SOURCE: Greene, Gayle. “Excellent Dumb Discourse: Silence and Grace in Shakespeare's Tempest.” Studia Neophilologica 50 (1978): 193-205.

In the following essay, Greene points out that although Prospero occasionally uses language to constrain or coerce, his special powers of healing are affected by silence, show, and music. Greene maintains that this accentuates Shakespeare's exploration of both the necessity and the limitations of speech.

“Hush and be mute, or else our spell is marr'd.” 

Critics have commented on the poetic thinness of The Tempest, and some have expressed surprise that the play has such great imaginative impact in spite of its paucity of poetic and rhetorical effect. The language is characteristic of Shakespeare's late plays, terse, spare, lacking the rhetorical embellishment and exuberance of his earlier style. It is relatively scarce in imagery, and what there is of it remains concrete and sensuous, rather than assuming the resonance of metaphor or symbol...