Shakespeare's The Tempest and The Elizabethan World

Prospero’s provisional tyranny disposes the absolute answers of representative knowledge, his enlightening work of wizardry reduces knowledge itself to an act of efficient representation, nonetheless an empty epiphany. Thus, Shakespeare’s last major folio is both ritual and play, an unprecedented work of “magic theatre” that institutes new stage conventions- in which both the meaningful “fabulation” of the sacred drama and its prescriptive performance in history are shown: a dramatic structure that can produce events in history within its narrative agency, truth that find its new measure in representation.