Prospero's Powers

As the third part of his trilogy on Shakespeare, Prospero's Powers extends the study of the late plays O'Meara offered in Othello's Sacrifice, to consider more closely how Shakespeare fulfills his personal artistic development in The Tempest.


The play is seen as expressing in its structure the whole of Shakespeare's tragic development up to that time. Great powers of self-knowledge and of inner knowledge of the cosmos are shown to have emerged from this development, which Prospero now embodies. Structural links are pursued that further connect Prospero's powers with the mysterious process of self-growth that is dramatized in The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.

Behind both works, and the Renaissance alchemical tradition they mediate, lies the mystery of the sacrificial death of the Sophia into human consciousness that was taking place at the time Shakespeare was writing. From the event of this death come the great possibilities of self-development and inner power over the world that Shakespeare was boldly prophesizing in the play that brings his artistic career to consummation.

"an excellent and profound study"-Richard Ramsbotham, Who Wrote Bacon?: William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I