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The Tempest

may be referenced by Shakespeare in ProsperoÆs speech in Act IV, Scene I, in which he maintains, ôThese 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-cappÆd towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behindö (Shakespeare IV.i). This passage implies that there will be a barren theater left when the great Bard walks away from the theater and creating. The reference to the ôgreat globeö seems to read like Shakespeare is saying farewell to the theater his works made famous.

We see in the play that there are references which imply such an infertile state of being. At one point in the play Sebastian says, ôI think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and give it his son for an apple,ö to which Antonio replies, ôAnd sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islandsö (Shakespeare II.i). There is a hint that the spreading of seeds will produce more islands, but if they are like the islands Prospero rules then the new islands will also prove unsatisfying. This might be ShakespeareÆs allusion to the fact that his own creative seed was drying up, unable to produce plays as satisfactory as his great works before ôThe Tempest.ö As Laurence Wright (75) suggests, there is a ôhint of onanismö in the above dialogue, the ôscattering of unproductive seed,ö suggesting that the discarded seeds will give rise to ôa proliferation of islands, each presumably as unsatisfactory, in the jaundiced view of Sebastian and Antonio, as the one on which they are presently stranded.ö

There are ample references in the play where the playwright appears to be saying farewell to his art and the theater through the character of Prospero, in what is, after all, a play where a king...

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The Tempest. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:45, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711665.html