1

The Bible opens with the image of a stormy sea: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the waters' (Gen. 1: 1–3).  Upon this buzzing blooming confusion, onomatopoetically called 'Tohuvavohu' in the original Hebrew, the speech of the creator first imposes meaning: the polarities of light and dark, day and night, sea and land.  Shakespeare's first words in the First Folio are: 'A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard'. The universe of his plays comes into being as confused and desperate shouts hardly separable from the deafening roar of wind and sea out of which they arise.  In the next scene a magical creator appears to give them meaning.  The parallel may be accidental, since there is no evidence that Shakespeare himself edited the Folio, but it points to some essential similarities between the book of Genesis and The Tempest.

Both are cosmic creation myths, stories of the emergence of complex, articulated being from nothingness or chaos.[49]  Just as the Bible's God makes the world he populates and then interacts with it, Prospero conjures up the world of The Tempest with his magical utterances and peoples it with his own offspring, along with the demons over whom he has taken control.  This is at least strongly suggested when he explains to his daughter that the 'direful spectacle of the wreck' that she and the audience have observed with horror, 'I have with such provision of mine art | So safely ordered that there is . . . not so much perdition as an hair . . . betid to any creature in the vessel' (Tempest, 1.2.28–31).  Not only has the cataclysmic event been completely under his control, but his reassurance is phrased in the words of St Paul: 'For there shall not an hair fall from the head of any of you' (Acts 27: 34), and Jesus: 'all the hairs of your head are numbered: fear not therefore . . .' (Luke 12: 7).

Creation myths, like the Big Bang theory, tell of the beginning of time and usually imply its apocalyptic end.  Though the notion of a start and finish of time is difficult to imagine in general, it makes clear sense when applied to stories, which are narrative representations of reality structured by beginnings, middles, and endings.  In the Bible's last book, where chronicle dissolves into vision, time folds up into eternity.  In the Bible's first book, eternity unfolds into time as its stories progress from the opening demarcation of day and night to the creation of matter, life, consciousness, and then, via Adam's dream, to the birth of Eve, the activation of human freedom, and the beginnings of family, society, and history.

The Tempest, whose title signifies storm and time in early modern English,[50] also progresses into temporality from a beginning that is both the timeless chaos of the storm and an Edenic preserve where father and child have remained in idyllic stasis. 'The hour's now come . . .', says Prospero, for him to retrieve the story of his past from 'the dark backward and abyss of time' (1.2.37, 50).  From then on he continually watches the clock.  His daughter's awakening to the temporal process begins with repeated lapses into sleep, but leads to a strong sense of her previous lineage and her future destiny.  As they both become involved with the many characters swept up on the shore of their island, their story merges with an historical chronicle of two large ducal dynasties.  By the end of both works, as the creation comes to maturity, the extratemporal creators are absorbed into time.  God's role as provider, teacher, and governor is passed to the human leader Joseph; Prospero divests himself of magic powers and takes on the mortality he shares with those he has ruled.  As time unfolds in a creation myth, so does space.  In Genesis the setting expands from the pastoral confines of the Garden of Eden through the Canaanite desert to the epic vistas of the Egyptian empire.  In The Tempest  the setting expands from the domestic compound of Prospero's cell to the island's varied landscapes and then to all of Mediterranean Europe and beyond.

Situated at the beginning of a body of stories, creation myths are seminal.  Just as Genesis functions as a seed containing the germinal patterns of most later stories in the Bible, so The Tempest, it has often been observed, contains in concentrated form many of the plots and themes of Shakespeare's other Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.  These seminal elements deal directly with fundamental human functions—what Northrop Frye calls 'primary concerns': 'food and drink, along with related bodily needs; sex; property (i.e. money, possessions, shelter, clothing, and everything that constitutes property in the sense of what is "proper" to one's life), liberty of movement.  The general object of primary concern is expressed in the biblical phrase "life more abundant"'.[51]  Another word for this is 'prosperity', cognate with 'Prospero', the name of the protagonist.

The creation at the opening of Genesis leads to an ongoing process of procreation denoted by its cognate word, 'generation'. Generations result from the effects of time, mortality, and continuity, manifested as the ageing and dying of individuals and the passage of their genetic material to children.  J. P. Fokkelman observes that the 'overriding concern' of the first book of the Bible is 'life–survival–offspring–fertility–continuity'.[52]  Generation is thus linked to family, the seminal cultural institution.  The recurrent recording of genealogies in Genesis reflects the theme of family in the accompanying narratives.  In fact, the first edition of the King James Bible begins with thirty-four folio pages of genealogical charts tracing lineage from Adam to Christ, while the succession of deaths and births is still recorded on pages inserted into family Bibles.  The 'project' that Prospero has long prepared and that he sets in motion at the opening of the play also centres upon founding a chosen family.  Like Genesis's God, as the story concludes, he retreats from absolute rule to limited guidance, from creator to procreator, from parent to grandparent, while the next generation advances from children to progenitors.   Both God and Prospero bequeath their descendants a promise that temporal evolution is progress, that posterity will inherit prosperity, or 'life more abundant'.  But the promise is conditional because the continuity of generation is unpredictable, the outcome not of a preordained plan but of the struggle for existence.

A creation myth represents genesis at several levels.  The myth must both contain and be contained by the originating events it records.  The creator it describes is prior to the creation, but also part of it, in so far as he is created by the text that describes him.  The creator God, therefore, must be both the story's protagonist and its author.  In its later passages and commentaries the Bible draws attention to this dimension of its opening.   'In the beginning was the Word', writes the Evangelist John.  The first midrashic comment on the first word of Genesis states that God created Wisdom, meaning the Scripture itself, before he made the world.  Psalm 139 implies that his book is a script that exists before it is performed: 'Thine eyes did see me, when I was without form: for in thy book were all things written, which in continuance were fashioned, when there was none of them before' (l. 16).

Likewise, there are suggestions that the character Prospero can be construed as the author of the script of The Tempest in which he is the subject.  It is hinted by his proprietary anxiety about each scene, by his explicit role as author of plays within the play, by his farewell to his book in the last act, and by his direct address to reader and audience in the epilogue.  Such identification is a central conception of Peter Greenaway's cinematic midrash on the play, Prospero's Books, which intercuts images of turbulent water with images of a quill pen inscribing the first words of the text and which assigns all the characters' speeches to the voice of Prospero sounding them out as he writes.[53]  That this character should be construed both as God and as author seems appropriate to a playwright's playful reflection upon biblical creation.

The process of growth, articulation, and proliferation through time described in Genesis seems to govern its own development as a literary narrative.  It begins with the single voice of an author constructing the natural universe in accordance with a simple preordained plan.  But after the creation of human characters in his own image, the story takes on a life of its own.  It seems to reproduce itself down the generations from Adam to Joseph, evolving from primal myth into longer, more complex, even novelistic units, as if itself driven by an inner principle of elaboration allowing the future to grow freely and unpredictably like an improvisation out of the past while the author's presence recedes and disappears.  The same kind of structural change can be discerned in The Tempest, through the increasing length and dramatic complexity of scenes as the play proceeds. 

2

Prospero's retrospective exposition of past events in the second scene of The Tempest (1.2.1–374) coordinates with the section labelled by the editors of the New English Bible as 'The Beginnings of History' (Gen. 2: 5–11: 10) and by the authors of the Geneva Bible's prefatory 'Argument' as the period when 'the wicked . . . falling most horribly from sin to sin . . . provoked God . . . at length to destroy the whole world'.  The protagonist and chief speaker in these sections is not the calm and benevolent creator who fashions the world with words but one locked in violent struggle with subjects who rebel and threaten him.  The primary concern of these stories is basic survival, which is marginal in the early conditions of a state of nature.  This image of the creator may derive from the widely dispersed Near Eastern mythical figure of the conqueror–colonist who first brought the world into being by defeating monsters:  'Thou didst divide the sea by thy power: thou breakest the heads of the dragons in the waters.  Thou breakest the head of Leviathan in pieces and gavest him to be meat for the people in wilderness' (Ps. 74: 13–14).

In Genesis God's antagonists are the ambitious Eve who, in league with the serpent, convinces credulous Adam to steal forbidden fruit; Cain, a jealous and murderous brother; the violent contemporaries of Noah affiliated with offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men; and the aspiring inhabitants of Babel who want to make a name for themselves by building a tower to heaven.  In The Tempest,  Prospero tells Miranda how his lack of vigilance 'in my false brother | Awaked an evil nature' (1.2.92–3), who then 'new created | The creatures that were mine, I say—or changed ’em, | Or else new formed ’em' (1.2.81–3), so that in league with Alonso he took control of the state.  Prospero also recalls the island's malignant earlier ruler, Sycorax, and the revolt of her son, Caliban, its primitive inhabitant whose brutish nature he had attempted to elevate until the monster sought to retake control by mating with Prospero's daughter and overthrowing his rule.

The ruler punishes the rebels, indulging a vengeful rage and threatening to undo his own acts of creation with reversions to disorder.  God drives Adam and Eve out of the garden he planted for them into a barren landscape, he sends Cain wandering, and he returns the cosmos to chaos with the Flood, a forerunner of other tempests he unleashes against those he wants to discipline—at the Red Sea (Exod. 14: 21–31), on the way to Tarsis (Jonah 1: 4–2: 10), at Galilee (Matt. 8: 23–26), and off the coast of Cyprus (Acts 27: 4–20).  He also creates a mental tempest when he renders the universal human language into a babble of incomprehensible dialects. Prospero re-establishes his dominance as 'A god of power' (1.2.10) and 'a prince of power' (l. 54) by throwing Caliban out of his home, forcing him to live by the sweat of his brow, and reducing the language that he taught him into profitless cursing, by repeatedly storming at Ariel that he will be returned to the oak that imprisoned him, and by tormenting his countrymen with the prolonged ordeal of death by drowning.

The horror of that ordeal is vividly conveyed in one of the longest descriptive passages in the Bible (Gen. 7: 1–24).  This horror is relieved by an equally lively and extended description of the chosen remnant's salvation, with its anxious waiting, its raven, dove, and olive branch, and its account of debarkation onto dry land (Gen. 7: 24–8:22).  God seals that experience with a statement of regret and a vow to all living things never again to send such destruction (Gen. 8: 21) and marks it with the rainbow to forge a link between heaven and earth (9: 13–14).  Prospero likewise relents and shows his mercy as an agent of deliverance, first to Miranda, in the words cited earlier, eventually to all the victims of the shipwreck whom he spares from drowning and other torments, and finally to Ariel and Caliban, whom he frees from slavery.  Upon sparing Ferdinand and Miranda from his rage in the fourth act, like Noah's God, Prospero presents them with the spectacle of a rainbow and a blessing of fertility.

3

The Tower of Babel story in Chapter 11 marks the end of a major structural division in the book of Genesis.  It corresponds to the shift from Prospero's narration of past events to the beginning of new activity that occurs with the entrance of Ferdinand at 1.2.376 in The Tempest.  In the next sections of both works, the creator moves partly into the background, still retaining control, but no longer the only protagonist.  He shows less raw power than in the earlier sections and behaves in a more deliberate, controlled manner.  The narrative units change from short, choppy, self-contained stories to an interconnected continuous sequence of events. Rather than creating, destroying, and re-creating by trial and error, the ruler begins to work by breeding, conditioning, and teaching, using longer intervals of time to improve his offspring through the process of evolution.  The means of creation changes from magic powers to sexual reproduction.  In this section human figures come forward and take on individual, differentiated, and self-motivated character, but the 'primary concern' most emphasized shifts from personal survival to survival of the family through generation.

The stories of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which occupy Chapters 11 through 36 of Genesis, involve both God and human in procreating the one family that will bring forth the tribes, the nation, and ultimately the empire of the 'chosen' or genetically selected people whose story is told in the later books of the Hebrew Bible.  One method of generation, appropriate to their early herding culture, is inbreeding.  God distinguishes his preferred line of descent with a kind of genetic marker: 'I will make thee exceedingly fruitful: yea, Kings shall proceed of thee. . . . thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations. . . . shall circumcise the foreskin of your flesh, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you' (Gen. 37: 6, 9, 11).  The subsequent stories of the patriarchs centre on the drama of selecting the chosen over the rejected offspring, largely by virtue of consanguinity.  Isaac's line prevails over Ishmael's, whose mother, Hagar, was of different class and family origin from Sarah, Abraham's stepsister (Gen. 20: 12).  Even though he is the younger brother, Jacob is preferred to Esau, an animalistic hairy man who marries a local Hittite woman rather than his own kin. Jacob's mother, Rebekah, steers him northwards to mate with a first cousin, daughter of her brother (Gen. 28: 1–3).  And the apparently unrelated story of the massacre of Schechem by the sons of Jacob for the rape of their sister Dinah reinforces a warning against exogamy (Gen. 34). 

As Prospero concludes his exposition of past events, he too turns to concerns of breeding.  He introduces Caliban, who like Ishmael is the offspring of an ignoble mother with rival matrilineal claims.  When the proto-sibling attempted to people 'This isle with Calibans' (1.2.353), Prospero drove him from the family home and put him in bondage.  Following Caliban's suggestion—'She will become thy bed . . . and bring thee forth brave brood'—Stefano also tries to claim the inheritance: 'I will kill this man.  His daughter and I will be king and queen' (3.2.105–8).  But Prospero foils this second upstart servant, and, after assurances of the purity of both Miranda's mother and her grandmother, in Prince Ferdinand he finds a scion of close and distinguished lineage, one whose sister Claribel's competing claims of inheritance have been disposed of by marriage to the heathen King of Tunis.

Within the framework of 'primary concerns' defined by the patriarchal project of establishing a familial line, love and romance function like evolutionary sexual selection.  Abraham is tough enough to defeat four kings in battle when he first arrives in Canaan (Gen. 14), and Sarah is so beautiful that Pharaoh and King Abimelech court her.  The fact that this couple have their first child together in their nineties makes their offspring particularly precious as the distillation of a lifelong love.  Stories of love at  first sight recur in this section.  With Isaac, the lengthy discovery of the beautiful bride occurs through the eyes of Abraham's anonymous servant (Gen. 24: 10–60), but Jacob's first meeting with Rachel at the well evokes the power of physical passion within the framework of family continuity:  'While he [Jacob] talked with [the herdsmen], Rachel also came with her father’s sheep, for she kept them.  And as soon as Jacob saw Rachel . . . then came Jacob near, and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and watered the flock of Laban his mother’s brother.  And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted his voice and wept . . . then she ran and told her father' (Gen. 29: 9–12).

Ferdinand's first encounter with Miranda produces a heavenly sensation in both of them—'I might call him | A thing divine, for nothing natural |  I ever saw so noble. . . . Most sure the goddess | On whom these airs attend', (1.2.420–2; 424–5)—before the conversation also quickly turns to fathers.  These love scenes recall the innocent sexual encounter of Adam and Eve—'Now they were both naked, the man and his wife, but they had no feeling of shame towards one another' (Gen. 2: 25).  That first experiment in perfecting humanity set the pattern of triangular tension among parents, child, and spouse: 'that is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and the two become one flesh' (Gen. 2: 24)—thus glossed in the Geneva Bible: 'So that marriage requireth a greater duty of us toward our wives, than otherwise we are bound to show to our parents'.  In order to compensate the parent for loss, the children must contain their desires for one another and for children within a framework of  obligations to the parents who fostered them.  The aged thereby retain some control over the vigorous young and protection from Oedipal threats such as those of Caliban or Stefano.  God drives this lesson home with Abraham by demanding Isaac back after they have bonded (Gen: 22).  This cruel trick intensifies Abraham's love for his son, it reinforces his fear of God's authority, it reassures the deity that his chosen successor is not a rebel like so many of his predecessors, and it marks God's recognition of human generosity.

In the case of Abraham's grandson Jacob, God challenges him directly only with a brief wrestling bout, but the young man's father-in-law Laban takes over the role of patriarchal tester.  After welcoming his nephew with open arms, he too plays cruelly with his nephew's emotions, demanding seven years' hard labour for Rachel's hand in marriage and then substituting his older daughter, Leah, in the wedding bed (Gen. 29: 20–28).  Jacob works another seven years to get his choice, but Laban cheats him out of the flocks he has rightfully bred for himself.  Only by proving that he has the patience and restraint as well as the cleverness, mettle, and generative prowess to overcome these obstacles—including the ability to do his own selective breeding of goats—does Jacob gain his father-in-law's blessing and his right to go home with his beloved to become his nation's founder.

Ferdinand too must yield to his prospective father-in-law.  Unlike Caliban, he willingly performs the servile labour of moving logs to acknowledge Prospero's control.  This discipline also corrects Ferdinand's premature assumption about his own father's death and his early, easy accession to the throne (1.2.432–3).  The spectacle of Ferdinand's suffering causes Miranda to transfer her love from her father to him.  Like Rachel, who steals her father's household gods and escapes with Jacob in secret, Miranda repeatedly violates Prospero's precepts (3.1.36–7, 58–9) and takes the initiative to propose marriage herself.  Her father also imposes the ordeal to test Ferdinand's commitment, 'lest too light winning | Make the prize light' (1.2.454–5), for a prince who has already 'liked several women' (3.1.43).  Like Laban when he catches up with the couple (Gen. 31: 39–41), he expresses concern about the future treatment of his child, and the need for compensation that later surfaces in his shared grieving with Alonso for the daughters they both have lost to sons-in-law (5.1.146–8).  Accepting the pain of this loss is a parental test, shared by God with all mothers and fathers in the Bible.

God and Prospero both offer those who successfully pass their qualifying tests—the selected or 'chosen' ones—a vision of the future with a promise of fertility and prosperity as a reward for distinguishing themselves from those who are rejected.  Because Abraham has been willing to sacrifice his son, God says: 'Therefore will I surely bless thee, and will greatly multiply thy seed, as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore . . . ' (Gen. 22: 17).  Jacob's courtship of Rachel is framed by visions at Beth-El:  'The land upon which thou sleepeth, will I give thee and thy seed.  And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth. . . . Israel shall be thy name. . . . Grow, and multiply: a nation and a multitude of nations shall spring of thee' (Gen. 28: 13–14; 35: 10–11).  Prospero apologizes for his severe treatment of Ferdinand and offers compensation: 'All thy vexations | Were but my trials of thy love, and thou | Hast strangely stood the test.  Here, afore heaven, | I ratify this my rich gift' (4.1.5–8).

The gift is his daughter, but also the vision of deliverance, fertility, and prosperity in the masque, linked by a rainbow to Jacob's ladder and Noah's flood.  Following the vision of parental acceptance and bounty, the young men wish to go no further:  'Then Jacob awoke out of his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place . . . this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven"' (Gen. 28: 16–17).  Ferdinand says: 'Let me live here ever! | So rare a wondered father and a wise | Makes this place paradise' (4.1.122–4).

The end of Jacob's personal quest arrives when he is renamed Israel, the progenitor of the future nation.  His story concludes the patriarchal section of Genesis.  From here on God recedes further from his creation, removing himself completely from the narrative as speaker and player and standing outside events as Providence.  Though Joseph is the protagonist of the longest story in Genesis, God never addresses him directly.  Instead, Joseph becomes a kind of God–human, a stand-in, following his own lights but mysteriously linked to the deity, a brother of other humans, but one who lives on a higher level. 

As his daughter and future son-in-law sit enthralled by his wedding gift, Prospero brings his breeding to conclusion.  The finale of the masque states his wish for an eternal happy ending for the new couple complete with the banishment of winter and the reconciliation of peasants and demigoddesses.  But, before he can join them in dancing with the masquers, they are interrupted by two disturbing realities that keep both the masque itself and the play from reaching closure.  With a tempest-like 'hollow and confused noise', Prospero reminds himself that he has unfinished business with the rebellious faction of the clowns and with his brother's conspiracy.  That noise also tolls the onset of retirement, old age, and death.  While Ferdinand and Miranda take on the world, changed from naïve romantics to chess players who can 'for a score of kingdoms . . . wrangle' and still 'call it fair play' (5.1.177–8), he must relinquish it.  Coming in a flash, this realization about genesis and generation, fulfilment and completion, nevertheless is disorienting for young and old alike: 'Sir, I am vexed. |  Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled. | Be not disturbed with my infirmity' (4.1.158–60).

The transformation from creator-god-father to prospective grandfather and corpse leads to Prospero's abjuring his magic, freeing his slave-spirits, and releasing his hold on the humans under his spell.  This completion of the Ferdinand and Miranda romance plot in The Tempest parallels the silent retreat of God once Jacob has become Israel at the end of the patriarchal chapters of Genesis.

4

Resemblances between Genesis's Joseph and Shakespeare's Prospero are detailed and striking.[54]   Linguistically they are linked by the word 'prosperity'—'And the Lord was with Joseph and he was a man that prospered. . . . And his master saw that . . . the Lord made all that he did to prosper in his hand' (Gen. 39: 2–3).  Prosperity can emanate from two sources—an external benefactor such as mother earth or father god, or a self‑supporting community of people led by an effective leader, first among equals.  The process of selection, a zero-sum game, depends on sibling rivalry.  The process of cooperation—the strengthening of a 'band of brothers' forming the basis of a nation—must suppress that rivalry.  The stories of Joseph and Prospero, the providers, overlap the stories of Joseph and Prospero and their brothers.

In the last section of Genesis the focus of primary concern within the family shifts from paternity, or the relations of parent and child, to fraternity or the relations between siblings.  This shift is predicated upon the disappearance of God, but the theme has been present from the earliest chapters in the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau.  According to Fokkelman: 'Finally in the last cycle of the book the psychology of crime, guilt, remorse and compunction among brothers is worked out much more thoroughly, under the direction of the master manipulator Joseph . . . the theme of brotherhood, a metonymy for the bond that links humanity, is handled with growing complexity from the beginning of Genesis to the end'.[55]

Prospero is not only a patriarch.  His project of breeding optimal progeny shares priority with his project of working out his troubled relationship with his brother, Antonio, and his daughter's future in-law, Alonso.  Sibling rivalry—what Hamlet's father calls the 'primal eldest curse'—drives Antonio to plot with Alonso to kill the rightful Duke Prospero and drives Sebastian in turn to plot with Antonio to kill his brother, Alonso, just as Joseph's brothers plot to kill the distinctively robed brother favoured by his father.  Resolving sibling rivalry requires somewhat different strategies from resolving generational conflict.  The chosen brother, like the parent, first needs to establish dominance, but in order to succeed he must also appear to relinquish it, acknowledging, as Prospero does, that he is not father or god, but 'one of their kind' (5.1.23).

Joseph starts out as 'this dreamer' (Gen. 37: 19), a person with true visions but lacking enough prudence to anticipate the resentment of those who do not share his gifts.  Like Prospero, who, 'rapt in secret studies' (1.2.77), 'neglect[s] worldly ends, all dedicated | To closeness and the bettering of my mind' (ll. 89–90), Joseph is at first oblivious to the reality of his political situation.  Both he and Prospero 'Awaked an evil nature' (l. 93) in their brothers and, as a result, suffered usurpation, exile, and imprisonment.  Joseph's brothers steal him from his father's favour, plan to kill him, and end up imprisoning him in a pit and then selling him into slavery and exile in Egypt.  Prospero's brother and his cronies remove him from his dukedom, try to kill him, and allow him to be abandoned at sea in a leaky boat that ends up marooned on the island.

Rudely awakened from innocence and forced to cope for survival in their places of exile, both Joseph and Prospero learn some practical wisdom.  As a convict in Pharaoh's jail, Joseph goes from a dreamer to an interpreter of dreams, using his intelligence as well as his intuition.  Though he insists that interpretive power comes from God (Gen. 40: 8), in proclaiming that Pharaoh's two dreams of the fat sheaves and cows being devoured by the lean are really one (43: 25), he uses human analytical skills to penetrate surfaces by discovering abstractions.  By predicting that lean years will consume fat ones, he expresses the homespun foresight of the ant to the grasshopper.  Prospero has fewer books after his sea voyage, those discreetly selected for him by his counsellor Gonzalo, and, once outside the precincts of his library, he finds enough applicable information in those to gain control over his environment.

Wearing his robe and consulting his books, Prospero teaches the ignorant Caliban to speak and releases Ariel from imprisonment.  At the same time he subdues and enslaves them and their fellow native spirits, appropriating their power to rule the elements.  After Joseph bests Pharaoh's magicians and sages (Gen 41: 8), he is entrusted to rule over all Egypt.  Dressed in fine clothing and signet ring, he delivers the people from hunger while divesting them of their wealth.  By the time fate—in the form of famine and storm—lands their lost brothers in their places of exile, both have exercised their acumen long enough to have risen to the status of 'Prince of Power'.

Having attained power, each pursues the god–human's fraternal initiative to right wrong with vengeance, instruction, and forgiveness.  Jacob's sons arrive in Joseph's Egypt desperate for grain and disoriented by travel. Prospero's brother and his companions wander the island waterlogged, bereaved, and exhausted.  Both parties have been partially rescued by the exiled brother and find themselves at his mercy—that is, within his power. One source of that power is immediate knowledge.  He recognizes them because he remembers the wrong done him.  They do not know him because he is disguised or invisible, but also because they have repressed the memory of their crimes long past.

After harshly accusing the ones he spies on of being spies (Gen. 42: 9; Tempest, 1.2.456), the hidden brother manipulates the others into a replay of their earlier crimes of conspiracy and rebellion, now within his control.  Joseph insists they return home and bring him their brother Benjamin, who has stayed behind, thereby once again stealing a youngest preferred son away from their father.  He does this, one may infer, to enjoy the revenge of inflicting pain on them, and to determine whether they have spared his mother's other son and are capable of repentance.  If so, re-enacting the old crime can remind them of what they have forgotten and teach them about the pain it inflicted.  Prospero similarly works on the lords by setting up a situation in which the treasonous coup that exiled him is now re-enacted by Antonio and Sebastian against his brother, King Alonso.  The pain of being betrayed by his own brother—though only half-conscious—and of apparently losing a son awakens Alonso's memory of having betrayed his brother monarch.

In a comic replay of another element of their crime—selling him for silver and sneaking him into the caravan of the Midianites—Joseph tricks his brothers with an apparent gift of silver in their bags—which will then serve as false evidence of theft.  Both elements of this trick recur in The Tempest's subplot of Caliban and the clowns, who are first manipulated into hatching a new conspiracy to overthrow Prospero to gain wealth and power and then entrapped with the false delights of a ducal wardrobe.

Joseph's methods of interrogation activate his brothers' consciences and soon elicit a confession that he overhears: 'And they said to another', "We have verily sinned against our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear him: therefore is this trouble come upon us"' (Gen. 42: 21).  This encourages him to take the cat-and-mouse game further with what may be termed a 'banquet trick'.  When the brothers return to Egypt with Benjamin as hostage a few years later, he offers them a resplendent meal, and, while their defences are lowered, he hides a silver goblet in Benjamin's pack.  After they depart, 'Joseph said to his steward, "Up, follow after the men and when thou dost overtake them, say unto them", 'Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for good?'"' (Gen. 44: 4).  When the packs are opened, Benjamin's is found to contain the goblet, and he and his brothers must return to Joseph, who accuses him of the theft and threatens to keep him as a slave.  Similarly, Prospero surprises the hungry nobles with a lavish buffet after having had them led blindly around the island in search of the King's lost son.  Watching their approach to the meal from an invisible vantage point above, he arranges for Ariel to spoil the dinner and to deliver a tirade expressing Prospero's wrath, exposing the lords' original guilt, threatening eternal perdition, and demanding full contrition.

The Geneva editors take pains to point out that Joseph's methods are not to be imitated: 'This dissembling is not be followed, nor any particular facts of the fathers not approved by God's word' (gloss to 42: 7).  'We may not by this example use any unlawful practices, seeing God hath commanded us to walk in simplicity' (gloss to 44: 2).  Nevertheless, this device produces the desired effect of repentance in both stories.  Joseph's oldest brother Judah is willing to sacrifice himself for the release of Benjamin:  'Now therefore, I pray thee, let me thy servant bid for the child, as a servant to my lord, and let the child go up with his brethren.  For how can I go up to my father, if the child be not with me, unless I would see the evil that shall come upon my father?' (Gen. 44: 33–4).  Alonso falls to the ground acknowledging his crime and willing to give up his own life to return the life of the son that he believes has been taken from him as punishment:

The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,

                                                                  pronounced

The name of Prosper.  It did bass my trespass.

Therefor my son i'th’ ooze is bedded, and

I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,

And with him there lie mudded.

(3.3.96-102)

At this turning point in both stories the focus shifts to the hidden controlling brother.  Each has forced his antagonists to experience the suffering of the victim of fratricide.  Each now feels compassion for the repentant criminals.  After dismissing his servants, for the moment abjuring his royal powers and distance, Joseph breaks down crying, discloses himself to his brothers' wonderment, forgives them fully, and arranges for them and his father to take up residence in Egypt, where they will be reunited and provided with land and wealth.  So too, after Alonso's repentance, Prospero acknowledges his common humanity with those he has dominated and offers them forgiveness:

shall not myself,

One of their kind, that relish all as sharply

Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th' quick,

Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury

Do I take part.  The rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent,

The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Not a frown further.

(5.1.22–30)

At the final moment, even Caliban is transformed in Prospero's designation from an 'abhorrèd slave' who will 'any print of goodness . . . not take' (1.2.354–5) to a 'thing of darkness I | Acknowledge mine' (5.1.278–9). Once so acknowledged, Caliban too repents, with a word that asks forgiveness and favour, both human and divine: 'I'll be wise hereafter, | And seek for grace' (ll. 298–9).

These revelations, recognitions, restorations, and reconciliations produce an ecstatic happy ending.  They also produce a retrospective vindication of all previous confusion and suffering as purposeful contributions to the positive outcome—a theological assertion of the fortunate fall:  'Now therefore be not sad . . . that he sold me hither: for God did send me before you for your purification . . . to preserve your posterity in this land, and to save you alive by a great deliverance'  (Gen. 45: 5–7), says Joseph.  Gonzalo concludes,

Was Milan thrust from Milan that his issue

Should become kings of Naples? O rejoice

Beyond a common joy! And set it down

With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage

Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,

And Ferdinand her brother found a wife

Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom

In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves

When no man was his own.

(5.1.208–16)

5

Shakespeare liked to write deflating parodies of his own grandiose productions, as, for instance, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the rude mechanicals' rendition of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' parodies Romeo and Juliet.  In The Tempest, the clown scenes parody the archetypal cosmic creation myths of the Prospero plot as well as its biblical source.  Act 2, Scene 2 begins again with the unformed chaos of a storm dissolving the borders between classes—'Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows' (l. 39)—as well as between species and individuals: 'This is some monster of the isle with four legs' (l. 65).  The drunken butler Stefano gives coherent shape to the chaos as well as healing deliverance with the magic brew stored up in his homemade bark bottle: 'Here is that which will give language to your cat.  Open your mouth. This will shake your shaking' (ll. 82–84).  After figuratively bringing Trinculo into the world from under the gabardine, he accepts the worship of Caliban, 'a most poor credulous monster', whose visions of divinity are inspired by the colonizer's firewater: 'That's a brave god, and bears celestial liquor. | I will kneel to him' (ll. 115–6). 'Kiss the book', says Stefano repeatedly, referring to the ritual of swearing by the Bible as he commands the native inhabitant's worship by bottle feeding him dry sherry, profanely suggesting an analogy between it and communion wine or Holy Writ.

Shakespeare translates the mythic discourse of the Bible into still another register, following the lead of Genesis itself.  Moving further into time as the stories unfold, its final narrative fills in many particulars of the Egyptian setting, especially of economics and government.  The idealistic celebration of the founding of a nation is an appropriate mythic conclusion for a political text.  But the authors of Genesis, like the author of The Tempest, also observed history through a more materialistic historian's eyes, following the trail of the money and the power.

After the recognition–redemption scene and the Pharaoh's welcome of Jacob to Egypt, the earlier story (Gen. 41: 46–57) of Joseph's deliverance of the land during the lean years by distributing grain stored during the fat ones is repeated.  But this time the account is more detailed, plausible, and ironic.  Having accumulated a huge surplus by taxing the peasants during the period of glut, Joseph sells it back to them during the famine—first for all their silver, then for their herds.  Finally,

they came unto him the next year, and said unto him, 'We will not hide from my lord, that since our money is spent, and my lord hath the herds of the cattle, there is nothing left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies and the ground . . . Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be bound to Pharaoh: therefore give us seed, that we may live and not die, and that the land go not to waste'. So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh . . . And he removed the people unto the cities, from one side of Egypt even to the other.

(Gen. 47: 18–21)

The Geneva gloss gives a benevolent appearance to this policy.  'By this changing they signified that they had nothing of their own, but received all of the King's liberality'.  But the text makes clear that Joseph's ruthless transformation of Egypt from a feudal to a mercantile society makes it possible for his descendants to expand their numbers at a rate that could never have been supported by the nomadic subsistence conditions they had lived under in Canaan.  His centralization of authority also guarantees the privileges now granted by the Pharaoh, at least for the foreseeable future.

The last Chapter of Genesis contains an equally cynical rerun of the earlier story of fraternal reconciliation:

And when Joseph’s brethren saw that their father was dead, they said, 'It may be that Joseph will hate us, and will pay us again all the evil, which we did unto him'.  Therefore they sent unto Joseph, saying, 'Thy father commanded before his death saying, "Thus shall ye say unto Joseph, forgive now I pray thee, trespass of thy brethren and their sin: for they rewarded thee evil." And now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of thy father’s God . . .'.  To whom Joseph said, 'Fear not: for am not I under God? When ye thought evil against me, God dispoiled it to good, that he might bring to pass, as it is this day, and save much people alive.  Fear not now therefore, I will nourish you, and your children . . .

(Gen. 50: 15–21)

Given their persistent mistrust and the narrator's tacit but unmistakable disclosure of their bad faith, and given Joseph's canny strategy towards the Egyptians, this repetition of forgiveness might well be uttered with a touch of irony as well as threat.

The final reconciliation in The Tempest  is similarly qualified.  Apart from all the celebration stand Antonio and Sebastian.  These unregenerate schemers never apologize, and retain their witty cynicism to the last.  In his final judgement scene, Prospero distinguishes 'holy Gonzalo | Honourable man . . . a loyal sir' from the forgetful and frail Alonso, who is capable of contrition, and from Antonio, 'most wicked sir, whom to call brother | Would even infect my mouth . . .' (5.1.132-3). Though he forgives them all, he recognizes that there are people in whom self-interest, cruelty, and power-hunger remain ineradicable.  His forgiveness of Antonio involves no expectation of redemption or improvement.  He, and others like him, must be continually watched and controlled with tactics that appeal to their limited motives.

Before he relinquishes political power, Prospero appropriately greets each of these three: he embraces Gonzalo, he commiserates with Alonso, and he frightens Antonio with a crafty display of force and fraud:

Welcome, my friends all

But you, my brace of lords, were I so minded,

I here could pluck his highness' frown upon you

And justify you traitors.  At this time

I will tell no tales.

__.__.__.__.__.__

                                                                        I do forgive

Thy rankest fault, all of them, and require

My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know

Thou must restore.

(5.1.127–31, 133–6)

By retaining the threat to expose their conspiracy to Alonso, he keeps them in his debt, and, as a result of marrying his daughter to the prince of Naples, 'his death will remove Antonio's last link with the ducal power'.[56]  'The devil speaks in him!' (l. 131) says Sebastian.

Political realism goes together with the prophetic vision of an expanded community tracing itself to an originating family.  The nation of Italy, which Prospero foresees through the union of his daughter and Alonso's son, is analogous to the nation of Israel envisioned by Joseph and Jacob on the father's deathbed.  Jacob's benediction of his progeny is shadowed by power struggles which surface at the moment of blessing, as the son unsuccessfully tries to control his father's determination of precedence among his grandsons, Manasseh and Ephraim (Gen. 48: 17–20).  The grandfather's projection of their return to the promised land is filled with predictions of  war and fraternal strife.  Prospero promises 'calm seas and auspicious gales' for the voyage home (5.1.318), but it is clear that the new kingdom will experience continuing tensions, not only between aristocratic factions, but also as a result of the class hatred between courtiers and mariners.  This is loudly voiced by good Gonzalo—whose imagined commonwealth knew no 'riches, poverty, | And use of service' (2.1.156–7)—both at the moment of death in the first scene's storm, and at the concluding moment of miraculous resurrection: 'O look, sir, look, sir, here is more of us! | I prophesied if a gallows were on land | This fellow could not drown' (5.1.219–21).  As is appropriate for works that stand at the beginning, the endings of Genesis and The Tempest introduce a continuing history, the genre of discourse in which time bears absolute sway.