The Tempest Read Online Free

“These our actors” (sentence beginning in the middle of a verse line), pause, “As I foretold you” (parenthetic reference back to earlier dialogue), pause, “were all spirits and” (verse line ends with a forward-thrusting “and” instead of the customary pausal punctuation mark) “Are melted into air,” pause for elaboration, “into thin air,” take breath before launching into elaborated simile, then the towers, the palaces, the temples, the globe (each with its adjective and for the globe a special gesture or intonation in recognition that the theater-home of “these our actors” was “the great globe itself”), pause again, to gather and strengthen the strands of the thought with “Yea,” then through an asymmetrical parallelism of short and long, little function words and large-meaning verbs (“all which it” played off against “shall” and “inherit” against “dissolve”), then a repetition of the structure established four lines before (“And, like”), but with an upping of the ante (“baseless fabric” inflated to “insubstantial pageant”), and finally fade after “faded” to the completion of the sentence in the half line “Leave not a rack behind,” the key word being “rack,” which primarily means a wisp of cloud, thus clinching the sustained comparison of actors, theater, and life itself to
weather
—English weather, evanescent, always changeable—but also, by means of the play on “wreck” (which in Shakespearean English was pronounced and sometimes spelled “wrack”), evoking the particular form of extreme weather, namely tempest, that Prospero has conjured up at the beginning of the play. The subtlety of the verse movement matches the complexity of the thought. Through the vocal art of a skilled actor, the “beating mind” and the beats of the verse are as one.
    Prospero’s renunciations suggest that the play itself is profoundly skeptical of the power of the book and even of the theater. The closing sections of the dialogue focus on traditional religious themes such as the search for grace and the preparation of the soul for death. Prospero’s Christian language reaches its most sustained pitch in the epilogue, but his final request is for the indulgence not of God but of the audience. At the last moment, humanist learning is replaced not by Christian but by theatrical faith. Because of this it has been possible for the play to be read, as it so often has been since the Romantic period, as a credo, an
apologia pro vita sua
(a justification of his own life), on the part of Shakespeare the dramatist. The drama’s own afterlife folds back its interior movement from secular to sacred:
The Tempest
has become a work of secular scripture. When art took over some of the functions of religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Matthew Arnold predicted it would, Shakespeare became a kind of God, and the role
The Tempest
performed became analogous to that which classical texts such as Virgil’s
Aeneid
performed for humanism. Humanism became the humanities and Shakespeare became the classic text at the center of the literary curriculum, where he still remains. This edition feeds that process, but with its particular emphasis on the play in performance—explored in the essays on Shakespeare’s career in the theater and on the play’s stage history, and above all through the inclusion of the voices of distinguished directors—it also seeks to return
The Tempest
to the theater.

ABOUT THE TEXT
    Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling,