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His Dear One, His Only Child: The Complicated Relationship Between Prospero and Miranda

(This essay was originally written in December 2020 as part of an independent project analyzing William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and some of its modern adaptations/retellings. It is a companion piece to the short play Lull.)

The Tempest by William Shakespeare begins with and revolves around a journey. Prospero, a sorcerer who acquired his abilities through years of intense study of the “liberal arts”, has instructed a spirit named Ariel to cause a ship carrying several members of nobility within Italy on the island he rules. While on this island the prince of Naples, a young man named Ferdinand, falls in love with Prospero’s daughter, Miranda. Miranda has been raised since the age of three on this island, having accompanied her father there after he was removed from his post as the Duke of Milan and banished to the island. She has been exposed to almost no other people around her other than her father and the half-fish half-man creature named Caliban whom Prospero keeps as a slave. Miranda and Ferdinand are subsequently married by Prospero, restoring the link between the noble families. Prospero reconciles with the King of Naples, and they all plan to return to Italy. Before he returns, however, Prospero finally does what he had claimed he would do repeatedly throughout the play, and frees Ariel from his service, ending all of the magic that Ariel performed. In addition, his words and the actions suggested therein imply that he gives up his magic completely. He says, “this rough magic I hereby abjure… I’ll break my staff, bury it in certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.” At the end of the play, he says, “now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant.” In this case, ‘want’ means ‘lack,’ implying that Prospero has thrown down his staff and renounced his magical powers, despite how much power those abilities gave him.

By explicitly connecting Prospero’s ability to leave the island with his relinquishment of his magical powers, Shakespeare is emphasizing the theme of control with regards to Prospero’s character. In order for Prospero to regain his freedom, he needs to give up some of what gives him power. To be free, he must leave the island he rules, and give up his magical abilities. However, there are two characters over whom he has power that are not acknowledged in his closing monologue — Caliban and Miranda. Caliban is explicitly regarded as Prospero’s slave, and while he appears to acknowledge that Caliban is his responsibility towards the end of the play, there’s no mention of what is going to happen to Caliban; it is unknown if Prospero will take him to Italy to continue being his slave, or if he is to be left on the island alone as he was before Prospero and Miranda arrived. As Caliban’s character and enslavement is often interpreted as a metaphor for colonized people and colonization, his ambiguous fate in the play has been thoroughly analyzed, most notably in Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest. But even more subtle is how Miranda factors into Prospero’s quest for freedom. While she is not explicitly under her father’s control in the same way Caliban and Ariel are, she has been kept on an island with only her father and a creature who threatens to rape her for company. Her marriage to Ferdinand is legitimized by her father; Prospero then claims to sympathize with the King who fears his son has been killed because “I have lost my daughter.” He ultimately approves of the marriage between Miranda and Ferdinand, but his words imply that he struggles with this change. Shakespeare suggests via Prospero’s character arc that to achieve freedom, one must give up a certain amount of power, whether it be literal magic powers or power over other people.

The Tempest has been adapted countless times in many different forms of media. In two cases, the relationship between Miranda and Prospero is given even more attention. In Hag Seed, a novel by Margaret Atwood, The Tempest is given a modern setting in suburban Canada, where Prospero has been transformed into Felix Phillips, a disgraced theatre director who along with getting a job teaching theatre at the local prison begins to imagine his deceased daughter as an invisible spirit who accompanies him everywhere. While imagining Miranda as a little girl able to grow up and have the life she could not in reality provides him some comfort, eventually Felix lets her go. He accepts that she is gone but is grateful for the time he spent with her and the love he was able to give her, which he now expresses through his relationships with other people. Atwood writes,

Already she’s fading, losing substance: he can barely sense her. She’s asking him a question. Is he compelling her to accompany him on the rest of his journey? … What has he been thinking — keeping her tethered to him all this time? Forcing her to do his bidding? How selfish he has been! Yes, he loves her: his dear one, his only child. But he knows what she truly wants, and what he owes her. … “To the elements be free,” he says to her. And, finally, she is.

Felix’s journey is one of grief, and the conclusion of his arc involves an acceptance of his daughter’s death. Rather than continuing to keep her alive in his imagination, he releases her in the same way Shakespeare’s Prospero releases Ariel, a spirit that continually asks for his freedom. In Atwood’s retelling, Miranda is imaginary, so the only consequence of Felix’s separation from her is his ability to move on with his life having achieved closure. While this is an optimistic and satisfying ending for Felix’s character, it is notable that even Felix acknowledges how he has been keeping Miranda tethered to him. In cases where the point of separation is not so clear, such as when both characters are alive, it is not as easy for the ending to be as satisfying, because one has to consider how the separation will affect both characters as time goes on.

The 1956 film Forbidden Planet directed by Fred M. Wilcox has an ending that is not nearly as optimistic as Atwood’s adaptation of The Tempest. Instead of a Caliban character, the grotesque figure of the story is a monster literally created by Morbius, this adaptation’s version of Prospero. A literal manifestation of Morbius’ id, the creature seeks to kill the crew of the starship C-57D. Notably, the creature comes to kill the ship’s crew after Morbius’ daughter Altaira says that she wants to leave the planet because she has fallen in love with one of the Officers. Morbius asks the machine he created, Robbie the Robot, to destroy it, but the robot shuts down because it recognizes that the creature is a manifestation of Mobius’ desires, and thus is part of him. Mobius is eventually killed by the creature, but not before he sets off a sequence that eventually destroys the entire planet while the crew and his daughter watch from the ship. In this case, Morbius is literally killed by his subconscious desire to prevent Altaira from leaving him. As the understandably upset Commander Adams says, “but now she’s [Altaira] defying you, Morbius. Even in you, the loving father, there still exists the mindless primitive, more enraged and more inflamed with each new frustration. So now you’re whistling up your monster again! To punish her for her disloyalty and disobedience!” Unable to fully accept that his child no longer sees him as her sole companion, he lashes out, killing himself and his world in the process. Forbidden Planet explores how a parent’s protectiveness of their child can be destructive. Having witnessed the destruction of her planet, Altaira is able to leave with the ship’s crew and her lover, but the audience can clearly see that she will forever be traumatized by the loss of her father.

At the conclusion of both Hag Seed and Forbidden Planet, the connection between the versions of Miranda and Prospero is broken, either by choice or as a consequence of Prospero’s actions. Prospero’s fate is dependent upon his ability to give up power over his daughter. Power in both cases can both help and hurt Miranda. Miranda is kept safe and given companionship by her father, but she is also isolated and treated like a child with no real exposure to other people. Both the original play and the adaptations suggest that for the characters to be free, Prospero must give up some of his control over Miranda. But what is not explored in either adaptation is the other condition of Prospero’s freedom: the willingness of the audience to applaud, and thus let the play end.

Prospero says in his final monologue, “But release me from my bands/with the help of your good hands...As you from crimes would pardoned be/let your indulgence set me free.” Prospero breaks the fourth wall at this point, asking the audience to let the play end, so that he may move on in his own journey. In Hag Seed and Forbidden Planet, the audience is not given this option; the stories simply end like all books and films do. But in Shakespeare’s original work, the possibility of the story not ending is presented to the audience. The audience then has to consider, however briefly, the consequences of the plot’s continuation. One of those consequences is how the separation between Prospero and Miranda would become complicated. By writing a scene centered on Miranda set years after a modern version of The Tempest would have taken place, I aimed to illuminate the difficulty with which Prospero gives up power over Miranda, and how their isolation affected both of them. By showing Miranda’s unwillingness to go against her father’s wishes, I sought to emphasize that it is not only difficult for a parent to give up power over a child as they grow up, like Prospero does, but that it is just as difficult for the child to give up the comfort of their parent’s care. Unlike Prospero’s decision to give up his magical powers, there is no one clear act that can fully sever the connection between parent and child. When both parties are left alive, as they are in The Tempest, it is unclear how much freedom from each other they really want, how that freedom manifests itself, and whether that separation can or should be permanent at all.

#the tempest #essay #william shakespeare #hag seed #forbidden planet

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