Essay on Shakespeares The Tempest - Prospero and Shakespeare :: free essay writer

The Tempest, Prospero and Shakespeare   There can be no doubt that The Tempest contains numerous cases to the theater, and while party of Shakespeares plays make reference to the dramatic arts and their analogy to real life-time (e.g., all the worlds a stage), it is in this, his last play, that the Bard most explicitly acknowledges that the audience is viewing a show. Thus, in the plays final scene (Act I, scene i., ll.148ff), Prospero tells his potential son-in-law Ferdinand that the revels at hand are almost at an end, that the actors are intimately to retire, and that the insubstantial pageant of which he has been a part has reached its conclusion. It is, in fact, tempt to equate the character of Prospero with that of his creator, the playwright Shakespeare. When Prospero sheds his magicians robes in favor of his civilian apparel as the Duke of Milan, with the benefit of hindsight that this is Shakespeares last work and his crowning achievement, we are inclined to as sociate the learned sorcerer with the Bard of Avon. How far we are to carry off this identification, however, is moot.   Prospero of The Tempest, like Shakespeare in his late Romance period, is a mature man with a daughter (Shakespeare, in fact, had two daughters, his only son demise in childhood) at the height of his intellectual and creative powers. Prospero is a polymath, a scholar with a magic book from an entire library that so absorbed him that it was, dukedom large enough (I, ii. l.110). Prospero displays a tinge of affliction for having neglected his worldly office as Duke of Milan in favor of the life of the mind. Similarly, as virtually all of Shakespeares biographers have observed, the Elizabethan playwrights knowledge was highly broad, leading many to speculate that he pursued a sum up of vocations before settling into a life in the theater, and we know from textual correspondences that Shakespeare was broadly read and that he continued to absorb knowledge from divers(prenominal) publications until his death. We can also speculate that Shakespeare regretted remaining away from his home in Stratford, at least insofar as his career in capital of the United Kingdom kept him away from his children. Lastly, following The Tempest, Shakespeare, like Prospero, retired to civilian life, there creation a period of five or six years surrounded by his composition of that play and his untimely death at the age of fifty-two.