The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" Book

"My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely." So goes Miranda's soliloquy, directed at the audience (explicitly, as this play is stylized as a self-conscious commentary on Shakespeare's play). The poetry is lovely, yet Auden continually reminds you that his play is metafiction, a cognitive echo of the original story's aesthetics. Nothing is straightfoward - neither beauty nor monstrosity - in this beautiful critical approach.

My favorite section by far is Caliban's monologue to the audience. Shakespeare's play arguably encourages the reader to interpret Caliban unequivocally, as an unambiguously monstrous personality embedded in an ambiguous, half-human form. Auden doesn't challenge that notion so much as he makes you, to a sometimes-uncomfortable extent, aware of it: why interpret Caliban as the monster if his are empirical desires, plans, and dreams? Are we nothing more than Doctor Frankensteins, twisting Caliban - being the objectified "other" of the play - to suit our needs, even as we fail to understand the mechanisms of our own twisting?

Auden encourages readers of Shakespeare's play to a state of higher literary self-awareness, even as he subverts that effort with the pointedly aesthetic (rather than objective) beauty of his own poetry. And oh, that poetry: each character's monologue is so dreamy, so intricate, and so evocative of imagination itself as to create its own universe.

A beautiful, transformative read for any Shakespeare fan.