earticle

영어

The Tempest is a play about cosmic “wandering air.” The tempest of the opening scene pervades the play, not disappearing but manifesting itself in varying degrees and forms. The play offers an “airy” progress toward the all-enfolding harmony in Shakespeare’s vision which takes “airy” becoming and perishing as the essence of actuality and conceives the essential unity of the universe as an actuality. Shakespeare’s “airy” vision of the cosmos as the unfolding of continuous and harmonious creativity of “wandering air” climaxes in The Tempest’s wedding masque and Prospero’s famous speech to Ferdinand and Miranda after he abruptly ends the masque. In the play Shakespeare makes a significant adventure of positing a new civilization in his profound “airy” vision and suggests an aesthetic cosmology which can serve to overcome objective cosmology, rational order, and anthropocentrism. The play shows that on the basis of aesthetic cosmology and order, a cultural teleology of “airy” harmony can be established which provides meaning, purpose, and direction for human society and history. The play also demonstrates that a “brave new world” is constructed upon the conforming of man’s artificial civilization to the “airy” world, of appearance to reality.