SOURCE: Semon, Kenneth J. “Shakespeare's Tempest: Beyond a Common Joy.” ELH 40, no. 1 (spring 1973): 24-43.

In the following essay, Semon probes Shakespeare's thematic reconciliation of fantasy and experiential reality in The Tempest.

Helen Gardner, in her excellent essay on As You Like It, makes an interesting and unexplored comment on the nature of comedy: “This aspect of life, as continually changing and presenting fresh opportunities for happiness and laughter, poetic comedy idealizes and presents to us by means of fantasy. Fantasy is the natural instrument of comedy. …”¹ Throughout the canon Shakespeare experiments with fantasy and with fantastic events, but in the last phase of his career we find his most daring experimentation. The central problem of presenting a fantastic world, a world divorced from “reality” as one normally experiences it, is to reconcile the tension between the fantastic and the verisimilar. In the last plays there are several different...