The Tempest : From Temporality to Transcendence

Abstract

The Tempest, Shakespeare’s farewell play to the world stage has enchanted the audience by its bewildering range and variety. The corpus of the play is full of complex issues. Denotatively, the play seems to be a study in family feud, political antagonism, a vaulting ambition to outshine each other. One could easily notice Machiavellian traits even in characters like Alonso, Sebastian and in Antonio’s usurpation of Prospero’s Kingdom. The temporal aspects of the play also comprise the acculturating and civilizing aspects of Prospero and educating the subhuman creatures at sea – Ariel, Caliban and Sycorax. When we delve deep into the heart of the play, we immediately notice that here there are elements and happenings suggesting to us a sort of timelessness, a world beyond world, a larger reality cutting through illusions and conditionings. The present paper is an attempt to study the aspects which attribute this romance a kind of transcendentality, a hyper-reality making the readers and audience speechless wonderers at Divine designs of mystery pervading humanity