Come, thy l’envoy – begin.
LLL III. i. 71
This way to the egress.
P. T. Barnum
As Rosalind tells us, it is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue – but it is never a surprise to find Prospero in that position, and it seems fitting that he should have the last word here. For it is Prospero, Shakespeare’s last great dramatic character, who most clearly and memorably gives voice to the acceptance of death. In the tragedies we have heard other claims of acceptance – Hamlet’s quiet declaration that the readiness is all, Edgar’s caution that men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither – but at the close of The Tempest we hear that claim put forth in a new key, without regret, fear or reluctance. When Prospero solicits our applause and praise in order to fill his sails, he is enlisting our help in his passage to death – a journey over water that will take him first to Naples to see the marriage of his daughter (and thus to see himself superseded), then to Milan, ‘where / Every third thought shall be my grave’ (V. i. 311–12).
But it may be possible to localize this acceptance of death in a more dramatic moment earlier in the final scene – when Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo are brought before the company, their plot exposed. ‘Two of these fellows you / Must know and own,’ Prospero then says to the assembled onlookers, ‘this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine’ (274–6). What is ‘this thing of darkness’? Literally, of course, it is the bestial Caliban – and by extension the beast in man, the boar chained beneath the rock in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis, the Minotaur confined in his maze. But may we not extend this meaning even further, to find in ‘this thing of darkness’ not only bestial man but mortal man, man doomed to darkness because of his fallen nature? Shakespeare frequently uses darkness as a metaphor for death, as in Claudio’s brave (and temporary) pledge in Measure for Measure: ‘If I must die, / I will encounter darkness as a bride, / And hug it in mine arms’ (III. i. 82–4). To acknowledge ‘this thing of darkness’ is to look death in the face, and to see that his face is our own. In this sense the acknowledgment of Caliban is an act analogous to the other gestures by which Prospero signifies his acceptance of death: the drowning of his book and the releasing of Ariel. Through these actions he reclaims his mortality.
Nothing in Prospero’s life becomes him like the leaving of it, for in the act of leave-taking he transcends dramatic occasion. His farewell to his greatness becomes in its own way a reinterpretation of that greatness, an affirmation of the human limits as well as the godlike capabilities of man. The last words he speaks are at once a reminder of the Golden Rule and a version of the last rites of the Church, a request for absolution – but with one characteristically Shakespearean addition: the rites Prospero proposes are reciprocal, absolving speaker and audience in the same act. ‘As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free’ (Epil. 19–20). Prospero the character is poised on the threshold between life and death, the actor who plays him is poised between fiction and reality – and the audience participates crucially in both moments of transition.
It is entirely appropriate that this moment of frame-breaking should occur in the epilogue, which in The Tempest, as in many of Shakespeare’s plays, is the most liminal element in the dramatic structure. In essence, the epilogue confirms the role of the play itself in educating and altering its audience, by acting simultaneously as a rite of separation and a rite of incorporation. The speaker addresses his hearers in a way at once intimate and direct; his remarks are part of a threshold ceremony of divestiture, revealing himself as an actor, the events of the play as a fiction, or both. ‘If I were a woman,’ says Rosalind – and the Elizabethan audience knows that she is not. ‘You have but slumber’d here, / While these visions did appear,’ says Puck – and the audience perceives that he is ringing one more change on the metaphor of dream and reality. Feste sings his melancholy song about mortality – ‘the rain it raineth every day’ – and then abruptly alters the refrain to remind us that he is really a player, his song an artifice like the play that contains it. Pandarus addresses himself to his ‘Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade’ – that is, to other panders – but the door he holds open is also the threshold between the world of the play and the other world beyond it.
Jaques observed that men and women are merely players, but Shakespeare continually reminds us of the converse: that players are merely men and women. His characters live for us above all in their humanity and their consciousness of the nature and finitude of the common human condition. That is why it is not only possible but instructive to speak of maturation patterns in the plays, of characters coming of age and undergoing rites of passage. That is also why Shakespeare’s plays have been translated into so many languages, and are read with such pleasure and understanding by people of widely divergent societies and cultures around the globe.