Continuing with our grand survey of Shakespearean plays, so far we’ve studied Shakespeare’s background, sonnets, Julius Caesar, Henry V, madnesses of Richard III and Hamlet, the similarities of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, Much ado about Nothing, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear.
After a Shakespearean interlude at the dentist, Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter had so infused my thoughts, that my latest Homeschool Mother’s Weekly Journal featured The Bard.
Opening our copies of The Tempest, we annotated the literary elements key to understanding the story.
Written towards the end of Shakespeare’s career, this tragi-comedy tells a fanciful story of a ship lost at sea during a tempest and an island where a wizard named Prospero lives with his daughter Miranda.
Among them lives fanciful creatures, which helps lend this play to the genre of commedia dell’arte, a form of Italian theater that included masked characters of certain types.
In this play, the stock characters included a clown, a beautiful girl, a wealthy manipulative father, and a pair of drunken fools.
Due to timing of this play in Shakespeare in final days, some think Prospero represents the Bard ready to retire from the stage.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. -Act 4 Sc 1
And then…the last words of the play spoken by Prospero: Let your indulgence set me free.
And thus concluded our grand survey of Shakespearean brilliance.
