Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

202
William Shakespeare
drama but also the characterisation, the substance and the course of the
action, but more particularly the nature of the magic and the marvellous
which here everywhere exert their infl uence. It explains why all
the characters, with the exception of Prospero, are not so much the
bearers of their own existence, as rather borne by it, driven on by the
tempest which unconsciously gathers round them, determining their
fate and guiding their actions, the eff ects of which tempest they no
doubt perceive, and its nature is not revealed to them, till all that was
to be has actually come to pass; the misfortunes which befell them, the
marvels that terrifi ed them, they regard as strange matters of chance,
as freaks of nature, peculiarities of the island and of its inhabitants.
In truth, however, it is Prospero’s magic arts which eff ect everything,
Prospero’s spirits which in reality control and shape earthly existence,
inasmuch as they are the embodiment of the stirrings and movements
of the secret psychical life of nature, so to say, the souls of plants, of
stones and metals, of winds and clouds, the small yet powerful spirits
which Prospero so beautifully describes, when in act v. 1, he exclaims:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves;
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fl y him,
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime
Is to make midnight-mushrooms; that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid
(Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimm’d
Th e noontide sun, cull’d forth the mutinous winds,
And ’twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fi re, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt.
From this description it is clearly evident that the very introduction of
the elves and magic is but a fantastico-symbolical form given to the
mysterious powers which prevail in nature and which so signifi cantly
infl uence human life. But these spirits, at the same time, boast of being
the ‘ministers of fate’ who have ‘to instrument this lower world and
what is in ’t.’ And, in fact, the mysterious powers of nature—when the