This summer, students at the Interlochen Arts Camp presented “The Tempest.” This is not my favorite Shakespearian play because I am a bit put off by all of the magic. But I wanted to be prepared so before attending, I logged on the Internet to review the plot and I happened onto an article by Raji Ayinla called “The Meaning of Magic in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
It suggested that in in Elizabethan time, many people simply did not trust scientists. Imagine!
The article explained, “Prospero’s exile can be read as an allusion to the poor treatment of scientific figures like Galileo who were persecuted for their ideas. In the eyes of the Church, science was as heretical as magic.”
They didn’t call it science then, but during Shakespeare’s lifetime, an intellectual revolution was taking place.
In addition to Galileo, Copernicus ,Tycho Brahe, Francis Bacon and others were making discoveries which were in direct conflict with the teaching of the Church and their knowledge seemed to give them supernatural abilities.
In the play, “the liberal arts” that Prospero learned through “secret studies” resulted in power and absolute control.
But this play - with its political intrigues and conspiracies, slavery, and yes, magic - ends with the everybody returning home, just like the students from the Interlochen Arts Camp did last weekend.
“Our revels now are ended. “
