Coming Home

Everything seems to work out pretty well for Prospero and his daughter Miranda at the end of The Tempest. Miranda falls in love, Prospero gets his position back, and everyone travels happily back to civilization. But I can’t help but wonder what their life is going to be like when they get back. Does Prospero think that everything will be exactly the same? That he’ll just be able to waltz back into his old life as if he hadn’t spent the past twelve years on an island with only his young daughter and a bunch of enslaved spirits?

As I thought about this, I realized that this is a common occurrence in many of the books we’ve read, and also in popular culture in general. Cabeza de Vaca was gone for eight years, Marco Polo for seventeen years, and Ibn Battuta for twenty-four. But they all end up going back where they came from and living out the remainder of their lives at home. I wonder about this—did nothing change in Spain, Venice and Tangier?

I think that this is an aspect of traveling that modern audiences are very concerned with, because it is a major part of movies and literature. In Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes spends years and years in prison, and when he finally escapes he returns to a home that is nothing like what he left. His father is dead, his fiancé married to his best friend, and everything about his old life completely gone. In the movie Cast Away, Tom Hanks is only gone for four years (a third of the time that Prospero is gone, and an eighth of the time Ibn Battuta was traveling around), but when he gets off his little island, his wife is married to Chris Noth and has been raising his baby for a year. The lives of these travelers/ castaways at home don’t wait for them to come back, which I think is interesting to think about in the context of The Tempest and these other travelers’ lives.