Moore and Prospero

Excerpt from Jess Nevins' Impossible Territories: The Unofficial Companion To The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Black Dossier, published in July 2008.

Jess Nevins: Some fans have read the final sequence of the Dossier where Prospero gives his speech as autobiography, the bearded magus withdrawing from the world and being unshackled from mundane authorities. How much did you intend it to be autobiographical, if at all?
Alan Moore: I didn't intend it to be autobiographical at all, no. I do happen to be a magus, I do happen to be English, I do happen to have largely withdrawn from-certainly from the comics world, although I'm still fairly present in this material world, where I'm sitting now. I think most people around Northampton are always surprised when I'm described as a recluse. I guess that there are similarities: Yeah, we've both got beards. But, no, I wasn't thinking about me at all. I was mostly thinking purely about the fascinating figure of Prospero, who as we construe him in the Black Dossier is connected with both Christopher Marlowe's Faust and Ben Jonson's John Suttle, the Alchemist, or I think he was just called Suttle, I think we added the John, because we wanted to try and underline all of these three figures were based on Elizabeth the First's astrologer and magician John Dee, and so that final sequence with Prospero, it wasn't even Prospero saying "I am retiring from the world," and indeed Prospero makes an appearance in Volume Three of the League, in the third book. But it was purely meant as a triumphal statement on behalf of the world of fiction. I was using Prospero as a spokesperson for my ideas concerning fiction and how important that world is, how dependent we are upon it, how it can hardly be regarded as fictional at all when it has such far-reaching effects on the nonfictional, physical world. So that was mainly why we put Prospero in such a strong role. And also, right at the end, we'd previously established that Prospero speaks in iambic pentameter, and I wanted the final scene of the book to be able to go out with a really rousing final speech delivered in full Shakespearean flow, that would be able to sum up what kind of statement the Dossier is trying to make, taken as a whole, all of its individual parts. And if you had to sum it up succinctly into one statement it would probably be pretty much what Prospero says. He's saying that the world of fiction is vital to the human world and fortunately the world of fiction is eternal and is beyond the reach of all mortal authorities, and where it can continue to carry on its work uninterrupted by mundane problems. So I suppose at least in that regard me and Prospero at least have that much in common. But I don't feel that I am withdrawing from my sense of engagement with the world. I'm working harder now than I've ever done before. I am turning out more stuff. I know that people aren't seeing it, because I'm two-thirds of the way of a three quarter of a million word novel, which will be finished in another couple of years, and so then people will be able to see what I've been doing.