Generations of readers have for this reason been tempted to see it as a culmination of Shakespeare’s vision, to identify Prospero with Shakespeare, and to read the famous speech in which Prospero breaks his magic wand as Shakespeare’s farewell to his art. Although critics nowadays hesitate to identify Prospero with Shakespeare, those of us who love The Tempest cannot help feeling that it represents a culmination—that Shakespeare could not have written it without the wisdom and technique he had accumulated through writing all his other plays.

We get this impression because the characterizations, for example, are so simple—Prospero is wise, Miranda is pure, Caliban is base, Antonio is wicked. Yet these are not the simple characters of a playwright who cannot do any better. They are the simple characters of the playwright who has already created Hamlet and Macbeth and Lear. And we feel this; we feel we are in touch, through the characters of The Tempest, with very real and very powerful forces. Caliban, who speaks one of the most beautiful passages of poetry in the play, is enigmatic enough. But where will you come to an end of understanding Ariel? Ariel’s complexity certainly does not lie in his characterization. It lies, you may say, in the poetry he speaks. But that is to beg the question.

It is the deliberate return to naivete, after the tragic complexity, that makes us feel there is something special about the four plays of Shakespeare’s final period. The special effect is most apparent in The Tempest, because it is the lightest in surface of the four. It is presented to us as a gorgeous bubble, which is blown up for our entertainment like the masque Prospero conjures for Ferdinand and Miranda, and which is just as easily dispelled in the end. Yet The Tempest contains the subject matter of tragedy, and it gives us throughout the sense of omniscience, of surveying all life, that we get only at the highest points of illumination in the tragedies. No wonder then that The Tempest seems the appropriate statement of age, of the man who having seen it all can teach us that the profoundest statement is the lightest and that life, when we see through it, is gay, is tragicomically gay—that the evil, the violence, the tragedy are all part of a providential design.

The Tempest was probably written during the fall and winter of 1610-1611. It was produced at court in the fall of 1611, and again during the winter of 1612-1613 as part of the festivities that preceded the marriage of the King’s daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. The First Folio probably gives us the play as it was acted at court during the winter. But there is insufficient evidence to support the contention of some scholars that the play was radically revised for the wedding festivities and that the wedding masque in Act 4 was inserted in honor of the betrothed couple. Some scholars have even, in their disappointment with the verse of the wedding masque, supposed that the masque was not written by Shakespeare. But Shakespeare always uses a deliberately stilted style for a play within a play; and the masque depends for its effectiveness on spectacle rather than language. Unless new external evidence turns up, there is no reason to look outside the play itself for an explanation of the wedding masque, since the masque fits in subject matter and form into the very texture of The Tempest.

The masque brings to a climax the theme of nature versus art that is central to The Tempest. For Heaven and Earth, Juno and Ceres, unite in the masque to pronounce a blessing on the union of Ferdinand and Miranda, and to connect sexual union with nature’s fruitfulness as seen in its ideal aspect. Venus and her son Cupid are, however, as representatives of lawless passion, specifically excluded from the natural force celebrated in the masque. This fits in with Prospero’s severe warning to Ferdinand not to “break” Miranda’s “virgin knot” before marriage. Nature is celebrated in the masque as a principle of order. And it is shown to be, as a principle of order, inextricably intertwined with art, civilization, idea.

There is good reason to believe that Shakespeare had in mind, when he wrote The Tempest, the reports that first reached England in September 1610 of the miraculous deliverance of the crew and passengers of a ship that had been lost the year before in a terrible tempest off the Bermudas—those stormy islands that Shakespeare refers to in The Tempest as “the still-vexed Bermoothes.” The written accounts of the survivors (extracts from which appear under The Sources of The Tempest) emphasize the providential quality of their deliverance, for the castaways were saved by the magically beneficent nature of the island on which they found themselves. These so-called Bermuda pamphlets go on to see the very storm and shipwreck as providential, since they enabled the castaways to discover for the benefit of mankind that the islands that mariners had shunned as inhabited by devils were actually an island paradise.

In exclaiming over the ways of providence, the Bermuda pamphlets offer those paradoxes that are at the heart of the tragicomic vision—the sort of paradoxes Shakespeare uses in The Tempest. “Though the seas threaten, they are merciful,” says Ferdinand in the end. And Gonzalo sums up the meaning of the play through a series of paradoxes. “Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue / Should become kings of Naples?” he asks,

In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand her brother found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.

(5.1.205-6, 208-13)

This is the essential message of tragicomedy—that we lose in order to recover something greater, that we die in order to be reborn to a better life. One of the Bermuda pamphlets speaks paradoxically of “these infortunate (yet fortunate) islands,” and even calls the shipwreck and deliverance “this tragical comedy.”

The Bermuda episode must have raised again for Shakespeare the perennial question that became particularly pertinent after the discovery of the New World—the question of whether nature is not superior to art, and whether man is not nobler in a state of nature than in a state of civilization. It is not surprising that Shakespeare had also in mind, when he wrote The Tempest, the essay “Of the Cannibals” (also extracted under Sources) in which Montaigne praises the American Indians in terms that helped establish the ideal of the Noble Savage.