Reading Adler's List

It begins with a storm and ends with a promise of “calm seas, auspicious gales” Act 5, Scene 1, ln 314. Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his book and in so doing suggests Shakespeare’s own impending exit from the world of playwriting.

Highly original, with no known source like most (if not all) of Shakespeare’s other plays, The Tempest was the last play he wrote on his own before the collaborations that followed. Filled with magic and treachery and love, it crams all of it into events which transpire over a few hours. During the course of the play, Prospero’s tyrannical nature becomes increasingly more justified until he becomes a stern, but fair, dispenser of power.

Sometimes there is no grand moral to take away. Sometimes there is no insight into human nature. Sometimes there is just a great story that‘s told well. That’s the Tempest.