Word: prosperoous
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...glance at the footnotes in any critical edition will show you that almost every character in the play recalls a dozen others. Prospero, you learn, springs from a long line of irascible magicians. And Ferdinand, it appears, could have stepped out of Sidney's Arcadia. But even if you have dutifully read the appropriate criticism, unraveled the separate strands of Renaissance thought, gotten up the puns, you still won't resonate to everything in the play--or at least, not the first time--simply because you aren't Elizabethan...
...short, the magic gets the most of him. He makes Prospero's decision to forgive his enemies a sudden change of heart, motivated by Ariel's pity for the distracted lords. But Prospero's mercy was part of his plan from the beginning. He could have had vengeance simply by letting Antonio and Sebastian kill Alonso, and then, with some supernatural urging, kill each other. Ariel might even have saved Gonzalo...
...Masque of the Red Death dusts off a trifling Poe classic and adapts it to fit the collected smirks of Vincent Price. Poe's original described a masked ball at which the vulgar Prince Prospero and all his company succumb when Death appears disguised as a plague victim. In the elegant, elongated movie version, Prospero is a Satanist who scourges the entire 12th century countryside. He tortures peasants, tries to corrupt a village maid, and lets his pet dwarf barbecue a guest. Fortunately, by the time Death gets to the party, most of the nicer people have fled...
They called him a Hamlet when he was Archbishop of Milan. Lately, Pope Paul VI seems to be displaying the artful sovereignty of a Prospero and the action-now dash of a Henry V. And action now means a notable zeal for carrying out the renewal of Catholicism planned by John XXIII...
Something Superhuman. At 64, Carnovsky has played many of the classic character parts - Shylock, Prospero and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. But Lear, obviously, is something else again, and Carnovsky says that when the role was offered to him he "fainted inside." The part, he says, "demands almost super human strength. The actor must learn to tell the truth...