Introduction

This is less an introduction and more of a prologue, and I've tried to make sure that it's towards the end of my writing process. I love The Tempest because it confuses me, frustrates me, and still somehow inspires me. Coming back to it this semester, I was struck by the unspoken cost of Prospero's power, and what exactly it was that we, the audience, had to forgive him for. Also, in fairness, I missed my goth phase in high school, and I've been making up for it ever since through a love of esoterica, and so the chance to explore both lead me to the thesis that Prospero's magic is a metaphor for the nascent global market of the Renaissance, with all its awe-ful, awful, wonders.

Esoterica is well-named, though, and while I find it fascinating to learn secret names for God, or try to distinguish a pantheist from a panentheist, it was easy to get distracted trying to puzzle my way through research into magic that was secondary to my concept. I had to focus my research around essential goals, quickly, and that ended up leading me to a term of art that gets used throughout my production concept:

Aether (or, the Aethereal) - 'something' which seems to be made from 'nothing.' Power, by another name.

This has ended up being what magic means to be in this production, and so you'll see it used throughout this production concept as a term that can mean "something magical," but it also can include something as material as the characters' costumes. Because so much of this concept involves taking the inherent self-referentiality of The Tempest and using it to unpack the metaphor of Prospero's magic, I needed something big enough, and brazen enough, to prompt critical reflection from an audience. Prospero's magic is never blasphemous, but it should look and feel almost holy, until suddenly it's so holy it becomes profane. It goes from imitating God's creative power to aping or misusing God's creative power, and we need to practice telling the difference between the two. Especially because our judgement is the climactic act of the play: at the end, Prospero asks us for our forgiveness. What did he do?

Once I'd established that I wanted to focus on the audience's relationship to the play, and specifically how magic is actively used as a metaphor for power, I had my concept. I imagined myself a theater company, and tried to write from the group's perspective, and I think I found out a little more about why this play keeps fascinating me.