What role does magic play in The Tempest by Shakespeare?
Magic was a controversial subject in Shakespeare’s day. In Italy in 1600, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his occult studies. Outside the Catholic world, in Protestant England, where Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, magic was also taboo; not all “magic”, however, was considered evil. Several thinkers took a more rational approach to the study of the supernatural, with the determination to discover the workings of unusual phenomena. The German Henricus Cornelius Agrippa was one such thinker, who published in De Occulta Philosophia (1531, 1533) his observations of “divine” magic. Agrippa’s work influenced Dr. John Dee, an Englishman and student of supernatural phenomena. Both Agrippa and Dee describe a kind of magic similar to Prospero’s: one that is based on 16th-century science, rationality, and divinity, rather than the occult. When King James took the throne, Dee found himself under attack for his beliefs, but was able to defend himself successfully by explaining the divine n
