The island of The Tempest is full of men as well as magic, and its only female inhabitant, Miranda, seems almost too good to be true. Her very name means ‘wonder’, and her father, Prospero, treasures her as an angelic creature. He calls her, we are told, ‘a nonpareil’ (3.2.100). This is hardly surprising: there are no other women to compare her to. Like Perdita in A Winter’s Tale and Marina in Pericles, other late plays by Shakespeare, she is a daughter-figure who is beautiful and virtuous, an ageing playwright’s sentimental homage, perhaps, to his own daughters.
It is the absent women in The Tempest who are the play’s most intriguing female creations. Claribel the banished, Sycorax the witch and Miranda’s own mother, Prospero’s Duchess, are all characters who are spoken about rather than speaking themselves. Their identities are forged by the language the male characters use to describe them, and an analysis of their significance poses unsettling questions about the position of women in Shakespeare’s play.
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