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‘It is not surprising,’ writes Frank Kermode, ‘that The Tempest has sent people whoring after strange gods of allegory.’ Certainly many scholars have been fascinated by the elusive magic of Shakespeare's final vision, and as Kermode himself points out in his introduction to the play, ‘The theme of deliverance from tragic existence into a new dispensation of mercy lends itself readily to any Jungian interpretation.’ The author of Prospero's Island, a widely travelled Jungian psychotherapist, schooled in philosophy and Indian techniques of meditation, has worked hard on just such a task, influenced notably by Kerenyi, Marie-Louise von Franz and, above all, James Hillman. He sees The Tempest as ‘the greatest mystery play of our tradition’, steeped in alchemical imagery and profoundly influenced by the background of Renaissance hermeticism, which was becoming highly controversial in Shakespeare's time. He is intrigued also by Frances Yates's theory that in the figure of Prospero Shakespeare was defending the Rosicrucian tradition, as exemplified by the celebrated magus and mathematician, John Dee, who fell into disfavour with James I and died in poverty in 1608. The book itself is attractively illustrated with a series of beautiful emblematic plates taken from two seventeenth-century alchemical works. It is unfortunate that the effect of certain quotations is marred by (probably) careless proof-reading.
With great energy, skill and sympathetic imagination, (vitiated only occasionally by an over-rhapsodic style), the author takes us step by step through the play, discussing the significance of each character and scene in a way that must inevitably enhance its value for all Jungians, but also, one would hope, for the general reader or student too. It is not hard to see the dramatic tumult of the storm that opens the play as a true psychological upheaval, which sweeps certain male characters away from the mainland of ego-consciousness and plunges them into an unfathomable s