Reconciliation After "the Tempest"

"the Tempest","Cymbeline"and"The Winter′s Tale"is often called Shakespeare′Romantic Dramas as his "Swan Song" of his drama career. Three drama has a similar structure pattern, and constitutes a whole Organism of play.In the field of structure of these three dramas, the relation of the characters has an evolutionary process that from entire to breaking up and then to entire, and the circumstances of dramas has a process which from imperial court to the nature and back to imperial court again. With the development of story line, the tragic atmosphere grows, and Shakespeare take"time"as a character to be the point of transition from Tragedy to Comedy.Attention in this chapter will be concentrated on two things which the three plays have in common: first, the familiar pattern of romantic drama, with its conflict between lovers and elders and a resolution that involves the renewal of society; and second, the presence in each of a very different kind context, which invites the viewer or reader to see the central action as participating by analogy in a much larger movement of international, or more properly intercultural, significance.Northrop Frye, equating that event with a return of the"green world"or golden age which he finds to be a concomitant of much of Shakespearean comedy, suggest that here Shakespeare has allowed that world to triumph over the iron one represented by the historical conflict between the two nations, thus providing"the halcyon peace with which the play concludes."The circumstance and the personage arrangement are to be tied together that serving in drama structure entirety. The personages of the romantic drama are not actualize ones, but emblematic, abstract ones. According to their function in drama structure, they could be divided for four following types:Sometimes the tyrant father is the conflict maker in dramas, has a type of peculiar qualities. This kind of characters should not compose as actualize personages, their effect is the driving force that fabrication circumstance develops, but not keeping a character in consistent;Female characters, their camouflaging means change which caused opportunity of comedy plays in order to achieve the comedy found at last time. And, from adversity to prosperity of the heroine′fate, reveals a deeper level of myth and metaphors of season;The villain is always accompanied with some irony: sometimes ridiculed by the opposition figures who appeared together or he is such a figure himself. It adjusts the drama atmosphere but doesn′t enrich the circumstance .When the villain is the irony character, this treatment way is a kind of irony that has composed to unreal ideal or the hypocritical naive life attitude;A master′plan in the romantic drama is often made by a loyal, resourceful servant. He helps his masters escape from the chaos at critical moments, and help him to restore identity of the owner, become world domination at the right moment. The servant is at a subordinate status of the structure in the theater.Until the beginning of this century much of the criticism of The Tempest focused on the character of Prospero, a surrogate for Shakespeare, it was alleged, who at the end of the play abandoned book and pen and made his farewell to the world. Still another is what might be called the ontologyof the play: the role of magic in it, the supernatural beings, and the physical natureof the island itself.In the play The Tempest, as in the two preceding ones, Shakespeare took comedy not out of the world (as the term"romance"sometimes implies) but into it, with a vigor and an imagination daring unequaled by any other playwright of his time or since.The glory of these three plays is that they present the dream of comedy and through that dream a series of dreams of harmony discoverable in specific situations in the world that Shakespeare knew, which is also the world we know. That glory can be ours to enjoy, provided we are willing to share Shakespeare's dreams. Otherwise these plays, the apotheosis of his comic art, like any other masterworks we may presume to trivialize with reductive categories, may become our judges.