William Shakespeare's The Tempest is categorized along with other plays written near the end of the playwright's life, plays that are considered difficult to classify so that they are called tragicomedies, showing that there is a mixture of both comedy and tragedy inherent in their structure and characterizations. Ferdinand and Miranda are the lovers in this play, but they represent more than merely youthful desire and serve as pawns in a larger game being played by Miranda's father, Prospero. At the same time, Prospero always protects his daughter, and his encouragement of their romance should be seen in the context of a doting father wanting the best for his daughter in spite of his dedication to exacting revenge and regaining his place in the outside world.
Prospero has been given considerable power as a magician and as the controller of the spirits of the island, and his enemies have been delivered to him by the tempest. Brockbank refers to such devices as "self-conscious artifice" and says that Shakespeare's last plays tend to make use of such elements. In The Tempest, these elements are used to develop deeper meanings and relations among characters and ideas:
There is a multiple, complex allegory. It has to do with the social and moral nature of man, with the natural world, with the ways of providence, and with the nature of art. Yet this very complexity is the source of the play's simplicity--of its power to entertain, to move, and to satisfy our playgoing and contemplative spirit (Brockbank 183-184).
Prospero's command of "the natural world" is evident in what Robert Ornstein says of the way Prospero pushes the two lovers together, noting that Prospero has spent much time protecting his daughter from the lust of Caliban and now "instinctively hectors Ferdinand on the need to respect Miranda's virginity" because "he is unable to think of Miranda except as a vulnerable defenseless child even though he knows tha...