from
his hierarchic superior. As was usual in the daemonic hierarchy,
Ariel has “meaner fellows” whom he seems to order about. Are
these the same as the “weak masters” by whose aid in some inde¬
terminate past Prospero had managed storms and raised the dead?
Are they the same spirits that Prospero “from their confines call’d
to enact” the hymeneal pageant? Could it even have been by their
marshalled power that Prospero released Ariel from the pine? These
questions we ask only in passing, for though the play suggests them
it gives no means to answer exactly—and, of course, no need. But
Prospero does obviously have elaborate relations with spirits, and
some of these relations are of a kind that is dark and mysterious in
even the most self-assured of magical manuals, and that is so in the
play. Is Caliban right that Prospero’s spirits all “hate him as
rootedly” as Caliban does? Knight holds this to be Caliban’s lie
(p. 238), but Frye thinks it probably has some truth in it (p. 20);
Gordon seems to think so too (p. 83), and Dr. Johnson took it for
granted (p. 72). Leech contends that Prospero was a harsh master
to Ariel simply because he had become a harsh man (p. 144 ff.), but
K. M. Briggs implies that harshness to spirits was the “usual prac¬
tice of magicians of [Prospero’s] period,”19 its purpose to keep
dangerous servants under control. Did Shakespeare, then, expect
the audience to understand Prospero’s harshness as a technical part
of a dubious magic? Neither magic nor the play entirely justifies
Miss Briggs’ reading; in many surviving “conjurations,” as she says,
magicians do shower their spirits with abuse; but in even more they
are conciliatory. And besides, we do not ever hear Prospero “con¬
jure.” But we do have some misgivings about what Ariel is and
about what it takes to manage him and about how allowable and
how morally productive such measures may be.

IV

In what I have said about the dubiety of Prospero’s operation

and of his ministers I have not meant to imply that in dramatic
impression his magic is the near fellow of Dr. Faustus’ magic or even
of Friar Bacon’s. Though the magic of Prospero may in some sense
72 Robert H. West

be “using devils to countervail his God” as Bacon confessed his

did, still the spirit agent is attractive, Prospero seems genuinely to
rise superior to any evil or meanness in his processes, and certainly
the Christian deity as touchstone of magic’s flaws gets no emphasis.
But Prospero’s magic is like Bacon’s in one last thing: the magician
finally turns away from it. And because the audience is uncertain
whether Ariel may after all be somehow malignant and fairly certain
that Prospero must have directed worshipful ceremony to spirits,
his turning away seem automatically explicable as some sort of
repentance. He “repents of his art in the last scene,” Dr. Johnson
notices. With nostalgia Prospero reviews his greatness in magic
and then renounces it. Such renunciation is a standard enough fea¬
ture in tales of spirit magic and appeals most directly to the audi¬
ence’s sense of the dangers and insufficiencies of it.
Some critics think that Prospero’s abjuration signals a kind of
apotheosis, and others that it is no more than a resolve that “secret
studies” shall not again distract him from the practical affairs of his
dukedom. He resumes “worldly responsibility,” is “glad to return
to power,” is now ready to “make an excellent duke” and is at the
same time “on his way upward toward equality and union with the
gods.”20 Curry supposes that Prospero’s magic has been so sufficient
and so good that it has, as theurgy was supposed to do, carried him
toward deity into a stage of it in which he will abandon implements
and ceremony and “consummate the assimilation of his soul to the
gods” through prayer (p. 196). But surely effective return to govern¬
ment and assimilation to the “gods” have alike a sound of triumph
and vigorous expectation that goes poorly with Prospero’s words
on the dissolution of “the great globe itself” and “all which it in¬
herit” and more poorly yet with his highly personal declaration at
the end that “every third thought shall be my grave.” And why,
we may ask, should effective return to government in itself require
abjuration of effective magic?
If Shakespeare intended the renunciation to suggest some kind
of guilt or insufficiency, in the magic, then the renunciation speech
ought, perhaps, to give a clue to it and perhaps does give one in
Prospero’s claim to have raised the dead: “. . . graves at my com¬
mand/ Have wak’d their sleepers. . . .” This claim may, as Sisson
holds, be “inconsistent with the general picture of his white magic,”
may import “an element of . . . ‘rough magic,’ the violence and
chaos of black art.” The whole of the renunciation speech, Sisson
thinks, “conflicts with [Shakespeare’s] conception of Prospero as a
 Ceremonial Magic in The Tempest 73

white magician.” Sisson does not, however, find it as I do a de¬

liberate shading, for he takes the magic as intended to be genuinely
“philosophy in its higher reaches . . . White Magic both in origin and
in purpose and effect.” Simply Shakespeare has “been unwary in
his borrowing from Ovid” (pp. 75, 76).
But when we match Prospero’s speech with that of Medea in
Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses, we see that of the dozen
marvels she boasts, Shakespeare borrows only five by the most liberal
count and drastically re-phrases them all. He has used Ovid, but
not unwarily. Whatever confirmation of illicitness in Prospero’s magic
Shakespeare may give with the necromatic assertion is purposeful
and calculated. As Leech says, “The Tempest is nothing if not
planned” (p. 143).
Unlike Sisson, Frank Kermode sees the renunciation speech as
entirely compatible with purity in Prospero’s art. “The adaptation
of Medea’s incantation to the needs of Prospero is very skillful.
Only those elements which are consistent with ‘white magic’ are
taken over for Prospero.”21 Kermode’s meaning seems to be that not
every magic is black that performs a deed black magic may do.
Admittedly the feats of various kinds of magicians overlap widely.
Means and purposes of raising the dead range in Renaissance ac¬
counts from the out-and-out “nigromancy” ascribed to Erichtho and
Medea to the “divine magic”22 of Christ and St. Peter. Grant that
out-and-out necromancy is about as close to a goetical exclusive as
the literature of magic affords,23 still Prospero’s claim, made but in
passing, saying nothing of ends and little of means, may perhaps
be held ambiguous rather than clearly evil. Sisson thinks that rais-
ing the tempest was itself “sailing pretty near the wind for Shake¬
speare,” since it was an “approach to the known evil powers of
witchcraft,” and that Shakespeare had carefully to redeem it for the
effect he wanted of a good and dignified magic (p. 76). The boast
of waking graves’ sleepers is, perhaps, hardly redeemable for this
effect of an unmixedly good magic, and certainly Shakespeare makes
no effort to redeem it. It must, then, signify the dubiety of Prospero’s
magic.
Most of Prospero’s recital in his abjuration speech has to do with
the management of the weather, a power of his that we already
knew about. But “graves at my command/ Have wak’d their
sleepers” is so bold that Leech takes it as simply a misstatement
put into Prospero’s mouth to further Shakespeare’s symbolism. We
74 Robert H. West

do not, though, as Leech claims, “know that no one has been raised
from the dead on the enchanted island” (p. 143). We have no hint
about when or where Prospero may have raised his dead. He does
not seem to be talking about the day of the play’s action, but to be
looking back over the unstaged years when he had plied his art.
The fact that he raises no dead during the play does not in itself
mean that he is making a misstatement.
Professor Schiicking wrote that the necromantic statement is in
fact a deliberate contradiction of our previous impression of Pros-
pero’s art and is intended to serve Shakespeare’s purpose of “episodic
intensification.”24 If so, one thing intensified is our impression of
the magic as straining toward moral lawlessness, though nothing
Prospero says is conclusive about it.
Shakespeare juxtaposes the climactic claim of necromancy and
Prospero’s abjuration of what he significantly calls “this rough
magic.” Neither the abjuration nor the adjective “rough” confirms
a guilt in the magic, but they bring to its peak the long doubt that
the play has subtly nourished. It is the sort of doubt we experience
in the real world about a psychic phenomenon that has impressed
us. Whatever we believe of such an experience must house always
with a small uncertainty, for if it is not delusion the true reason of
it are beyond our native realm. And so with Prospero’s magic.
Shakespeare takes pains to convince us of good faith, of real results,
and of high-wrought ends and means. He takes pains to remind us,
too, of how little we may understand of such an enterprise, of how
incommensurable with our humanity it must be.

Magic in The Tempest is not, then, just fairy tale or facile enter¬
tainment in a musical review, nor is it a symbolical veneer whose
chief purpose is to signify something quite different from it to be
taken much more seriously. It is rather a reflection—so far as such
a quicksilver romance gives a surely identifiable reflection—of the
quite literal interest and hope that the early seventeenth century still
found in the occult, and of a concomitant suspicion of it. Somewhat
as the eighteenth century was to have a hope and a linked suspicion
centered in “reason,” the nineteenth one in “progress,” and ours in,
say, “education” or “science,” so (though admittedly in a minor way)
the seventeenth had a hope and an accompanying doubt in the
occult. This it inherited from a more enthusiastic age. Cardan,
 Ceremonial Magic in The Tempest 75

Agrippa, Paracelsus, Dee, and innumerable others carried the hope

in the sixteenth century; after them Fludd, Vaughan, Boehme,
Campanella, Henry More, Glanville, even Robert Boyle, continued
it, though with diminished promise. As for the doubt, all orthodoxy
and all scepticism pronounced doubt of magic, and the occultists
themselves—Agrippa most strikingly—entertained it in one way or
another. To suppose that in 1611 an able playwright could not take
magic seriously in both believing and doubting would be like sup¬
posing that in our time one could not take private wealth or cor¬
porate enterprise seriously. Conceivably these things now stand
near their end; but they are real to us still.
If, of course, magic in The Tempest did not mean more to us
than anything we now think or care about magic, the play could
hardly continue to interest us. It has to be first about men and what
men know and use and respond to, alone and with others. And so
The Tempest is about men, by means of a dramatically pivotal man,
about his knowledge and power, and hence about his errors and
weaknesses—and thus, if you like, in its way it gets around to
failure and success in government, science, and art. But the magic—
the relation of Prospero and Ariel and the deeds they do—does not
“stand for” these things. In The Tempest magic exists in itself, has
in itself as much dramatic standing or “reality” as Prospero’s duke¬
dom does. Dukedom and magic alike have gone out of being, but
we can still have some knowledge and sense of them, and understand
in their terms, if we will, all sorts of things about man and power
and man and error.
Whitaker supposes that “we are not justified in taking the super¬
naturalism of [The Tempest] too seriously. . . . Ariel, Caliban, and
the other spirits are a mechanism in the plot of the play and a means
of making its meaning clear, but not a part of that meaning” (p. 323).
This conclusion rests, of course, largely on his opinion that Shake¬
speare was confused in his showing of “the supernaturalism.” If, as
I hold, Shakespeare was by no means confused but merely preserved
the proper mysteriousness of his subject and made dramatic capital
out of it, then the “supernaturalism” is part of his meaning.
The whole audience understood very well that Prospero, like
any other spirit magician, chanced putting himself in the power of
fiends for nothing of value. The judicious understood, too, that the
utmost success of even a “magician most profound in his art and
yet not damnable” might amount in the face of death and its mystery
76 Robert H. West

to no more than a worldly disease. With men and spirits alike Pros-
pero gets his will, and neither he nor we would have it otherwise.
But what he has paid for it both he and we remain unsure, and what
it is worth before God we know yet less. “We are such stuff/ As
dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep.”
Even if his magic would remain his, Prospero can conceive nothing
more that he might use it for. Nor can we.

NOTES
1. See Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. (New York,
1960), pp. 71-72.
2. George Lyman Kittredge, Introduction to his ed. of The Tempest (New
York, 1939), p. xviii; Bernard Knox, "The Tempest and the Ancient Comic
Tradition,” English Stage Comedy, ed. by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. (New York,
1955), p. 53; Stopford A. Brooke, On Ten Plays of Shakespeare (London,
1948), p. 297; Northrop Frye, Introduction to his Pelican ed. of The
Tempest (Baltimore, 1959), p. 21; G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life
(London, 1948), p. 243; George Gordon, Shakespearian Comedy (Oxford,
1944), p. 91.
3. See Elmer Edgar Stoll, Shakespeare and Other Masters (Cambridge, 1940),
pp. 281-316, and especially p. 287.
4. Curry’s account, for instance, of how Sycorax must have ruled and im¬
prisoned Ariel and of how Prospero released him is no doubt sound so
far as history of philosophy is concerned, but surely it draws astonishing
detail from a very few and largely indefinite lines in The Tempest. See
Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns (Baton Rouge, 1937), p. 186ff.
5. C. J. Sisson, “The Magic of Prospero,” Shakespeare Survey 11 (Cambridge,
1958), pp. 70, 71.
6. The only direct notice of the question comes, perhaps, when Sebastian
says “The devil speaks in him,” and Prospero returns a curt “No.” (V. i.
128). H. Mutschmann and K. Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism
(New York, 1952), p. 253, suggest that Prospero shows his faith by speak¬
ing reverently of the Virgin in V.i.143.
7. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1960), II,
282. On Prospero’s personal magic see also Reuben A. Brower, “The
Heresy of Plot,” English Institute Essays (New York, 1952), p. 65, and
John A. Hart, “The Tempest,” in Shakespeare: Lectures on Five Plays
(Pittsburgh, 1958), p. 74.
8. For references on this point see my The Invisible World: A Study of
Pneumatology in Elizabethan Drama (Athens, Ga., 1939), chapters iii and
vii.
9. See my articles “King Hamlet’s Ambiguous Ghost,” PMLA, LXX (Dec.,
1955), pp. 1107-1117, and “Night’s Black Agents in Macbeth,” Renaissance
Papers, University of South Carolina (1956), pp. 17-24, and “Ariel and the
Outer Mystery” in Brown University’s forthcoming Shakespeare Memorial
Volume, in all of which I argue Shakespeare’s special reserve on the
supernatural.
10. See in order S. C. Sen Gupta, Shakespearian Comedy (Oxford, 1950),
p. 241; Knight, p. 242; Sisson, p. 76; Clifford Leech, Shakespeare’s Trage¬
dies (London, 1950), p. 143; Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Na¬
ture of Man (New York, 1942), p. 200.
 Ceremonial Magic in The Tempest 77

11. See, for instance, Cornelius Agrippa, “Of Theurgy,” The Vanity of Arts
and Sciences (London, 1684), pp. 119, 120; Gaspar Peucer, Les Devins
(Paris, 1584), V.iii.211; Martin Delrio, Les Controverses et Recherches
Magiques (Paris, 1611), Il.ii.l 12; and for moderns Colin De Plancy, Dic-
tionnaire Infernal (Paris, 1818), under Magie, II. 1; and Arthur Edward
Waite, The Book of Ceremonial Magic (New York, 1961), p. 14.
12. See, for instance, Andrew Willett, An Harmonie upon the First Book of
Samuel (Cambridge, 1607), p. 328, and William Perkins, A Discourse of
the Damned Art of Witchcraft in The Works (Cambridge, 1613), p. 638.
13. On the necessary place of worship to finite spirits in spirit magic see The
Invisible World, pp. 115, 126, 129, 229.
14. On magical books, robes, and circles and the affinity of magician for spirit
see The Invisible World, pp. 115, 126, 127, 247, 250.
15. Virgil K. Whitaker, Shakespeare’s Use of Learning (San Marino, 1953),
p. 208 and pp. 322-323.
16. Curry thinks that Caliban’s fishy nature indicates that he was the son of
an aquatic daemon. Curry gives, however, no reference from the Neo-
Platonists whom he holds to be Shakespeare’s general source. Paracelsus
is the principal writer of the Renaissance to assert true cohabitation and
issue between elementals and human beings. See A Book on Nymphs . . .
trans. by Henry E. Sigerist, in Four Treatises of Theophrastus Von Hohen-
heim Called Paracelsus (Baltimore, 1941), p. 238. Antiquity provides end¬
less tales of union between mortals and gods or daemons, and these tales
Renaissance writers, both pneumatologists and others, picked up in pro¬
fusion.
17. In “Ariel and the Outer Mystery” in the forthcoming Brown University
Shakespeare Memorial volume, I argue that Ariel, like the ghost of King
Hamlet and the witches of Macbeth, is pneumatologically ambiguous,
probably by design. Certainly the time’s whole concept of the “neutral”
or “middle” spirits was a tangled one whose only real clarification came
in the orthodox insistence that no such class existed. For an example of
the muddled and careless way occultists adjusted Platonistic notions to
Christian ones see Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, trans. I. F. (London, 1651),
III, xvi, 390ff.
18. See The Arbatel of Magic, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1655), p. 127ff.,
for the names of superior spirits who bind their servants to magicians. On
the oaths which bind spirits see The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy,
trans. Robert Turner (London, 1655), p. 71. Agrippa himself says in
Occult Philosophy, III,xxxii,447-8, that evil spirits may be bound through
the offices of the good.
19. The Anatomy of Puck (London, 1959), p. 54.
20. See in order Spencer, p. 198; Stoll, p. 310; Hardin Craig, An Interpretation
of Shakespeare (New York, 1948), pp. 350-51.
21. See his Arden ed. of The Tempest (Cambridge, 1958), Appendix D, p. 149.
22. The miracles of the Apostles and saints were sometimes spoken of as
magic. I take the phrase “divine magic” from a trans. of Gabriel Naude,
The History of Magic (London, 1657), ii, 14, where he distinguishes “divine
magic” from theurgy and goety, both of which he thinks illicit. The
prophets and Apostles, says Agrippa, “were famous by the wonderful
power of God . . . without the cooperation of the middle causes. . . .”
(Occult Philosophy, III, vi, 358), and in his chapter of necromancy (III,
xiii) he talks of such pious feats “among the Gentiles and Jewes in former
ages” as Elijah’s and Apollonius’s.
23. Agrippa says flatly in The Vanity of Arts and Sciences, pp. 115, 116, that
78 Robert H. West

invoking the “Souls of dead Bodies” is “held abominable,” and this was
the orthodox view. Agrippa is of the same opinion in Occult Philosophy,
III, xlii, where he explains at length that necromancy requires blood and
the necromancer’s affinity for devils, unless it is the divine kind, whose
means belong to God. Protestants held, of course, that any apparent rais¬
ing of the dead by magicians was always devilish delusion. See Willett,
p. 315ff., Perkins, p. 626, and Randall Hutchins, “Of Specters” (c. 1593),
trans. Virgil Heltzel and Clyde Murley, HLQ XI (1948), p. 424ff.
24. L. L. Schiicking, Character Problems in Shakespeare’s Plays (London,
1922), p. 115.

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