Paper Summary:

The writer of this paper explains that one of the fundamental themes of the play is the transmission of learning through the process of education and the aims and outcomes of that process, both intended and unforeseen. The paper notes that if the island of "The Tempest" can be read as a microcosm of human society, one of the key aspects of Prospero's character is as an archetype of the teacher who, in terms of Renaissance educational thought and practice, is charged with forming character as much as imparting knowledge, while Miranda and Caliban serve as contrasting images of the effects of education upon its recipients.

From the Paper:

"The Tempest respects the dramatic principle of the unity of time: the action of the play takes place over the course of a single afternoon. Everything that occurs during that limited period of time, however, is profoundly an outcome of events that stretch back twelve years previously. It was twelve years earlier that Prospero, Duke of Milan, entrusted the government of his city to his brother Antonio, in order that he might devote himself entirely to the pursuit of learning in "the liberal arts" those being all my study, / The government I cast upon my brother" [1.2: 73-5]. The "liberal arts" referred to here are those aspects of learning seen in Renaissance humanism as worthy of a free man of high social status: the study of grammar, logic and rhetoric (the "trivium") and arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy (the "quadrivium"). It was this decision to seclude himself in study that has led to Prospero's enforced seclusion on his desert island, for Antonio did not follow his brother's love of learning, but was rather in love with power as a Renaissance ruler he is in the cast of Machiavelli's "Prince" rather than Castiglione's "Courtier" and "needs will be / Absolute Milan" [1.2: 109]."

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