Tempest

this theme is made most explicit in The Tempest, which contains his self-portrait as a magus and was written near the end of Shakespeare’s creative trajectory just as the Uranus-Neptune alignment became exact.

Tarnas argues that The Tempest is the astrologically determined masterwork of Shakespeare’s Uranus-Neptune phase, encoding the Hermetic-Gnostic revelation that all apparent reality dissolves into a mysterious spiritual-imaginative ground.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the upending of Doctor Faustus in The Tempest and of The Jew of Malta by The Merchant of Venice.

Bloom identifies The Tempest as Shakespeare’s daemonic inversion and supersession of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the key move by which Shakespeare established his own sovereign imaginative authority.

Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 4.1.

Hillman cites the fourth act of The Tempest — the famous ‘we are such stuff as dreams are made on’ speech — as a textual authority within his discussion of the puer-senex dynamic and the alchemical vision of ephemeral substance.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Henry James wrote brilliantly on The Tempest, while Wallace Stevens was haunted by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet.

Bloom traces the transmissive influence of The Tempest through the American literary tradition, with Henry James as its most penetrating commentator among the twelve writers central to his study.

Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

I had never taught The Tempest before and was eagerly looking forward to this new experience. But somehow I could not summon the libido to continue.

Nichols records The Tempest as the threshold object of a sudden libido-withdrawal — the play whose prospective encounter coincides with, and symbolically marks, an episode of psychic deadening, rendering it a depth-psychological event in its own right.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Tempests will sweep over the earth, and toward the conclusion of the period these will increase. In the end all life, human and animal, and all the vegetable seeds, will be forced to seek shelter.

Campbell deploys the tempest as the mythological agent of eschatological annihilation within the Jain descending cosmic cycle, the necessary catastrophe that precedes renewal and the return of a savior.

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 64

A bibliographic index entry confirms Hillman’s engagement with The Tempest in his treatment of power, without elaborating the specific argument at this location.

Hillman, James, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 192, 193, 254, 279

An index entry in Bloom records multiple page references to The Tempest, signalling its structural importance to his argument about the American daemonic sublime across several chapters.

Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →