In no drama has the poet risen to such supreme types of character. Prospero was the highest expression of Shakspere’s latest thought, but only the shadowing forth of a supremer ideal. We can portray what is beneath us far more vividly and truly than what is above us. Shakspere had lived Hamlet, and that is why he so vitally touches every human soul. In Prospero it was the vision by the great poetic soul of a promised land he had only viewed from a mountain top. He had seen the wonderfully luscious grasps of Eschol, but had not yet tasted them. This is why we feel the vast yet subtle difference between “Hamlet” and “The Tempest.”
If the immortal poet had lived the years allotted to man, with ever increasing openness of vision, his own soul would have attained that lofty height where, from the “pattern on the mount,” he would have portrayed the splendor of divine manhood in godlike majesty, the soul irradiating the body like the shining face of Moses in its halo of awe-inspiring divinity. The people required a veil; they would require one still.
Although Shakspere left us before he had lived in the radiance of the truly spiritual realm, we may well crown his Prospero with his words of another:
He sits ‘mongst men like a descended God:
He hath a kind of honor sets him off,
More than a mortal seeming.