[In the following essay, Wiltenburg argues that in The Tempest "Shakespeare has imitated, with important differences, the main pattern of Virgil's poem in its beginning, middle, and end; that is, in its situation, development, and resolution."

Even those sympathetic to source studies may well feel that enough has been said about the sources of The Tempest. More than most of the plays, it seems to be a rich confluence of elements drawn from Shakespeare's diverse reading, conversation, and theatrical experience. So many things float to the surface here: contemporary excitement over the exploration and colonization of the New World; bits of Italian and Spanish history and fiction involving usurpations, flights, islands, and returns; scenes and techniques from the ongoing human comedy of commedia dell'arte improvisations; some of Montaigne's reflections on nature and society, anger and restraint; and a fascination with magic, man's power to influence, and perhaps control, nature outside and inside himself and others, by the power of his 'art'. Yet no one of these predominates, or presents a sufficiently strong matrix of incident and character to constitute a primary source. Kenneth Muir [in The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays, 1977] spoke for many readers, I suspect, when he concluded that, whatever the variety of his materials, 'it seems … likely that for once he [Shakespeare] invented the plot'.

Others, however, have felt that something is still missing in our account of the play and its sources; among them, Muir himself, who twenty years earlier had voiced the opposite opinion that, although 'there were … a number of minor sources … it is highly probable that there was a main source as yet unidentified'. Indeed, Shakespeare characteristically writes in response to a story. He does sometimes take inert lumps of chronicle history or philosophic speculation and transform them into things rich and strange, but his most frequent way with sources is to take an old story, badly or somehow inadequately or incompletely told, and tell it again. I believe the Aeneid is the main source of the play in this sense, not the source of the plot (though it does provide many incidental and verbal details and parallels), but the work to which Shakespeare is primarily responding, the story he is retelling.

The claims for the Aeneid in this respect have not been much considered, in part perhaps because they were so obvious. Source hunters instinctively prefer the secret, the subtle, and the arcane, but even groundlings have heard of Dido and Aeneas, and one needs not to be much of a classical scholar to spot the allusion to Virgil in Ariel's harpy-like entrance in act 3. Critics have not made much of this material: Muir speaks of the 'curious echoes' from the Aeneid; Frank Kermode feels 'that Shakespeare has Virgil in mind'; Geoffrey Bullough, in his authoritative account of the narrative and dramatic sources, does not even bother to mention the Aeneid. Some critics may have felt, with Chesterton, that 'a debt to Virgil is like a debt to Nature'. Others seem to have contented themselves with the reflection that since the Aeneid, at least in its first four to six books, was a chief text of contemporary education, it could be regarded as a common quarry of ideas and effects, requiring no special attention.

The true significance of the Aeneid for the play may also have been obscured for a time by the misguided enthusiasm of Colin Still's The Timeless Theme. Colin Still, a theosophical crank, was interested in The Tempest only insofar as it could be interpreted as an allegorical illustration of the 'timeless theme' he perceived as underlying all religions and all great literature, including (but not limited to) the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Dante, the mystical texts of the Zohar, Shakespeare, and Milton. Yet, for all the crude forcing of the evidence to very narrow preconceptions, Still made some valuable connections between the poem and the play. He noticed the exchange between Adrian and Gonzalo (2.1.79-84) concerning the identity of Carthage with Tunis (Gonzalo is wrong of course, Tunis is only near what had been Carthage), he remarked the general similarity of the interrupted voyage from Tunis to Naples to that of Aeneas voyage from Carthage (near Tunis) to Cumae (near Naples), and he suggested that the experiences of Alonso's party in the enchanted island are comparable in several respects to those of Aeneas in the underworld.

Much useful work was done by J. M. Nosworthy, who identified several structural and verbal parallels, and demonstrated that Shakespeare has drawn directly upon the description of the storm and landing in Aeneid 1, both for general inspiration and for many specifics. He noted [ … in Review of English Studies 24, 1948] that both poem and play open with a storm and shipwreck in the present, then introduce the antecedent action, or 'causal plot' as he calls it, through Aeneas' narrative to Dido, and Prospero's to Miranda, before beginning the present action or 'effectual plot'. He further demonstrated in detail that 'Shakespeare's tempest and Virgil's storm are analogous in origin and outcome. Both are provoked by supernatural means to ensure that a certain character shall arrive at a certain requisite locality and there be brought into relation with other characters.' He cited parallels between furious Juno and angry Prospero as authors of the storms, between Aeolus and Ariel as their agents (one of whom, we may note, will be rewarded with a wife, the other with his freedom); between the isolation of Ferdinand to effect his meeting with Miranda, and the relative isolation of Aeneas (he never loses his fidus Achates) to effect his meeting with Dido; and finally, between the supernatural preservation of mariners and ships in both. Beyond the storm and its consequences he cited verbal borrowings from Aeneid 1 and 4, the most significant of which go to form part of Ceres' speech to Iris in the masque of act 4, and Ferdinand's first encounter with Miranda, palpably based upon Aeneas' recognition of his mother Venus ('0 dea certe') in Aeneid 1. My intention here is not to multiply specific parallels, useful as that might be (though I will suggest one later), but to assess what Nosworthy calls the 'pervasive influence' of the poem on the play. In what follows, I will argue that Shakespeare has imitated, with important differences, the main pattern of Virgil's poem in its beginning, middle, and end; that is, in its situation, development, and resolution.

Shakespeare takes as his 'given' for the play what we may call the Virgilian situation, a situation characterized by tempests, defiled banquets, and 'widowhood'. First in both poem and play is the tempest itself. In the play, it reflects the state of moral disorder occasioned by the usurpation, now dramatized as a physical disorder to effect Prospero's present purpose. But in the poem the tempest expresses a continuing relation between man and the gods, Juno in particular, whose hostility makes man's voyaging, man's history, a continual series of tempests—physical, personal, and social—the end of which remains, in the poem, promised but not achieved. The effect of these tempests, whether within man or outside him, is not so much ruin as separation. As Shakespeare's mariners cry out in the first scene when the ship appears to be lost:

       Mercy on us!—
We split, we split!—Farewell, my wife and
 children!—
Farewell, brother!—We split, we split, we
 split!
                                           (1.1.59-61)

This is also Aeneas' situation in the first half of the Aeneid. His narrative of his voyage is punctuated with painful, helpless splittings and farewells. First of all to Troy itself; as Panthus says to him while they are still within the burning city:

venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus
Dardaniae. fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens
gloria Teucrorum; ferus omnia Iuppiter argos
  transtulit.
                                       (2.324-7)

This is the hour which no effort of ours can alter. We Trojans are no more; no more is Ilium; no more the splendour of Teucrian glory. All now belongs to Argos; it is Jupiter's remorseless will.

Then there is Aeneas' farewell to his wife Creusa, inadvertently left behind in the escape from the city. Aeneas returned to search for her and reports:

ausus quin etiam voces i act are per umbram
impievi clamore vias, maestusque Creusam
nequiquam ingeminans iterumque iterumque
      vocavi.
                                    (2.768-70)

I even risked shouting through the darkness. Again and again I filled the streets with my cries in useless repetition, as in my grief I called out Creusa's name.

He refuses to be consoled when her spirit argues the divinely ordained necessity of their separation: 'lacrimantem et multa volentem / dicere deseruit, tenuisque recessit in auras' (2.790-1) ('though I wept and longed to say so much, she forsook me and vanished into thin air'). Similar are the losses or leavetakings from many companions and friends, culminating in the loss, just when destiny seemed within reach, of his father Anchises:

hinc Drepani me portus et inlaetabilis ora
accipit. hie pelagi tot tempestatibus actus
heu! genitorem, omnis curae casusque

     levamen,
amitto Anchisen … hie labor extremus
                                        (3.707-10-14)

At last I found a harbour at Drepanum, but there was no joy for me on that shore. For here, after all the persecution of the ocean-storms, O bitterness! I lost my father, lost Anchises my solace in every adventure and care … This blow was my last anguish.

Throughout his journeys, Aeneas searches for a home, a place to rest. He prays at Delos, 'da propriam, Thymbraee, domum, da moenia fessis / et genus et mansuram urbem' (3.85-6) ('Apollo, grant us a home of our own. We are weary. Give us a walled city which shall endure, and a lineage of our blood') Yet without the gods' permission, and without full knowledge of their intentions, he finds only a series of false havens. Immediately after the departure from Troy he attempts to build the city of Aeneadae, only to be driven from the place by the shocking discovery of the bleeding bush, his old comrade Polydorus. His settlement on Crete also begins well, until 'subito cum tábida membris, / corrupto caeli tractu, miserandaque venit / arboribusque satisque lues et letifer annus' (3.137-9) ('falling from some poisoned part of the sky, a heart-breaking pestilence attacked and rotted trees, crops, and men, and the only yield of that season was death'). Aeneas' experience in the Strophades, the Turning Islands inhabited by the Harpies, follows the same pattern. He and his men make no attempt to settle there, but raid herds of cattle and goats, invite the gods to 'share their plunder', and '[build] seats of turf along the curving shore and [start] on a rich feast'. Suddenly the Harpies are upon them, defiling the food with their filth, and cursing Aeneas and his men as usurpers of their possessions and place. Their leader cries:

bellum etiam pro caede bourn stratisque
  iuvencis,
Laomedontiadae, bellumne inferre paratis
et patrio Harpyias insontis pellere regno?
accipite ergo animis atque haec mea figite
  dieta.
                                      (3.247-50)

You would fight for these slaughtered bullocks? And drive us innocent Harpies from our rightful realm? Attend then to my words.

—whereupon she prophesies a hunger so great that they will some day 'eat their tables'.

Shakespeare imitates this episode in 3.3 to make a similar point about pleasant delusions and false security to the 'three men of sin', Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian. Ariel presents, and then harpy-like removes, a spectral banquet, emblematic of the delusive pleasures their forgotten crime against Prospero, their usurpation of his possessions and his place, has apparently secured. As the Harpies rebuke Aeneas for his misperception of what is pleasing to the gods, so Ariel reminds the three of their crime and of the superintending powers, which may delay, but do not forget.

Both ideas, that of the tempest, of man buffeted and isolated by forces he does not control, and that of the defiled banquet, of finding his desires and perceptions delusive, come to their most poignant focus in the idea of 'widow-hood'. The passage in the play in which this idea appears has long been a puzzle:

Adrian. Tunis was never grae'd before with such
  a paragon to their Queen.
Gonzalo. Not since widow Dido's time.
Antonio. Widow! a pox o' that! How came that
  widow in? widow Dido!
Sebastian. What if he had said 'widower Aeneas'
  too? Good Lord, how you take it!
Adrian. 'Widow Dido' said you? you make me
  study of that: she was of Carthage, not of
  Tunis.
                                        (2.1.71-9)

Kermode would defend this passage against those who find in it only 'dreary puns' indicative of Shakespeare's 'fatigue', but concedes that the 'apparently trivial allusions to the theme of Dido and Aeneas [have] never been properly explained', and holds out the hope that 'our frame of reference is badly adjusted, or incomplete, and that an understanding of this passage will modify our image of the whole play'. The immediate effect of the exchange is clear enough. We are given yet another example of the contrasting perspectives of the pompous and conventional Adrian and Gonzalo, and the cynical and ironic Antonio and Sebastian. Gonzalo's phrase is pedantically correct (Dido was, in fact, the widow of Sychaeus), but also attempts to cast a mantle of respectability over this most notorious example of indignus amor. Antonio and Sebastian take the brutal view, widows being proverbially lustful, and (as Kermode suggests) they may even be indulging in familiar puns hinging on Dido—die, do; and Aeneas—any ass.

Yet I believe Shakespeare intends a further point for the reader of Virgil who is neither a fool nor a cynic. Rightly understood, the phrases 'widow Dido' and 'widower Aeneas' touch Virgil's presentation of the human situation at a vital point. In the view that dominates the first half of the poem (and still continues in the second), all are widows, all are widowers. All are necessarily bereft of, or separated from, what they most want, need, or love, whether in the form of a lost friend, brother, father, wife, husband, or city; or of a destiny promised but nowhere apparent. As Aeneas pitifully complains to Venus in Book 1:

quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis
ludis imaginibus? cur dextrae iungere dextram
non datur ac veras audire et reddere voces?
                                       (1.407-9)

Ah, you are too cruel! Why again and again deceive your own son with mocking disguises? Why may I not join hand to hand, hear you in frankness, and speak to you in return?

In this situation, all desires, whether for knowledge, rest, intimacy, or consolation, must go unsatisfied or (what is often worse) incompletely satisfied, leaving men 'split' or 'widowed' from their own good. Virgil stresses the pathetic quality of this condition, and the tragic paradox whereby man's desperate attempts to find satisfaction merely drive him further from his best self and from his destiny. Both the pathos and the paradox are most fully explored in the story of Dido. She has fled to Africa and founded Carthage in the wake of her brother's brutal murder of her husband, Sychaeus. When Aeneas arrives, she has already proven herself as a builder and lawgiver, a shrewd and beneficent queen. An important condition, perhaps even source, of her purposefulness and self-sufficiency is that she has, as she says, 'Been irrevocably resolved never again to desire a union in wedlock with any man, since the time when death's treachery cheated me of my first love … For he who first united me with him took all love out of my life' ('si mihi non animo fixum immotumque sederei, / ne cui me vinclo vellem sodare iugali, / postquam primus amor deceptam morte fefellit … ille meos, primus qui me sibi iunxit, amores / abstulit', 4.15-17 … 28-9). Yet now, Venus and Cupid have 'poisoned' her and Aeneas has 'stirred [her] heart to wavering' for the first time. She resists as best she can, but finally her own intemperate desires and the inflammatory counsels of her sister, 'set Dido's heart, already kindled, ablaze with new access of love, gave new hope to tempt her wavering intention, and broke down her scruples' ('his dictis incensum animum inflammavit amore / spemque dedit dubiae menti solvitque pudorem', 4.54-5). Virgil touchingly portrays her hesitations and indirections in revealing this love to Aeneas. But finally, with the connivance of Venus and Juno, they are driven together and make love in the cave. Virgil comments:

ille dies primus leti primusque malorum
causa fuit, neque enim specie famave movetur
nee iam furtivum Dido meditatur amorem;
coniugium vocat; hoc praetexit nomine
    culpam.
                                    (4.169-72)

On that day were sown the seeds of suffering and death. Henceforth Dido cared no more for appearances or her good name, and ceased to take any thought for secrecy in her love. She called it a marriage; she used this word to screen her sin.

Through this sad self-deception and Aeneas' subsequent desertion, Dido becomes a 'widow' twice over, and the chief example of the broken relations throughout the poem. Worst of all, in losing Aeneas she loses not only her love but also herself, for she can no longer hide from herself that, in her dream of a satisfying love and 'marriage', she has violated the sense of 'honour and its laws' that had sustained her. Only suicide, one final 'widowhood', remains. This sense of 'widowhood', of continual bereavement, underlies the famed Virgilian sadness. It leads to the 'pity for a world's distress, and a sympathy for short-lived humanity' ('sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt', 1.462) that Aeneas is so moved to find when he first sees Troy's story, the recurring story of men and civilizations, depicted in the temple at Carthage.

That Shakespeare was sensitive to this aspect of the Aeneid is clear from his extended treatment of the Dido and Aeneas story, or rather of the originals for the story, in Antony and Cleopatra. There, too, the Virgilian conflict between love and destiny, subjective desires and objective necessities, is at the centre of the play, though it is resolved in a quite un-Virgilian fashion. There, too, the principals are described as 'widow' and 'widower', and the question is even raised whether Antony's relation with Cleopatra does or does not amount to a 'marriage' (2.2.119-23). In The Tempest, most of the characters are also 'widowed'. Sebastian reproaches Alonso for 'making widows' in Milan and Naples by his ill-advised African marriage and voyage. All are separated from country or friends, fathers from sons, each from the others, and, as Gonzalo retrospectively remarks at the end, 'no man was his own', each is in some way separated from himself and his own good. Most obviously 'widowed' is Prospero himself, who, like Aeneas, is in fact a widower (though nothing is made of it), but more significantly, is separated from his place, his rights, his proper self. As he says to Miranda in act 1:

Prospero. Thy father was the Duke of Milan,
   and a prince of power.
Miranda. Sir, are you not my father?
                                      (1.2.54-5)

Only at the very end will he be able to say:

Prospero.      know for certain
That I am Prospero, and that very duke
Which was thrust forth of Milan …
                                   (5.1.158-60)

Yet in the play it is clear that while these separations may be common, they are neither normal nor inevitable; the powers may delay, but do not forget, and will assist in reuniting the 'widowed'.

Granted, then, that the initial situations in play and poem are overwhelmingly similar, what can men, particularly the heroes Aeneas and Prospero, do in these circumstances? What enables them to act at all? What do they attempt and achieve? What price do they pay for their achievement?

At the centre of the Aeneid is Aeneas' visit to the under-world. Book 6 begins with Aeneas weeping for the loss of his friend and steersman Palinurus; it ends with his determination to pursue a glorious vision of the future Roman civilization. This change is effected by a vision of the continuity of human life and effort that compensates for the inevitable pain of 'widowhood'. In the underworld, the sense of bereavement is even more intense than in ordinary life, for here Aeneas must relive all at once the loss of his Trojan comrades, see for himself the pain he has inflicted on Dido, and feel her unrelenting hatred. Most painful of all is the encounter with his father, Anchises; in his joy at finding him, Aeneas cannot restrain himself and pleads:

              da iungere dextram,
da, genitor, teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro.
                                       (6.687-8)

Father, oh let me, let me, clasp your hand! Do not slip from my embrace!

Virgil comments:

sic memorans largo fletu simul ora rigabat.
ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum,
ter frustra comprensa manus efrugit imago,
par levibus ventis volucrique simillima
    somno.
                                     (6.699-702)

As he spoke his face grew wet with the stream of tears. Three times he tried to cast his arms about his father's neck, but three times the clasp was vain and the wraith escaped his hands, like airy winds or the melting of a dream.

Balancing this confrontation with the past, with all that has been suffered and lost (or never possessed) is the vision of his children, of Rome, of a new civilization greater than Troy, great enough to make his sufferings worthwhile. Anchises, his father and guide, having reviewed many figures from the coming 'glory', and having contrasted the genius of other cultures with that of Rome, concludes:

tu regere imperio populos, Romane,
     memento
(hae tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere
     morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.
                                          (6.851-3)

But you, Roman, must remember that you have to guide the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to graft tradition onto peace, to show mercy to the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low.

Here he finds, in the idea of that civilization and world order, a conception of his destiny worth sacrificing himself for, worth sacrificing others for. He emerges, purged of his grief, prepared for the struggles that follow.

The Tempest possesses no fully comparable 'centre', though as Still and, more recently, Jan Kott [in Mosaic 10, 3 (1977)] have suggested, the enchanted island itself is like the underworld: both are places set apart, divorced from the mainland or the upper world, providing a magical ground where past and future are brought together, to heal and to begin anew. Moreover, several characters in The Tempest have central experiences similar in various respects to those of Aeneas. Alonso, 'bereft' of his son, experiences a sharp grief and later guilt strong enough to reawaken in him a sense of 'kindness', a sense of his connection with other men analogous to Aeneas' discovery of a sense of connection in time. His son Ferdinand, who is 'something stain'd with grief… [and] … hath lost his fellows, and strays about to find 'em' (1.2.417-19), is, like Aeneas, prepared by grief and isolation for the vision of a better world in the person of Miranda.

Most important is, of course, Prospero himself, whose superiority depends, like that of Aeneas, upon his greater awareness of the continuities of the moral life. What sets him apart from the other characters and makes him their proper governor—though every major character, except Miranda, either wishes, imagines, plots, or claims to be a 'king'—are his greater capacities for memory and conscience, the moral bases of his art. Even the best of the others are, in comparison, a trifle obtuse: Miranda is unaware of her noble birth, and has only the faintest memories of her life before her exile; Ariel and Caliban both attempt rebellion and must be reminded of who they are, who they have been, and their consequent obligations to Prospero. Self-forgetfulness is also the problem of Alonso and his party, and the quality of their crime against Prospero. Their usurpation involved a forgetting and violation of the better part of their nature, the familial and social bonds of 'kindness'. Antonio forgot his brother, Alonso his brother prince. 'Kindness', meaning not only benevolence but an awareness of man's social nature, of his connectedness with other men, and the fulfilment of his natural obligations to them, cannot be created or imposed, but like the alchemist's gold 'within' the lead must be drawn out, realized, recovered. The recovery of 'kindness' in turn makes possible the transmutation of past experience. This is Prospero's method in reclaiming Alonso. He first separates father and son in order to expose Alonso's 'kindness', his overwhelming affection for Ferdinand. He then presents the accusatory harpy-like vision of 3.3 in which the 'three men of sin' are called upon to 'remember' their crime; and Alonso is specifically directed to interpret the loss of his son as retribution. His contemplation of that past action, now understood through a revived conscience, a revived and vivifying 'kindness', transmutes the crime to the penitence which Prospero defines as the condition of personal reunion and political restoration. Thus Prospero confronts, and enables others to confront, both the past and the future, and intertwines them in a living knot, devoted as he is to the causes of both justice and love.

While similarities predominate in the delineation of the human predicament, the differences come to the fore here, in the response to it. Aeneas begins the founding of the new city with his proposed marriage with the daughter of King Latinus, much as Prospero constructs his hopes for renewal on the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. But in the Aeneid, the marriage abrogates the previous under-standing with Turnus, and provokes the disruptive intervention of Juno. Both possible marriages—Aeneas and Lavinia, Lavinia and Turnus—reflect the same painful division seen in the 'marriage' and separation of Aeneas and Dido, and elsewhere in the poem. The one is a marriage of state, the cold requirement of destiny, the other a marriage of passion, supported by the furious, possessive subjectivity of Turnus, and of Lavinia's mother, Queen Amata. Between these fatal extremes there is no middle ground. The result is the long warfare that occupies the rest of the poem and kills so many of Aeneas' friends, allies, and noble enemies.

The marriage Prospero promotes between Ferdinand and Miranda serves many of the same purposes as Aeneas' proposed marriage. It too is a marriage of state, uniting the rival powers of Naples and Milan, re-establishing order and providing for continued order and vitality. But this is also a marriage based in nature, in what Prospero calls the 'Fair encounter / Of two most rare affections'. And Prospero, like a wise gardener, takes great pains to manage this natural attraction, not denying their passion, but restraining it with the masque, with the 'sanctimonious ceremony' that prevents the 'weeds' of 'barren hate / Sourey'd disdain and discord'. His aims are modest. He hopes for no new world (only the naive Miranda and the perpetually naive Gonzalo could imagine that), but only for a fresh start. His project wins the favour of that same Juno who had implacably opposed Aeneas; as she sings in the masque:

Honour, riches, marriage-blessing,
Long continuance and increasing,
Hourly joys be still upon you!
Juno sings her blessings on you.
                                          (4.1.106-9)

For both Aeneas and Prospero, the resolution of the action depends finally upon the sacrifice or renunciation of something in themselves. Yet the nature and effects of their respective sacrifices could hardly be more different. Again and again, events in the poem reinforce the sense that human aspiration is irremediably tragic, that the city of law and reason must be built on blood, that, as Jupiter had decreed in Book 1, only in the distant future will the 'terrible Gates of War' be shut and the 'ghastly Lust of Blood' chained up (1.293-6); until then, the establishment of civilization requires the sacrifice not only of man's weakness, but also part of his tenderness, his humanity. Aeneas must accept a guilty world and a guilty destiny, in which his public purpose requires the sacrifice of his private affections: to lead and to overcome, he must deny himself. But that sacrifice, the sacrifice of what one loves, exacts a terrible psychological price in Dido, in Turnus, in Aeneas, for it causes fury, the loss of reason, the loss of oneself, in which all the accumulated sadness and bitterness are destructively vented. The Aeneid ends not in triumph (though we know the cause of Rome has triumphed), but in fury and dismay:

                       stetit acer in armis
Aeneas, volvens oculos, dextramque
  repressit;
et iam iamque magis cunctantem flectere
  sermo
coeperat, infelix umero cum apparuit alto
balteus et notis fulserunt cingula bullis
Pallantis pueri, victum quern volnere Turnus
straverat atque umeris inimicum insigne
  gerebat.
ille, oculis postquam saevi monumenta
  doloris
exuviasque hausit, furiis accensus et ira
terribilis: 'tune hinc spoliis indute meorum
eripiare mini? Pallas te hoc volnere, Pallas
immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine
  sumit,'
hoc dicens ferrum adverso sub pectore condit
fervidus. ast illi solvuntur frigore membra
vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub
  umbras.
                                    (12.938-52)

Aeneas stood motionless, a fierce figure in his armour; but his eyes were restless, and he checked the fall of his right arm. And now at any moment the plea of Turnus, already working in his mind, might have prevailed on his hesitation, when suddenly, there before him, he saw slung over his shoulder the accursed baldric of Pallas and his belt, inset with the glittering rivets, which he had known of old when they had belonged to his young friend whom Turnus had brought low with a wound, and overcome. This baldric Turnus was wearing now over his own shoulder, and the trophy was fatal to him. Aeneas' eyes drank in the sight of the spoils which revived the memory of his own vengeful bitterness. His fury kindled and, terrible in his rage, he said: 'Are you to be stolen hence out of my grasp, you who wear spoils taken from one whom I loved? It is Pallas, only Pallas, who by this wound which I now deal makes sacrifice of you; he exacts this retribution, you criminal, from your blood.' Saying this and boiling with rage he buried his blade full in Turnus' breast. His limbs relaxed and chilled; and the life fled, moaning, resentful, to the Shades.

Prospero too must perform a renunciation, a sacrifice of some part of himself (two of them, in fact), yet his renunciations produce not bitterness and fury, but peace within himself and reconciliation with others. First is the renunciation (which Aeneas could only imagine) of his fury, in this case, his justifiable anger at those who had imposed the long separation upon him. Throughout the play he has sought justice: restoration for his wronged self and suffering for the guilty. But now the prosecution of justice becomes for Prospero, as earlier for Alonso, not an end in itself, but the necessary preparation for the recovery of kindness. As he says to Ariel:

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a
  feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply
Passion as they, be kindlier mov'd than thou
  art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck
  to th' quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being

 penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel:
My charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore,
And they shall be themselves.
                                                      (5.1.21-32)

Even more telling than the renunciation of his anger, is the renunciation of his art, the 'rough magic', the power to constrain others to share his 'fancies'. Although it has not, so far as I know, been remarked before, this second renunciation closely resembles an episode in Aeneid 5 involving two boxers, Dares and Entellus (5.362-484). Dares, the younger man, defies all comers (there are none) until Entellus, the old champion, is finally persuaded to oppose him. Entellus embarrasses himself by missing a punch and falling down, then in furious shame and rage overcomes and humiliates Dares, threatens to kill him, and does in the end celebrate his victory by smashing in the skull of the prize steer. He concludes: 'Here victorious I lay down the gauntlet and my art' ('hie victor caestus artemque repono', 5.484). This story presents several similarities to the conflict between Prospero and his younger brother Antonio—the younger man boldly supplanting the elder, his aggressive boasting and over-confidence; the elder's delayed response, initial irresolution and need for external encouragement; and finally, the complete victory of the aroused elder, and the restoration of his claims. But what is most striking is the contrast between the two final renunciations of one's 'art' or strength, one's mastery over others. For Entellus, it is an equivocal victory: he has won once more, but he is defeated by age. His youth and strength are gone, and his farewell to his 'art' is also a farewell to his younger and better self, a farewell to his place among men. Prospero, however, bids farewell to his worse self, the desire for control, for a mastery of his fellows that stands in the way of his own recovery of 'kindness', and his renunciation is not a farewell, but a readmission to humanity.

It is often observed that there is something 'fundamental' about The Tempest, and that the editors of the Folio may have arranged things better than they knew when they placed it first. I think that this analysis of its relation to the Aeneid helps us understand why this should be so. Both works address the most fundamental questions raised by the enterprise of civilization: what is required to establish and to renew our life in common? Both agree that the answer is 'sacrifice', yet differ essentially on the nature of that sacrifice (is it to be a part of what is best in us, or a part of what is worst?) and on the consequences of that sacrifice for the individual (will it be fury or 'kindness'?).

That Shakespeare should, in addressing these questions in his last major play, have turned to a reconsideration and reworking of the Virgilian pattern seems peculiarly appropriate, for the Aeneid was not only the chief document of the Latin civilization the Renaissance inherited, but also, in its incorporation and transcendence of the Homeric patterns, the most frequently recommended model for imitation, the best way of using and responding to the past. Jan Kott has suggested [in Arion 5, NS 3 (1976)] that in The Tempest 'The Virgilian myths are invoked, challenged, and finally rejected'. I think it is more accurate to say that Shakespeare treats Virgil much as Virgil had treated Homer. What were ends for the first writer have become means for the second. Just as Virgil subsumed the Homeric stories of men who fight primarily for themselves to the story of a man who fights primarily for his culture, his concept of civilization, so Shakespeare has subsumed the search for law, for justice, the story told so well by Virgil, into his own larger story of the search for 'kindness', a richer concept of civilization, in which, in Yeats's words:

    all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last …
 … that its own sweet will is Heaven's will.