After having watched Shakespeare Uncovered in class, I'm genuinely intrigued by the The Tempest. As Shakespeare's final full text, critics suggest that he wrote it as a farewell play with autobiographical elements. As a sorcerer, Prospero conjures people of his past to the island, controlling them with his skills in magic -- similarly to how Shakespeare brings people together in the theater with his skills in playwriting. It is also predicted that Prospero giving up his magic in the end is symbolic of Shakespeare's end to his career in writing. The host of the program, Trevor Nunn, even proposed that Shakespeare himself could have played Prospero.
As a final "hurrah," Shakespeare used experimental illusions in productions of The Tempest to create special effects, a revolutionary element in theater at the time. Scholars studying The Tempest also conclude that it was never performed in the Globe Theater, but rather in a dark, enclosed space because a lantern or spark in darkness has a much more jarring effect.
It is always interesting to see autobiographical elements in the writing of an author. However, I wrote about this in my blog post, and I feel that it is not worth the time to study the details of an author's life, unless it was an exceptional life, because it does not help us gage the big picture of the time period we are studying from.
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