The battles are so great because the stakes are so small and the parties so similar. Shakespeare’s The Tempest presents another piece of Girardian literature where mimesis rules all. Just as in Kafka’s The Castle where all town citizens metaphysically become the Castle, so, too, in The Tempest does the hunt for power, the same power among the same parties, become the guiding force to madness.

Prospero, the exiled ex-duke of Milan, finds himself washed ashore on a remote island after losing his throne to his treacherous brother, Antonio. In order to attempt a restoration of his lost power, he learns the ways of wizardry, culminating in his summoning of a great tempest that shipwrecks his brother and brother’s company. Prospero turns to his books of spells as a guide back to his power lost. As Caliban the slave says to his comrades when the three are about to loot Prospero’s cell and kill him, “Remember first to possess his books; for without them he’s but a sot.”

The push for power, the struggle against his own brother, drives Prospero to extra-human intensity. This culminates in an almost godlike command over nature via his spells and summoned sprites. Prospero’s battle against his brother and his retaking of the throne are only so intense because the two parties are so similar in their desires. They mimic each other. One can contrast this mimetic conflict of Properso and Antonio with the struggle between Caliban, the forlorn slave, and Prospero, his master. The battle between Caliban the slave and Prospero the Duke is depicted as comical by Shakespeare because the two parties are so disparate. For Caliban, the stakes of freedom and personal control over his island are too great to actually be cared about. Instead, we should care about one royal reclaiming a throne from another royal–this is the mimetic way. Caliban’s struggles are but a trivial aside in the plot of The Tempest. He becomes a drunkard, consorting with the jester and the drink-loving butler. He is found having stolen garments from the master, appearing almost clown-like in the faces of the royals that discover him. Caliban’s struggle for freedom as a slave is so far from the master's struggle for the dukedom of Milan that it cannot be a true battle in the slightest. It is but a ripple within a tempest. The real battles, or at least those battles depicted as most real, are those where the competition is fiercest because the contestants are so similar and the stakes are so low.

-Charlie, August 2024