1. Shakespeare: A Local Habitation and a Name

Miranda's exclamation at the end of The Tempest undermines its own apparent irony, by throwing an aura of optimistic wonder over the specimens of common humanity assembled before her, who vary from the weak-minded to the irredeemable. The magician Prospero's appetite has become jaded, but there is hope for the world because his sense of wonder has been released to colonize it and change its complexion. Although this is the end of Shakespeare's play and of his life's oeuvre, and the playwright has decided to shed his robe and break his staff, we feel that in a sense every Shakespearean play begins like this: with a collection of characters, perhaps aspects of a single mind, who are none of them much more than ‘arrant knaves, crawling between earth and heaven’ (as Hamlet describes himself). But when they start to become related to each other in the terms of a dramatic poem, animated by the poetic magic, a veil is stripped away and they become facets of a inner world, revealing the mind in the process of working. This applies even to those elements without poetry in themselves — those who, like Antonio, do not know the difference between their conscience and a chilblain. Yet even the hero in a Shakespeare play, well aware of the ‘deity’ conscience, is not necessarily particularly virtuous or the ‘noblest of them all’. He is the one who — in terms of Keats's ‘Chamber of Maiden Thought’ metaphor — sees the door standing ajar into the next chamber of thought, and begins to move towards it, impelled