THE LEGACY OF PROSPERO IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH AND AMERICAN DRAMA

This dissertation examines the dramatic archetype of Shakespeare's The Tempest, testing it in Philip Barry's Hotel Universe, T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party, Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House, William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. Like The Tempest, each of these plays is woven around the arduous efforts of a mystical redeemer or manipulator to reform and restore to moral, spiritual and social health a group of diverse characters, often life's castaways, who find themselves gathered in a single mysterious place.;The study shows that each of the modern plays is deeply rooted in the cultural, political, social and intellectual background of this century, and is written within the modern theatrical tradition, a background and a tradition that are different from those informing The Tempest. Whereas Shakespeare's play reflects the Elizabethan fascination with preternatural and magical powers, the modern plays demonstrate the twentieth-century faith in Einsteinian physics, Freudian psychoanalysis and post-Nietzschean philosophy.;The modification of the Shakespearean pattern and the limitations of modern Prosperos, however, reflect the doubts of modern writers about the existence of adequate healers in our times and about the possibility of reformation on more than an individual level. Like the Shakespearean savior, his modern descendants are devoted and well meaning, but they live in an age of skepticism in which human and world problems are beyond the capabilities of any single reformer, any one Prospero, completely to solve.;Based on the success or failure of the redeemer, these plays are relegated to three categories: in the first, which includes Barry's and Eliot's plays, the Prospero figure manages to manipulate and redeem the other characters; in the second, which includes Shaw's and Saroyan's plays, the redeemer shows a limited success in the consummation of his healing mission; in the third, which includes O'Neill's play, the would-be redeemer disastrously fails to bring salvation to anybody including himself.