ABSTRACT
Though The Tempest is a play, it is also a complicated masque or a narrative poem with lyric intervals. It is difficult to compare with Shakespeare’s other plays, for it is briefer, more elaborate in fantasy, and in some respects more intensely personal than they. During the last century, it was thought to be confessional and Prospero’s final speeches were associated with Shakespeare’s retirement from the theater. The play does not permit this conclusion. Shakespeare is not forsaking his art. If The Tempest is to be read biographically at all, it must be seen as a poetical summary of the poet’s life and its satisfactory achievements, as the poetic rendering of that bright moment at the end allowed to men of special favor, a moment that assures them that what they have loved will endure. The Tempest, like Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, is one of a series of warm afternoons in the autumn of Shakespeare’s life. It is mellow with the ripeness of knowledge, for its maker has discovered the right ritual for the marriage of the inner and the outer world, of the real and the ideal, the experienced and the imagined, the dream and the actuality.
