SOURCE: Zimbardo, Rose Abdelnour. “Form and Disorder in The Tempest.” Shakespeare Quarterly 14, no. 1 (winter 1963): 49-56.

In the following essay, Zimbardo asserts that The Tempest principally represents the opposition between order and chaos, and the limitations of artistically created order.

When one is travelling through that wild terrain of criticism relating to Shakespeare's last plays, there is very little upon which to rely. One is faced with a thousand questions—Are the plays myth, romance, or an elaborate working out of the tragic pattern? Were they written because the poet wished to return to the forms he had used in youth, because he was bored, or because he was pandering to the tastes of a new audience? Is The Tempest a pastoral drama, a dramatic rendition of masque and anti-masque, or a religious parable? To each question there is a most ingeniously contrived reply. But, however sharply the critics...