Prospero is, plainly put, a wizard. He lived “several centuries (or so) ago, in a county whose name doesn’t matter” and is best described as being “tall, skinny, [and] straggly-bearded.” As a wizard he – along with best friend Roger Bacon – “know[s] seven different runic alphabets, can sing the whole dies irae all the way through, and (though they cannot eclipse the moon) can do some very striking effects with lightning. They can also make it look like it might rain, if you wait long enough” [The Face in the Frost].
Little is known of Prospero’s past or how long he’s lived in the Southern Kingdom. At one point he and fellow-wizard Melichus were students of the great magician Michael Scott. As part of their studies, Prospero and Melichus were forced to live together in the deserted mountains of the Northern Kingdom and use their combined powers to create and/or enchant an object; they ultimately chose an ordinary looking green-glass paperweight. While Melichus eventually became power-hungry, Prospero used his magic to benefits others and to keep up his own sprits. Through events unrecorded, Prospero eventually met and befriended the Franciscan monk Roger Bacon, who shares Prospero’s wizardly ways and sense of adventure.
His Southern Kingdom home is a ridiculous-looking two-story house covered with doodads and stuffed with unlikely and anachronistic possessions, including a magic mirror that wallows in the junk of future centuries.
As strong and powerful a magician that Prospero is, he gets frightened and jittery over shadowy cloaks and strange insects. He doesn’t remember all the spells he should and isn’t sure what some objects in his house are for. He does know some people in these parts don’t take too kindly to wizards and therefore he must sometimes disguise himself (something like Bishop Lanfranc or Nicholas Archer [104]). Whatever his flaws, when he recognizes something is amiss and he realizes that he may be the only one able to stop the impending doom, he musters up incredible courage to get the job done. Teaming up with Roger, the duo stumbles into various situations, both hilarious and horrific, to stop the work of the warlock Melichus and to set things right in the world.
The word prospero comes from the Latin prospeare, meaning to cause to succeed. Easily the most famous character to carry the name is that of the exiled Duke of Milan, one of Shakespeare’s more enigmatic protagonists from The Tempest (1611). Prospero and his daughter Miranda are banished to an exotic Mediterranean island and, for twelve years, the wizard uses magic to control the spirits of their new home. When his brother Antonio, who overthrew Prospero, passes near the island on an ocean voyage, the wizard raises a tempest, wrecks their ship, and causes them to be washed ashore. By play’s end Prospero is reinstated as duke and gives up his magic.
Another Prospero familiar in literature is Prince Prospero of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842), the story of an elaborate party locked away in a castle to avoid a plague that had long devastated the country.
As a wizard, Prospero is in good company with other magical entities such as King Arthur’s Merlin and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gandalf. Bellairs was much taken with The Lord of the Rings, noting in 1971 that Face “was an attempt to write in the Tolkien manner...and I wanted to do a modest work on those lines.” Struck by the fact that Gandalf was not much of a person but rather just a good guy, Bellairs continues, much of the Prospero and his surroundings could be described as an alter ego of sorts of Bellairs himself, who “gave Prospero most of my phobias and crotchets.”
