The Tempest (Vol. 72) | Philip Brockbank (essay date 1966)
Philip Brockbank (essay date 1966)
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:
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