Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

"'Tis far off, And rather like a dream": Common Weal, Common Woe and Commonwealth

"'Tis far off, And rather like a dream": Common Weal, Common Woe and Commonwealth Prospero asks Miranda whether she can remember anything of their life, before they came to that small cell in which they were then, some dozen years after they were cast ashore on the island over which Caliban had once exercised lordship. She struggles, fetching forth nothing more than a domestic memory of being a little girl attended by four or five women. Prospero urges her to a larger vision, but she is unable to bring back to consciousness a single image more from "the dark backward and abysm of time" (l.ii.37-52).1 Thus begins her course of instruction, in which Prospero reveals to his daughter that he was once Duke of Milan, a "prince of power" and she a princess and his sole heir. Overthrown and marked for death by the Duke's brother, they had been spared by the good councillor Gonzalo. Moved by charity, he had set the pair out to sea in a boat, with a strange equipment to survive on land should they escape their perils. Knowing the Duke's love of books, Gonzalo had sent with them choice items from Milan's own library-the slender remains of that temporal royalty, that lot of dominion and property Prospero http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Explorations in Renaissance Culture Brill

"'Tis far off, And rather like a dream": Common Weal, Common Woe and Commonwealth

Slavin, Arthur J.
Explorations in Renaissance Culture , Volume 14 (1): 1 – Dec 2, 1988
Download PDF
28 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/brill/tis-far-off-and-rather-like-a-dream-common-weal-common-woe-and-ZSMNGrjd94

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© Copyright 1988 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0098-2474
eISSN
2352-6963
DOI
10.1163/23526963-90000099
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Prospero asks Miranda whether she can remember anything of their life, before they came to that small cell in which they were then, some dozen years after they were cast ashore on the island over which Caliban had once exercised lordship. She struggles, fetching forth nothing more than a domestic memory of being a little girl attended by four or five women. Prospero urges her to a larger vision, but she is unable to bring back to consciousness a single image more from "the dark backward and abysm of time" (l.ii.37-52).1 Thus begins her course of instruction, in which Prospero reveals to his daughter that he was once Duke of Milan, a "prince of power" and she a princess and his sole heir. Overthrown and marked for death by the Duke's brother, they had been spared by the good councillor Gonzalo. Moved by charity, he had set the pair out to sea in a boat, with a strange equipment to survive on land should they escape their perils. Knowing the Duke's love of books, Gonzalo had sent with them choice items from Milan's own library-the slender remains of that temporal royalty, that lot of dominion and property Prospero

Journal

Explorations in Renaissance Culture – Brill

Published: Dec 2, 1988

There are no references for this article.