SHAKESPEARE AND PSYCHOGNOSIS 



ESSAY IV. TYPES OF SITUATION IN "THE TEMPEST" 

 By Melanchthon F. Libby 



In the foregoing essays on types of character, however objective 

 exegesis may have erred, it has been impossible to miss the general 

 determination of types, because they are definitely fixed by the author 

 in the Dramatis Personae. 



We now pass to a more hazardous attempt, and one in which error is 

 impossible to be avoided, even in the selection of the types themselves, 

 to say nothing of their significance. 



As in the previous parts, I have drawn upon all available criticisms, 

 and have found them all more or less helpful, however narrow and frag- 

 mentary. One is inclined to say of The Tempest, as someone has said 

 of philosophy, that all the different views which have been expressed 

 (perhaps some others also) would, if hammered into a consistent whole, 

 give a true account of the matter. 



I have arbitrarily selected thirty types of situation which occur in 

 The Tempest, and which seem to me to offer headings for a companion 

 study to the thirteen types of character. I have chosen these types of 

 situation because they seem to me to represent in a more or less striking 

 manner all the most important relations of the individual types to the 

 social environment. And here I must make a confession which will 

 disappoint any reader who may have rashly connected this effort at 

 objective criticism with any counsel of perfection based upon the ways 

 of physics and chemistry, or of Professor Pearson's Grammar of Science; 

 and that is, that I do not clearly know what a type, in the sense in which 

 I am employing the word, precisely means. A type no doubt should 

 embody the characters of its group in some striking manner. Emerson 

 clearly means his Representative Men to be types of important human 

 groups, but he selects them in an arbitrary, though exceedingly instruct- 

 ive manner, and gives us no account of his ground of choice, which is 

 indeed perhaps an unanalyzed interest in his own experience. Every- 



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