SOURCE: Hamilton, Sharon. “The Father as Inept or Able Mentor: Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest.” In Shakespeare's Daughters, pp. 13-34. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2003.

[In the following excerpt, Hamilton studies the relationship between Prospero and his daughter Miranda in The Tempest, considering the play “a fable of fatherly wish-fulfillment and ideal nurture.”]

The Tempest is Miranda's coming of age ritual. It begins with the revelation of her true identity and ends with her betrothal. Every stage in this initiation process is overseen by her magician-father. Prospero is one of the earliest examples in literature of father as single parent. He protects Miranda, both from knowledge that would make her unhappy and from physical and emotional danger. He lavishes affection on her; never hesitating to say how and why he prizes her. At the same time, he respects her individuality. He has acted as Miranda's “schoolmaster,” setting high standards and training her mind. Like a good teacher, he encourages her to express herself and to make her own choices, even to the extent of countermanding his orders about how she should behave. Although Prospero has pressing reasons for wishing her match with Ferdinand, the young prince whom his magic brings to the island—it is Miranda's and Prospero's one chance for future security—he will not force her to acquiesce. In fact, he does everything possible both to gauge her feelings and to test the young man's worth before giving his own consent. In this, he is strikingly different from Capulet who, in spite of Juliet's abundance of potential suitors, is grimly insistent on Paris. Finally, Prospero frees Miranda to leave the sanctuary he created for her and to enter the larger world.

A daughter raised in such hermetic circumstances could be helpless or rebellious—incapable of asserting herself, resentful of her father's authority. Instead, Miranda is self-assured, resourceful, and kind. She reciprocates Prospero's love and respect, but she does not feel constrained to limit her circle of affection to him. Despite her isolated childhood, she is quick and prescient in judging others, and she recognizes in Ferdinand her soulmate. Miranda shows the confidence of a child who can love and trust others because she has been loved and trusted herself.

For Prospero the quest for Miranda's happiness is fraught with difficulties. The young suitor he has provided could prove unworthy—Prospero has never met him, and, as the son of his enemy, he does not have a promising heritage. Even should Ferdinand fulfill Prospero's hopes, the magician must face an arduous confrontation with the men who betrayed him. If his plan succeeds, the price he must pay is the loss of his powers and a lonely old age. He must return to governing Milan, while Miranda will join her new husband in ruling the Kingdom of Naples. Yet for the sake of his daughter's well-being, Prospero is willing to sacrifice the chief consolation of his life, his delight in her company. The emotional motor of The Tempest is the bittersweet satisfaction parents feel when they let their children go.

As the play opens, Prospero senses that the moment has come for Miranda's emergence into womanhood. The rousing action of the storm is followed by a long tête-à-tête in which he recounts her past and hints at her future. Prospero knows that this is the turning point in Miranda's self-awareness: “naught knowing” (I.i.18) of his origins, she is “ignorant” of what she is. The child's status is derivative, dependent on the parent's titles and goods, which she stands to inherit. Always before, he has deflected her questions about her past. Now, he tells her, “'Tis time / I should inform thee further” (ll. 22-23).

Miranda, who was only three when they arrived on the island, has little memory of her early years. He begins with the most shocking fact:

Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since,
Thy father was the Duke of Milan and
A prince of power.

[ll. 53-55]

The echoed words and the falling cadence resonate with The Tempest's peculiar elegiac music. Prospero was subjected to exile by the perfidy of his younger brother Antonio, whom, he tells Miranda bitterly, “next thyself / Of all the world I loved” (I.ii.68-69). Prospero recognizes his own fault in “neglecting worldly ends” and giving Antonio “the manage of [his] state” while he himself was “rapt in secret studies” (l. 77). Antonio eventually joined in league with Alonso, the King of Naples, “an enemy … inveterate” to Prospero. With Alonso's aid, Antonio drove the “right duke of Milan” out to sea in a “rotten” bark, its only passengers, he tells the girl, “me and thy crying self” (ll. 128-48).

Miranda wonders, wisely, if it was “foul play” or a “blessed event” that brought them to the island, and he responds, “Both, both, my girl!” (ll. 60-61). Their rescue came about not only by “providence divine” but human “charity” (ll. 159, 162)—that of the faithful old councilor Gonzalo. He furnished them with clothes and the “volumes” on magical lore which, Prospero asserts, “I prize above my dukedom” (l. 168). During the hard voyage, the child seemed to her father “a cherubim … that did preserve [him].” His care for her and “a fortitude from heaven” gave him the will to endure.

Now it is Prospero who must play the role of divine protector for Miranda. The “god” of his island-kingdom, he presides over spirits evil and benevolent, directs the forces of nature, and influences the acts of mortals. But he is not omnipotent. Prospero can precipitate certain events, but he cannot guarantee their outcome; he must act swiftly, be ever vigilant, and hope for the best. He depends on Ariel, his “tricksy spirit” (I.ii.226), to carry out his plans. He must be on guard against Ariel's weariness with his duties and stanch his eagerness to be set free, in accord with Prospero's promise. The time for fulfilling that vow is almost upon them: as the play opens, it is within “two days” (I.ii.299). “Bountiful Fortune” (I.ii.178) has brought Prospero's enemies near; the tempest that he devised and Ariel wrought have driven them to the island. Now the dreamy scholar, the man who preferred his books to his dukedom, must act quickly and decisively. As he reveals to Miranda, both intuition and astrology, “prescience” and “a most auspicious star,” assert that this is his one chance to right his life's wrongs (ll. 180-84).

What he does not tell the girl is that her fortunes, too, depend on his vigilance and agility. Should he fail, she would be left with an aging, Ariel-bereft father, in danger of some day facing the monster Caliban alone. A mark of Prospero's compassion is that he only hints at this dire future; he spares Miranda the anguish that full knowledge would entail. Like the sleep he casts over her while he and Ariel plot, the aim of his love is to protect and sustain. He strives not to bind his daughter to him but to free her, as he will his airy “son.” But in Miranda's case he intends to make certain first that, vulnerable as she is, she is going to other loving arms and a safe haven.

It is clear that Miranda has inherited more than Prospero's rank. From him and, possibly, her late mother, “a piece of virtue” (I.ii.56), she has learned kindness and trust, and she treats her father with the love that he has shown her. She is a sympathetic listener to his story of betrayal, desperation, and rescue. “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness” (I.ii.106), she tells him, and sighs “Alack, for pity!” She senses the supernatural quality of his power: her first question is whether his “art” (I.ii.1) has created the tempest. She is sure, too, of his benevolence: her term of address is “dearest father.” Miranda's concern is not her own safety but the fate of the “brave vessel” she has seen “dashed all to pieces” (l. 8). She exclaims: “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!” Prospero hastens to comfort her: “Tell your piteous heart / There's no harm done,” “No harm” (ll. 14-15), he repeats soothingly. He assures her that he has “so safely ordered” things that all on the ship are protected. Thus, the play's main values—compassion, resourcefulness, loyalty—are all introduced by the end of Prospero's account, and father and daughter share them.

This ideal mentorship has not come easily. Prospero's previous efforts at nurture, first of his younger brother Antonio and then of the creature Caliban, have been bitter failures. As a brother, he was not, he admits, merely negligent but also naive. His “trust, / Like a good parent,” “awoke” in Antonio “an evil nature” (ll. 93-94). The choice of metaphor is telling: Prospero feels a paternal sense of betrayal. But he did not, of course, raise Antonio, and he has taken great care with his actual child.

The chief threat to her well-being has come from the other object of Prospero's nurture, the “hag-born” (I.ii.283) monster, Caliban. Offspring of the witch Sycorax, he is a native of the island. Prospero virtually adopted the forlorn creature after the witch's death, treated him “with humane care” and “lodged” him in his “own cell” (ll. 346-47). But, he discovered to his fury, no “kindness” could alter the character of such a brute. The proof? When Miranda was only twelve, Caliban “did seek to violate [her] honor.” The creature admits gleefully to this charge, boasting that if Prospero had not intervened, he “had peopled else / This isle with Calibans” (ll. 350-51).

For Prospero, the rape of a child is an unforgivable crime. He ceases all kindness to Caliban, makes him his “slave,” and controls him with pinches, “cramps,” “side-stitches,” and threats of more such pains. The brute, unrepentant but wary of the magician's power, obeys and waits his chance for revenge. There has been a tendency lately to romanticize Caliban as a noble savage and to see the magician's habitation of the island as a metaphor for imperialism and his subjection of Caliban as tyranny over the native population. But such an interpretation ignores Caliban's malice and lack of remorse. In the play, the would-be child molester is literally a monster, his savagery softened by buffoonery but not, until he repents at the end, by sympathy. Shakespeare is on Prospero's side.

Caliban is easily cowed and Prospero despises him. Why then is the magician so disturbed at the creature's plot to overthrow him? In the midst of blessing Miranda's and Ferdinand's union, Prospero suddenly recalls Caliban's “foul conspiracy.” He is “touched with anger so distempered” (IV.i.145) that he cuts short a magical dance he had commanded in the couple's honor. He is moved to make his great speech about the transience of earthly “revels,” and then tells the lovers that he must walk “to still [his] beating mind.” Ariel appears shortly afterward and assures him that the three plotters—Caliban, the drunken butler Stephano, and the clown Trinculo—have been led in “calf-like” subjection into a “filthy mantled pool” (l. 182): a fittingly comic fall for such incompetent villains. But Prospero remains grimly disillusioned by Caliban's latest betrayal, and denounces him as

A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost!

[ll. 188-90]

Prospero never shows such rage toward his more dangerous enemies. Nor is this, like Capulet's, a tantrum but a fixed rancor. Perhaps it conceals his fear, either that the daughter whose “nurture” he has overseen so lovingly might prove likewise false or, more probably, that, should his plan fail, she could be left at the mercy of this “devil.”

The spirit Ariel, whom Prospero freed from a wicked spell, is his good stepson to Caliban's bad. In some ways, magician and servant are like two aspects—thought and action—of the same being. But Ariel is also a separate creature. Only Prospero can see and speak to him in his numinous form. Although he can delegate tasks of creating illusion and exerting control, he must constantly determine by anxious questioning if Ariel has carried them out: “Hast thou, spirit / Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?” (I.ii.193-94). “But are they, Ariel, safe?” (l. 217). Prospero lavishes affection on him, calling him “my dainty Ariel” (V.i.95) and “chick” (l. 316). He responds to Ariel's child-like question about whether he loves him with the fond affirmative “dearly” (IV.i.49). But Ariel is not of his master's element and their natures cannot mix forever.

In his “prescience,” Prospero has known all along that the foundering ship contains not only his enemies but his likely future son-in-law. They have never met. But, although Ferdinand is the son of Antonio's co-conspirator, the King of Naples, it is clear from his first appearance that he is worthy of Prospero's hopes. While the rest of the passengers and crew react to the tempest with curses and despair, the King and Prince of Naples are “at prayers” (I.i.50). After the ship splits asunder, Ariel lands Ferdinand alone, as Prospero instructs. Thinking the others drowned, the young man gives way to grief, sitting with “his arms in [a] sad knot” (I.ii.222-24) and “weeping again the King [his] father's wrack” (l. 437). Ferdinand is the good son of a bad father. That point should be qualified: the King, although a corrupt ruler, is a loving parent. As his despair over Ferdinand's supposed drowning shows, the affection between father and son is deep and mutual.

Ferdinand also proves a Romeo-like ideal lover, bold, ardent, and strikingly handsome—“a goodly person,” in Prospero's measured description to Miranda, though “something stained with grief (that's beauty's canker)” (ll. 415-16). Miranda, who has seen no other man but her father, expresses no qualms about the young man's looks: “I might call him a thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble.” Though Ferdinand has known a number of other noblewomen, he is no less hyperbolic about Miranda's beauty. He thinks her “a goddess,” and, before he discovers that she can speak his language, marvels: “O you wonder!” Prospero, watching this meeting, sees this mutual attraction as confirmation of his plan's rightness. He confides to Ariel in asides: “It goes on, I see, as my soul prompts it” (ll. 420-21). From the first, then, Prospero sees Ferdinand not as his rival but as his successor in Miranda's affections. He does not want to monopolize his daughter but to share her. As he later muses in soliloquy, he thinks of her as “his and mine loved darling” (III.iii.93).

Although his behavior may seem voyeuristic, Prospero is not observing the lovers for prurient ends. Miranda is utterly innocent and Ferdinand a still unproven entity. Prospero wants to be sure of the young man's mettle before he leaves his “loved darling” in his charge. All his magic would be mockery if the object of it were corrupt or weak. He puts Ferdinand to a number of tests, both to slow the hot pace of the courtship, “lest too light winning make the prize too light” (I.ii.452-53), and to gauge Ferdinand's worth. He accuses the prince of being a “spy” and a “traitor” (ll. 456, 461) who has come to usurp the island kingdom. When Ferdinand protests, Prospero devises cruel punishments: manacles, and a diet of sea water, mussels, and acorn husks—Prodigal Son fare. Ferdinand bravely draws his sword to defend himself but is “charmed from moving.”

Such mistreatment spurs Miranda to action. Dismayed by Ferdinand's arrest, she “hang[s] on [her father's] garments” and cries, “Sir, have pity. / I'll be his surety.” She is convinced of his goodness by his beauty: “so fair a house,” she argues, could not contain an “ill spirit” (l. 459). In this idyllic world, Ferdinand proves worthy of Miranda's intuitive trust. Although he chafes at Prospero's harshness in sentencing him to menial labor, he gallantly refuses both her urging to disobey her father's orders and her offer of working in his stead. He lavishes praise on her, calling her “perfect” and “peerless,” and begs to know her name, that he might include it in his prayers. When she reveals it, he relishes playing on its derivation: “Admired Miranda … the top of admiration” (ll. 37-38).

Ferdinand's trials are also a test of Miranda's bond with her father. To her plea for her lover's release, Prospero barks: “What, I say, my foot my tutor?” (I.ii.469-70). When she continues to protest, he warns, “One word more / Shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee” (ll. 476-77). This is the only time in the play that Prospero expresses an unkind feeling toward his daughter. Although his anger is mild compared to Capulet's toward Juliet or his own toward Caliban, it could be disturbing. But Miranda seems to sense that it is feigned, or at least transient. Secure in a lifetime of devotion, she is unperturbed by his harsh words. As Ferdinand is led off to begin his sentence, she lingers to assure him:

My father's of a better nature, sir,
Than he appears by speech. This is unwonted
Which now came from him.

[ll. 496-99]

Miranda is also undeterred by Prospero's “hests” about her behavior. He has told her not to reveal her name and not to “prattle” to Ferdinand of her love. He evidently wants her actions to be governed by “modesty” and her charms to retain an air of mystery. But Miranda ignores these directives. Juliet-like, she asks Ferdinand candidly: “Do you love me?” He responds ardently: “I / Beyond all limit of what else i' th'world / Do love, prize, honor you” (III.i.71-73). The declaration moves her to “weep” with happiness. Like Juliet, in spite or perhaps because of being a novice, she banishes “bashful cunning” and herself proposes marriage. She goes a step further and offers to “die [Ferdinand's] maid” if he refuses her and, in the meantime, to be his “servant.” Miranda is taking a great chance on rejection, humiliation, even danger. But her instincts are sound. Though more idealistic than the father who has sheltered her from the world's wiles, she has his perspicacity.

Miranda has been right to feel no fear of Prospero's wrath. Unlike Juliet, she has no soliloquies—no secrets from her father. One reason is that she is a simpler character, a sketch to Juliet's fully rounded young woman. But on the level of psychological realism, Miranda is so open because she is so secure. There is no need for guile with a father who senses her needs and puts her happiness before his own. In the idyllic world of The Tempest, the daughter's desired match is not only sanctioned but orchestrated by her father.

Prospero, who has entered “unseen,” has been watching the proposal. But he is careful not to disturb the tête-à-tête: he arranges its circumstances, but he leaves the outcome to the lovers. Not only is he unperturbed by Miranda's disobedience, he expresses the utmost pleasure in this “Fair encounter / Of two most rare affections.” He prays that the “grace” of the “heavens” will bless “that which breeds between 'em,” (ll. 74-76), an allusion not only to their love but to the offspring that he hopes it will bring, the traditional fruits of a happy union.

Prospero later conveys his paternal blessing directly. He explains to Ferdinand that the “vexations” he has been made to suffer have been “but trials of thy love.” Then he praises the suitor for having “strangely stood the test.” His “compensation” is marriage to one who, her father boasts, “will outstrip all praise / And make it halt behind” (IV.i.10-11). Unlike Capulet, he does not hesitate to praise Miranda to her face and before her suitor. A last condition remains: the young man must not “break her virgin knot” before the wedding, on penalty of incurring a marriage marred by “barren hate, / Sour-eyed disdain, and discord” (ll. 19-20). Prospero is teaching him that care of Miranda is a sacred trust. Ferdinand is a willing disciple. He promises to eschew “lust” as he “hope[s] / For quiet days, fair issue, and long life” (ll. 23-24).

It takes more than words, however, to reinforce the lesson of chastity. When the magician goes off, the lovers quickly give way to “dalliance.” Prospero returns and reproaches Ferdinand, warning him in Polonius-like terms against temptation: “the strongest oaths are straw / To the fire in the blood. Be more abstemious, / Or else good night your vow!” (ll. 51-54). He then creates a show of pagan goddesses. The avowed purpose is to entertain the betrothed couple. But the spectacle also serves as a reminder not only of Prospero's values but his powers: this is not a father-in-law whom Ferdinand would want to risk offending.

The theme of the show is stated by Iris, goddess of the rainbow: “A contract of true love to celebrate” (IV.i.84). Chastity is an important element of this concept: Venus and Cupid have been excluded, so that no “wanton claim” can entice the lovers into performing a “bed-right” before the wedding. Prospero will take no chance that Miranda be seduced and abandoned. As reward for abstinence, all the worldly blessings are promised the couple—in the words of Juno, queen of the gods: “Honor, riches, marriage blessing / Long continuance, and increasing” (ll. 106-07). As Prospero admits, he has summoned the spirits “to enact / [his] present fancies” (ll. 121-22): a fond father's fondest wishes. Ferdinand responds with awe and gratitude:

So rare a wond'red father and a wise
Makes this place a Paradise.

[ll. 123-24]

Gone is his previous resentment, his conviction that Prospero is “all harshness.” Father and fiancé have become allies.

But Prospero knows too well that the couple cannot stay in this Eden. These are earthly blessings he is conferring, and for the lovers to receive them, he must engineer their return to the larger world. The conditions of that return are the defeat of his old enemies and the rescue of Ferdinand's father, King Alonso. The news of Caliban's “foul conspiracy” (IV.i.139) recalls Prospero to his duty and his pain. “My old brain is troubled,” he confesses to the young people.

Prospero is right to be anxious. The two younger brothers, Antonio and Sebastian, are particularly corrupt: envious, cynical, murderous. When their fellow conspirator Alonso weakens, they turn against him. Deeply depressed by the supposed drowning of Ferdinand, he would be an easy prey to their assassination plot without Prospero's protection. His prayer before sinking into a heavy sleep—“Give us kind keepers, heavens!”—is heard by Ariel and granted by the man whose dukedom Alonso helped usurp.

Prospero knows the evildoers' hearts and is tempted to destroy them. In a subtle twist, he must be urged to empathy by Ariel, who imagines that his own “affections would become tender” if he were “human” (V.i.17-20). But it is Prospero's care for Miranda that chiefly restrains his fury. He chooses not the revenge that he would be justified in seeking but forgiveness and generosity. In return, he vows to ask only the villains' “penitence” (ll. 26-28). But when he confronts Antonio and Sebastian face to face, he admits that even that condition will go unfulfilled. His own brother is the worst of the lot. Grimly, Prospero says, “I do forgive thee, / Unnatural though thou art” (ll. 78-79). Antonio remains unmoved by this mercy. Except for a wisecrack about Caliban's marketability as a “plain fish,” he says nothing during this trial. Ruthless and vindictive, he and his moral twin Sebastian represent the continuing presence of evil in the world. If The Tempest were a tragedy, their malice would predominate. In the romance, they are reduced to Iago-like spectators at the idyllic celebration.

In contrast, Alonso, Prospero's future in-law and Ferdinand's father, does undergo a change of heart. He admits his old “trespass” against Prospero, and blames that sin for Ferdinand's supposed death. When Prospero suddenly reappears in his ducal robes, Alonso repents spontaneously: “Thy dukedom I resign and do entreat / Thou pardon me my wrongs” (V.i.118-19). Prospero is not soft in his compassion. He “require[s]” that Antonio formally “restore” the title that Alonso has offered, and he torments the king a while longer with Ferdinand's loss. He will not, however, let his fellow ruler give way to remorse: “be cheerful,” he counsels, “And think of each thing well” (ll. 250-51).

The main cheering element is the restoration of Ferdinand, and not Ferdinand alone but as half of a loving couple. Like his son, Alonso first mistakes Miranda for “a goddess,” and he readily assents to the match. The prince asserts that she is his “by immortal providence”—whose agent we have seen is Prospero—and describes the magician affectionately as a “second father” (V.i.195). Even Caliban shares in the general reformation. A grotesque shadow of his master, he had been devising a twisted plan for Miranda's future: to match her with the sottish Stephano, the man he would have overthrow Prospero and rule the island. When Caliban sees the butler's greed and incompetence, he repents: “I'll be wise hereafter, and seek for grace” (V.i.295-96). It is a sentiment worthy at last of Prospero's nurture.

Miranda is enchanted by the “beauty” of the noble visitors from the “brave new world.” Her father's response is wry: “'Tis new to thee” (V.i.184). Yet he is careful not to spoil the mood of celebration. He keeps silent about his inside knowledge of the evildoers, and he alludes only in a brief aside to the toll that parting from Miranda will take. For all his advice to Alonso about remaining cheerful, Prospero's own mood at the end of the “revels” he has devised is bleak. His one remaining wish is “to see the nuptial / Of these our dear-beloved solemnized” in Naples. Afterwards, he will “retire me to my Milan, where / Every third thought shall be my grave” (ll. 310-11). This line recalls his earlier description of Miranda to Ferdinand as “a third of mine own life / or that for which I live” (IV.i.3-4). Once he has carried out his vow to “abjure” his “rough magic,” to “break [his] staff” and “drown [his] book,” the old scholar will have only memories and his native “most faint” (Epilogue) strength to sustain him. But he shakes off his melancholy to perform a last benevolent act: he will use his magic to assure the travelers “calm seas” on their voyages home.

Prospero is in some ways the ultimate patriarch, protecting and guiding his child, engineering her future by means human and supernatural. But he embodies that figure in its most benevolent form. He accepts that the time has come for Miranda to pass from childhood into womanhood; in Shakespeare's day the main rite of passage was marriage. The match that he arranges for Miranda is the one that she would—and does—choose for herself, and the union brings concord between nations and reunion between brothers. Miranda, with the confidence and resilience of the loved child, expresses no qualms about setting forth for the “brave new world.” Her father approves, her husband-to-be is all she could wish, she is looking forward only to happiness. Prospero has not burdened her with his cares. His parting wishes to Ariel could as fittingly be addressed to her: “to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well!” (V.i.317-18). It is Prospero's willing sacrifice of his own well-being for the sake of his daughter's that gives the play its wistful, nostalgic tone. The “music of the island” is hauntingly sweet and sad. The Tempest is a fable of fatherly wish-fulfillment and ideal nurture.

By the time that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, his own daughters were well past the vulnerable age of his heroine. According to Blakemore Evans' dating of the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, 1611, Susanna would have been twenty-eight and Judith twenty-six at the time of its composition. The older sister had married in 1607, at the reasonable age of twenty-four; Judith was to marry the year of her father's death, 1616, at the rather advanced age for those times of thirty-one. In 1596, the year most scholars estimate that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, his elder daughter was about Juliet's age—thirteen—and he had just lost his only son. While no one would claim that Capulet is a stand-in for the playwright, it is possible that the intensity of the old man's grief has an autobiographical source.

Whether or not Shakespeare's relationship with his own daughters inspired The Tempest, the tone is one of nostalgic celebration, the main character a father devoted to a beloved child. This is not to suggest that Prospero is soft or self-effacing. He has an iron will, marked courage, and a temper every bit as fierce as Capulet's. He also has a comparable belief in his own authority. But he exercises those qualities not against but in sensitive concord with his daughter's feelings. His grief at his impending separation from Miranda is tempered by satisfaction that he has secured her happiness and by the prospect of future reunions. Capulet has no such consolations for his old age. By the final act, his oppression of Juliet has turned the wedding dance he anticipated into a dirge. In contrast, in The Tempest, under Prospero's guiding hand, the “music of the island” has come to soothe and bless all who have ears to hear it.