At the very end, the creator of Hamlet, the finest mind in the world, was eager to show that he could write as well in any style as the author of “Every Man in his Humour.” To me the bare fact is full of interest, and most pitiful.
Let us now turn to “The Tempest,” and see how our poet figures in it. It is Shakespeare's last work, and one of his very greatest; his testament to the English people; in wisdom and high poetry a miracle.
The portrait of Shakespeare we get in Prospero is astonishingly faithful and ingenuous, in spite of its idealization. His life's day is waning to the end; shadows of the night are drawing in upon him, yet he is the same bookish, melancholy student, the lover of all courtesies and generosities, whom we met first as Biron in “Love's Labour's Lost.” The gaiety is gone and the sensuality; the spiritual outlook is infinitely sadder—that is what the years have done with our gentle Shakespeare.
Prospero's first appearance in the second scene of the first act is as a loving father and magician; he says to Miranda:
“I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one! thee, my daughter.”
He asks Miranda what she can remember of her early life, and reaches magical words:
“What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?”
Miranda is only fifteen years of age. Shakespeare turned Juliet, it will be remembered, from a girl of sixteen into one of fourteen; now, though the sensuality has left him, he makes Miranda only fifteen; clearly he is the same admirer of girlish youth at forty-eight as he was twenty years before. Then Prospero tells Miranda of himself and his brother, the “perfidious” Duke:
“And Prospero, the prime Duke, being so reputed
In dignity, and for the liberal arts
Without a parallel; those being all my study.”
He will not only be a Prince now, but a master “without a parallel” in the liberal arts. He must explain, too, at undue length, how he allowed himself to be supplanted by his false brother, and speaks about himself in Shakespeare's very words: