Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Traditions
- 2 Deserts and Forests in the Ocean
- 3 Almost Beyond the World
- 4 Realms in Abeyance
- 5 Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
- 6 A Thousand Furlongs of Sea
- Epilogue: The Tempest's Many Beginnings
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue: The Tempest's Many Beginnings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Traditions
- 2 Deserts and Forests in the Ocean
- 3 Almost Beyond the World
- 4 Realms in Abeyance
- 5 Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
- 6 A Thousand Furlongs of Sea
- Epilogue: The Tempest's Many Beginnings
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
After all is said and done, and the Milan-bound party has left the stage, Prospero turns to the audience in one of Shakespeare's rare and perhaps last epilogues. Speaking of himself as ‘confined’ in ‘this bare island’, he asks the audience for release ‘from [his] bands’
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair;
Unless I be relieved by prayer
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
But Prospero is free. At least according to William Falconer's late eighteenth-century syllogism:
The inhabitants of islands … have a higher relish for liberty than those of the continents; and therefore are in general free. Thus the inhabitants of Great Britain were a free people, according to the first accounts we have of them.
Falconer's passage is sometimes cited by historians as a quintessentially Insular product, but the similarity in wording with Thomas Nugent's 1750 translation of Montesquieu's L'esprit des lois (1748) betrays the sentiment to be an older and Continental one.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Sea and Medieval English Literature , pp. 161 - 166Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007