Excerpt from Margaret Atwood's book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.
Prospero uses his arts -- magic arts, arts of illusion -- not just for entertainment, though he does some of that as well, but for the purpose of moral and social improvement.Posted by sheilaThat being said, it must also be said that Prospero plays God. If you don't happen to agree with him -- as Caliban doesn't -- you'd call him a tyrant, as Caliban does. With just a slight twist, Prospero might be the Grand Inquisitor, torturing people for their own good. You might also call him a usurper -- he's stolen the island from Caliban, just as his own brother has stolen the dukedom from him; and you might call him a sorcerer, as Caliban also terms him. We -- the audience -- are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to see him as a benevolent despot. Or we are inclined most of the time. But Caliban is not without insight.
Without his art, Prospero would be unable to rule. It's this that gives him his power. As Caliban points out, minus his books he's nothing. So an element of fraud is present in this magician figure, right from the beginning: altogether, he's an ambiguous gentleman. Well, of course he's ambiguous -- he's an artist, after all. At the end of the play Prospero speaks the Epilogue, both in his own character and in that of the actor that plays him; and also in that of the author who has created him, yet another behind-the-scenes tyrannical controller of the action. Consider the words in which Prospero, alias the actor who plays him, alias Shakespeare who wrote his lines, begs the indulgence of the audience: "As you from crimes would pardoned be,/Let your indulgence set me free." It wasn't the last time that art and crime were ever equated. Prospero knows he's been up to something, and that something is a little guilt-making.