Evening under Lamplight Podcast

The final section of the second scene of the play, in which the two lovers meet for the first time, and are charmed in different ways, always overseen by Prospero, and his magic, who wants to stir things up and make sure things don't go too smoothly.

We are now introduced to Caliban, and our sympathies are challenged as we watch Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban together on the stage.

It's a twisted canto: twisted bodies and twisted knowledge. 

At the third ditch of the circle of fraud, we meet a former Pope, now positioned head-first into a hole in the ground, his feet and legs exposed, and kicking in pain because there are flames of fire playing back and forth on the soles of his feet. What has he done wrong? He used the sacred things of the Church to make money for himself. That's called simony, and he's called a simoniac.

We're now at the half-way point in the Inferno, and we'll spend the whole rest of the poem looking at the various forms of Fraud, the sin that destroys all social cohesion, a sin that we'll all recognise in our world, of course. First, then, we meet the pimps and seducers, and then the flatterers.

We're on the second part of Act I, Scene 2, and meet Ariel, the tricksy spirit who is Prospero's stage manager and technical crew. We learn more about the magic behind the tempest, and more about Prospero's relationship with his agent Ariel. 

We move on to the opening part of Scene 2 of Act 1, shifting from the storm we'd just witnessed to a behind-the-scene account of what was behind the storm, setting things up for the revenge Prospero is planning for his enemies, watching the father-daughter interplay as he explains all this to Miranda, and her response. Many questions here, as we move more deeply into the plot of The Tempest.

We begin a new series of Evening under Lamplight Podcasts with a series on Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Here is the first episode, on the startling, action-filled, chaotic opening scene.

We've come to the end of Violence, at the spot where it begins to merge into Fraud, with the presence of the hybrid monster who will take Dante and Virgil down, down, into what will face them next.

Here at Canto 16 we become overwhelmed with the roar of a waterfall, while three august figures from the generation before Dante try to steer him in the wrong direction. We are almost out of the region of Violence - but the final, and worst region remains: Fraud.