SOURCE: “The Tempest: Shakespeare's Ideal Solution,” in Shakespeare's Personality, edited by Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 206-25.

In the essay below, Paris compares Shakespeare to the character of Prospero, and finds that “[like Prospero at the end of The Tempest, Shakespeare at the end of his career seems to have resolved his inner conflicts by repressing his aggressive impulses and becoming extremely self-effacing.”]

I

As J. B. Priestley has observed, “until his final years” Shakespeare “was a deeply divided man, like nearly all great writers. There were profound opposites in his nature, and it is the relation between these opposites … that gives energy and life to his work” (1963, 82). Critics have tended to define these opposites in terms of masculine and feminine traits. In The Personality of Shakespeare Harold Grier McCurdy concludes that Shakespeare “was predominantly masculine, aggressive,” but that...