SOURCE: Platt, Peter G. “Wonder Personified, Wonder Anatomized: The Tempest.” In Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous, pp. 169-87. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Platt explores Shakespeare's depiction of the epistemological and aesthetic dynamics of wonder, particularly in regard to the relationship between the marvelous and the real, in The Tempest.

Unlike The Winter's Tale, where wonder is almost unequivocally embraced as a balm to heal the wounds inflicted by an overly rationalistic world, The Tempest interrogates the marvelous virtually from the outset.¹ The play's ambiguous attitude toward wonder is certainly part of what Stephen Orgel has called a “double and contradictory movement” and of what Stephen Greenblatt has described as a “model of unresolved and unresolvable doubleness.”² Orgel's suggestion that the two plays were written virtually simultaneously and that The Winter's Tale may actually follow The Tempest does not alter the nature of...