What does prospero mean by in the dark backwards and abysm of time?
Answers
This story examines "The Tempest" in light of models of memory derived from cognitive psychology, sociology, and philosophy, placed within the context of early modern debates about the nature and locus of memory. In "The Tempest", Shakespeare stages profound tensions between an individualist, faculty-based model of memory in which the mind is figured as a "cell" bounded by a monodic subject, and the constant threats to such order and control on the part of other minds represented in the play. Attention to the tensions between control and disorder in memory, allows us to understand three critical cruces of the play: 1) Prospero's apparently unmotivated demand for Miranda's attention during the exposition of 1.2; 2) the destruction of the masque by a moment of forgetting, and the subsequent agitation caused; 3) the play's own apparent amnesia about the founding narrative recounted by Prospero, as Alonso increasingly displaces Antonio as the play goes on.