Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals,” whose romantic primitivism is satirized in Gonzalo’s plan for organizing society on Prospero’s island in the second act, is a possible source. The Tempest is a composite work with elements derived from multiple sources. Based on its popularity, persistence, and universality, The Tempest remains one of the richest and most fascinating of Shakespeare’s plays. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, and countless other works. The Tempest has served as a poetic treasure trove and springboard for other writers, with allusions detectable in John Milton’s Comus, T. The play’s central figure has likewise shifted from Prospero, who fascinated the romantics, to Miranda, who has claimed the attention of feminists, to Caliban, who is exhibit A in the reading of the play as “a veritable document of early Anglo-American history,” according to writer Sydney Lee, containing “the whole history of imperialist America,” as stated by critic Leslie Fiedler. Parrot, “perhaps the best loved of all Shakespeare’s plays,” and by William Hazlitt as among the “most original and perfect of Shakespeare’s productions,” The Tempest continues to be one of the most performed and interpreted plays in the canon, generating (and withstanding) autobiographical, allegorical, religious, metaphysical, and more recently postcolonial readings. As intriguing as the biographical reading is, it is only one of The Tempest’s multiple layers of meaning and significance. Two years later Shakespeare was back in London, collaborating with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII, and the lost play Cardenio. It has been tempting, therefore, to view Prospero’s sentiment and his play as Shakespeare’s last word, his summation of a career and a philosophy, what critic Gary Taylor has called “the valedictory culmination of Shakespeare’s life work.” First performed at court on November 1, 1611, before the playwright’s exit to Stratford, The Tempest, however, is technically neither Shakespeare’s finale nor requiem. Prospero bows out on a note of forgiveness, the tone that finally rules the play along with an affirmation in the essential goodness of humanity. It is inevitable, given the position of The Tempest as William Shakespeare’s final solo dramatic work, to hear in Prospero’s epilogue to the play, Shakespeare’s farewell to his audience: Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes de Shakespeare And, at the close of the piece, when the poet, touched by emotion, throws Antonio into the arms of Prospero, he has made Cain pardoned by Abel.
The region whither it transports us is the enchanted land where the sentence of damnation is absolved by clemency, and where reconciliation is ensured by amnesty to the fratricide. It is the expiation of the primordial crime. The Tempest is the supreme denouement, dreamed by Shakespeare, for the bloody drama of Genesis. It might be said that, before his death, the poet, in this epopee of the ideal, had designed a codicil for the Future. There is in The Tempest the solemn tone of a testament. Many commentators agree in the belief that The Tempest is the last creation of Shakespeare. Analysis of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest
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