SOURCE: Brockbank, Philip. “The Tempest: Conventions of Art and Empire.” In Later Shakespeare, pp. 183-201. London: Edward Arnold, 1966.

In the following essay, Brockbank examines the ways in which Shakespeare fashioned allegory from his textual and generic sources—exploration narratives, pastorals, and masques—for The Tempest.

There is enough self-conscious artifice in the last plays to allow us to suspect that Shakespeare is glancing at his own art when Alonso says:

This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod; And there is in this business more than nature Was ever conduct of: some oracle Must rectify our knowledge. 

And it may be that Prospero quietens the fretful oracles in his first audience with a tongue-in-cheek assurance:

                                                                                                                                            at pick'd leisure Which shall be shortly single, I'll resolve you, Which to you shall seem probable, of every These happen'd accidents; till when, be cheerful, And think of each thing...