Shakespeare’s ‘Final’ Play

Abstract

It is as though Shakespeare, through his magician-prince, were evaluating the different types of power proper to the magus, the ruler and the artist. This concern gives the play a sense of finality: an impression that Shakespeare is summing up everything he had written before, and reaching a balanced conclusion. We know that he went on to write at least a part of Henry VIII but this does not impair the valedictory tone of The Tempest. It is dangerously restrictive, however, to view the play as essentially concerned with autobiography. Wilson Knight has most persuasively argued a case for seeing a reflection of every previous Shakespearean drama in The Tempest, but it is important not to underestimate the social and political aims of the playwright. In Prospero’s renunciation of his magic there is clearly a reference to Shakespeare’s intended retirement, but the play is concerned with other issues than the personal and the artistic. Prospero, like Marlowe’s Faustus, is a Renaissance thinker, trying to better himself and the world. He seeks new realms of knowledge and is representative of the newly-discovered potential of mankind. The Tempest is also Shakespeare’s last political drama. Through the repetition of the original usurpation both in the attempted assassination of Alonzo and the plot of Caliban against Prospero, we are confronted with the relentless machinations of contemporary statecraft.