by Colin Swanson

Honore de Balzac, a great French journalist, writer, and one of the founders of realism, once said, "Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society." William Shakespeare, one of the greatest playwrights of all time and the author of The Tempest, would most likely have agreed with this statement. In The Tempest, Shakespeare offers up a scathing criticism of society in relation to the way humans live outside of society in nature. The characters found in The Tempest who had grown up outside of society were dumb, that much is true, but the character's who had been raised in society were most definitely the fools. To understand where Shakespeare was coming from in his discussion of society in The Tempest, several things have to be understood beforehand, such as information about Shakespeare himself, the time period...