"This is as strange a maze as e'er man trod." The semiotics of labyrinth in Shakespeare's The Tempest

The essay argues that the labyrinth image is embedded in very structure of The Tempest and works as a semiotic device whereby Shakespeare reflects upon Elizabethean practices and notions of power, hierarchy and regality. Prospero acts as Daedalus, the architect, but also as Minotaur, the monster to be faced to complete an initiation rite and establish a new social order. However, the triumph of order sounds artificial, and the relation between reality and fiction on which the text of The Tempest is based, resists final interpretations and opens a labryrinth of issues for us to explore and challenge.