SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Last Plays: The Tempest," in Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays: From Satire to Celebration, The University Press of Virginia, 1971, pp. 144-72.

In the excerpt below, Foakes traces the flow of the dramatic action in The Tempest, maintaining that Prospero's return to his rightful place in Milan is the central motivation of the play. Additionally, the critic describes the nature and limitations of Prospero's art, the corresponding visions of temporal order in the play and heavenly order in the masque, and the underlying tone of melancholy at the close.

Although The Tempest has much in common with Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, and has often been interpreted as a kind of 'necessary development' from them, it is also in many ways a new departure as a play. Thematic resemblances between these plays have been charted, and they have been analysed as different versions of...