Who is Prospero in Act 5, Scene 1, lines 1-97?

            Understanding Prospero’s character involves more than just understanding what happens in The Tempest.  At least a rudimentary knowledge of the structure of Shakespearean comedies is essential.  In act five, scene one it is especially important to understand the ideas of the comic individual, the comic solution and Prospero’s role in the two.  As the comic individual, Prospero is at fault for his usurping because he lost his grasp on the importance of the responsibilities of his dukedom and spent too much time practicing his magic.  Act five, scene one helps to further develop Prospero’s character with the establishment of the idea that he is a rational man, another important aspect to the comic individual.

            The reader starts to realize Prospero’s rationality starting at line 34: “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.  Go, release them, Ariel./My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore,/And they shall be themselves” (5.1.34-40).  Here, Prospero chooses reason and rationality over fury and vengeance; he takes the harder path.  Although Prospero seems villainous at the start of the scene with having taken prisoners, he starts to become more relatable to the reader when he realizes that although he may want to make them suffer, he must free his prisoners to achieve his overall goal of being restored as the Duke of Milan.  This idea of Prospero remaining rational is essential to Prospero’s identitiy as the comic individual.  On the other hand, this is only the first step towards the comic solution.  For the comic solution to be complete, one of the things Prospero must do is get rid of his magic, which he does when he breaks his staff and drowns his books, helping towards the restoring of his senses.  Revisiting the quote above when Prospero says “their senses I’ll restore” (5.1.39), he is not only restoring his prisoners to their senses but also himself to his own.  A major and final part to the comic solution is the comic individual being restored to their senses and here, Shakespeare plays with this idea by making Prospero return his prisoners to their senses just as his senses return to him; it seems as if the power Prospero has over his prisoners is analogous to the power Shakespeare has over Prospero and the entire play.  Throughout act five, scene one Prospero is further developed as a character as the Shakespearean comedy comes to a close with the resolution of the comic individual and the comic solution.