The Tempest

"This was a tricky one to put in. It is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays ; it is all about imagination and conjuring worlds, which is also what science does. Yes, and religion. Prospero is sitting there on his island, which I think really represents the interior of Shakespeare’s head, spinning wonderful tales and casting magic spells. There is a kind of allegory about scientific endeavour in The Tempest which I enjoy. It’s magical, and it is an allegory of human knowledge. The truth, which should not be deflected by sentiment. Sentiment is all very well when you are having a bottle of wine with your loved one. But when it comes to facing the physical realities of the world – which are the only realities, in my view – then you have to be really hard-nosed, and accept what it is without velveting the description. Because there is something called the scientific method, which is an extraordinarily powerful way of assembling reliable information about the nature of the world. I know of no other way of discovering the truth apart from going out to see what the world is like and comparing notes and building theories and then testing them. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Yes, but it is a process of approximation. And some things won’t be proved wrong. I don’t see how they do. I think they lack a corpus callosum . I think they have two hemispheres in their brain, and they don’t talk between the two. Or, more crudely, I think they have been brainwashed at birth or shortly after birth, and they haven’t shaken off this comfort blanket that religion provides. This interview was published March 15th, 2011"

"The American critic Steve Mentz has written about Ariel’s song near the beginning of the play and it was his words in At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean that showed me what the heart of this attraction to the sea edge might be. Ariel sings a song about the death of the king in the storm and the transformation of his body in the shallows into a kind of treasure. ‘Of his bones are coral made/Those are pearls that were his eyes,/Nothing of him that doth fade,/But doth suffer a Sea-change/Into something rich, & strange.’ No lines are more famous but everything about the edge of the sea, which is both full of destruction and rich with a wonderful glimmery glamour, is in those lines. It is what TS Eliot called ‘the menace and caress of the sea’—an amazing phrase in which the violence and beauty of the shore are made nearly to rhyme with each other. The book I have written is summed up in the words of those two poets."