Prospero’s Problem With Perfection

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Prospero’s Problem With Perfection: Why Magic Isn’t Enough

Giovanni Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man promotes the perfectibility of mankind. In the oration, Pico presents a specific, sequential program for man’s spiritual ascendancy to godly flawlessness. And yet Pico’s program is dealt a literary blow in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest when the protagonist, learned mage Prospero, is unable to complete Pico’s curriculum and quits his magic entirely. The divergent view of man expressed in these two works exists on many levels, but I believe the essential tension is revealed in the role of a single character in The Tempest: the misshapen manservant Caliban.

Caliban is grotesque and base. Arguably, his external ugliness reflects a moral hideousness within. Cosmo Corfield, in his scholarly article Why Does Prospero Abjure His “Rough Magic”? explicates this relationship when he associates “Caliban’s bestiality with a propensity to evil.” However, Caliban’s consignment to the realm of evil and vice must be examined more closely. Is Caliban so evil? Is earthiness necessarily linked to immorality? Understanding the character of Caliban is essential to understanding why Prospero is unable to achieve perfection.

Pico’s program for man’s perfectibility consists of three stages. He sees men as “first being purified, then illuminated, then finally made perfect” (16). These stages also follow in rigid sequence. Purification is achieved by “refraining the impulses of our passions through moral science . . . by dissipating the darkness of reason by dialectic” (16). Once cleansed of the “filth of ignorance and vice,” we may then “suffuse our purified souls with the light of natural philosophy” (16). After illuminat...

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...ke us remember what is significant. We may accumulate books and be filled with magical promise, yet still be – as Prospero until the very end – clueless. Pico’s program is best appreciated as a way of living – a desire to be the best person possible. Man’s perfection is wholly distinct from the perfection of God. The perfected man remains grounded in all that is human and natural; his eyes set not only on the heavens, but focused also on the world before him.

Works Cited

Corfield, Cosmo. “Why Does Prospero Abjure His “Rough Magic”? Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.36, No.1 (Spring, 1985), 31-48.

Mirandolla, Giovanni Pico della. Oration of the Dignity of Man. Trans. A. Robert Caponigri. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1999.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.

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