Something About the Prosperos

And maybe some of the others you’ve heard of. One of Bellairs’s better lines in The Face in the Frost is how Prospero, the hero of our story, is “not the one you are thinking of. (Face, 1)”  I assume many of Bellairs’s more literate readers know of other Prosperos but, if not, here’s a brief primer.

The most famous character to carry the name Prospero – and the one savvy readers were probably thinking of when they first picked up Face – is the exiled Duke of Milan, one of Shakespeare’s more enigmatic protagonists from "The Tempest" (1611). Prospero and his daughter Miranda are banished to an exotic Mediterranean island and, for twelve years, the wizard uses magic to control the spirits of their new home. When his brother Antonio, who overthrew Prospero, passes near the island on an ocean voyage, the wizard raises a tempest, wrecks their ship, and causes them to be washed ashore. By play’s end Prospero is reinstated as duke and gives up his magic.

Another Prospero familiar in literature is Prince Prospero of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842), the story of an elaborate party locked away in a castle to avoid a plague that had long devastated the country.

Besides being the birthname of Pope Benedict XIV (Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini, 1675–1758), it's also the name of a dozen or so other Italian poets and painters and saints and sinners.

The word prospero comes from the Latin prospeare, meaning to cause to succeed.