The Tempest: ‘Our Revels Now Are Ended’
Episode 238:
If the autumnal feel to the later plays suggest to us that Shakespeare was feeling his age and thinking on his own mortality his next offering, ‘The Tempest’ does little to dispel that idea. There has long been an urge to identify Prospero, the controller of the action on the island where the action takes place, with Shakespeare himself and therefor to take his words as closely linked to the playwright, making this play his personal farewell to the theatre. Although this is Shakespeare’s last solo authored play that view is a little fanciful. He went on to co-author three more plays, only two of which survive, so it seems unlikely that ‘The Tempest’ was intentionally his last play. The fact is that we have no evidence for Shakespeare’s state of mind at this time, but what we do have in ‘The Tempest’ is a play that stands alongside his very best plays and which has remained very popular throughout the centuries since its first performance.
The early performance history of the play
The sources for the play
The text of the play
A synopsis of the play
The role of magic in the play
Music and Masque in the play
Colonialism and the nature of power
The character of Prospero
Caliban and Ariel
The unities of time and space
The Epilogue
The later performance history of the play
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