Prospero: Kind of a dick.

Saturday, we had our first read-through of The Tempest. I’d already started learning some of my lines, but then I decided to wait until we got the final script. No sense learning lines that had been cut – mostly because it’d simply confuse me.  Incidentally… according to the online public domain version of The Tempest, the play contains 17,462 spoken words. Of those, Prospero says 4,786. That’s a little over 27%. I have enough work ahead of me without learning lines I’m not going to say in the production.

Nevertheless, when I got the script and started looking at the cuts, I was a little disappointed. Some of the earliest exchanges between Prospero and Miranda were cut – the business about what Miranda could remember before they came to the island – I felt there were some golden opportunities to show the affection between the father and daughter.

But then I realized that Prospero is really kind of a dick. Maybe we aren’t supposed to feel sympathetically toward him. After all, when he first appears, Miranda thinks she’s witnessed a few dozen people killed by Prospero’s magic. He tells her to calm down, because EVERYBODY IS TOTALLY SAFE. Well, that’s a lie. When Ariel first appears, shortly thereafter, he asks the spirit if everyone is safe. He actually had no idea whether those people were killed or not, but he told Miranda everything was fine. He also tells Miranda he has done nothing but in care of her. That’s a lie, too. He’s plotted out a big revenge strategy. Although there’s a component of it that MAY be in care of Miranda, even that seems questionable. His motivations for arranging the marriage to Ferdinand are as likely to be to profit himself as for Miranda’s well-being.

Then comes the issue of Caliban. So, let’s say you’re a Gandalf-level wizard. You’re alone on an island with your only daughter. You find a horrible creature there, a thing of darkness. And then it tries to rape your daughter. What do you do? Obviously, you keep the thing around, right? Because it makes the fire and fetches in wood. Things a wizard can’t do. Right? Obviously, I’m just at the beginning of this process, and I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts about this later, but it seems that Prospero has a need to dominate. He keeps Caliban around because he wants someone he can boss around. This fits with the more recent criticism of the play which suggests that it’s really about imperialism, but I feel that’s grafting an idea onto the play that didn’t even exist when it was written.

Anyway, with all of Prospero’s lies and self-centeredness, I’ve started to question many of the things he says. When Miranda asks why they were exiled instead of killed and Prospero replies that the schemers DARE not, because the people loved him so – really? Prospero didn’t give a shit about the people. He couldn’t be bothered. He didn’t have any interest in running the government. He skulked off to the tower to read. He abdicated his power to govern and improve matters for his people so that he could further his own personal interests.

Later in the play, he mentions that he forgot about Caliban and the plot to kill him. I suppose it’s possible that he isn’t a complete bastard, he’s just completely self-absorbed. At any rate, though – not exactly a warm, cuddly dude. He’s the kind of guy who would make you walk all the way to Mordor, while he rides a giant eagle everywhere.