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Thomas McFarland argues that The Tempest ''constitutes the alpha and omega of Shakespeare's comedy,'' by the way it brings together ''the two great realities of Shakespeare's comic vision--the movement towards social concord on the one hand and on the other the recognition of disharmony and disruption.'' While McFarland concludes that ''The Tempest serenely reasserts the enchantment of brotherhood and social harmony,'' other critics do not agree. William J. Martz emphasizes that the conflict of these forces occurs within Prospero himself as an internal, character struggle. The purpose of his struggle, according to Martz, is to overcome his own eroticized love for his daughter in the external world through reconciliation with his enemies. The plot of The Tempest, Martz argues, springs from Prospero's need to create the context in which he may surrender his desire as he gives his daughter as a gift in marriage to the son of the king of Naples, the former enemy with whom he has become reconciled.

Rather than focusing on theme or character, Derek Traversi sees Shakespeare as less concerned than he had been in plays like The Winter's Tale, which just precedes The Tempest, ''with the evolution of experience towards . . . its symbolic representation,'' which is achieved through character and plot development. In The Tempest, he asserts, ''the various characters and situations exist from the first entirely in terms of a definite 'symbolic' function.'' Robert H. West believes that what is being symbolized in The Tempest is ''the poignance of man's insubstantial pageant . . . . of human happiness against the shadow of mortality.'' In the ''great tragedies,''Westwrites, Shakespeare explores the mystery of ''iniquity;'' while in The Tempest, Shakespeare examines ''themystery of felicity.''

Early critics of The Tempest were as enthusiastic about the play as these middle and later twentieth-century critics. Rather, however, than emphasizing the psychological, philosophical, symbolic, or moral aspects of the play, they were excited by how it ''show[ed],'' as John Dryden wrote, in 1679, ''the copiousness of [Shakespeare's] invention.'' Thirty years later, in 1709, Nicholas Rowe wrote that Shakespeare's ''greatness . . . do's no where so much appear, as where he gives his Imagination an entire Loose, and raises his Fancy to a flight above Mankind and the limits of the visible World.'' As a representative of this kind of imaginative invention, Rowe calls The Tempest ''perfect.'' Nearly fifty years later, Joseph Warton, in 1753, wrote, ''Of all the plays of Shakespeare, The Tempest is the most striking instance of his creative power. He has there given the reins to his boundless imagination, and has carried the romantic, the wonderful, and the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance.'' In a lecture given in 1811 or 1812, Samuel Taylor Coleridge still finds it essential to focus on the fact that in The Tempest, ''Shakespeare has especially appealed to the imagination.'' In a written ''Analysis of Act I,'' Coleridge asserts that ''the power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instil that energy into the mind, which compels the imagination to produce the picture.'' Coleridge then cites Prospero's phrase ''hurried thence / Me, and thy crying self,'' and argues that ''by introducing a single happy epithet, 'crying,' . . . a complete picture is presented to the mind, and in the production of such pictures the power of genius consists.'' Astonishment at the imaginative, dramatic and intellectual heights Shakespeare achieved in The Tempest continued throughout the nineteenth century. Nearly a hundred years after Coleridge, writing in 1909, the great novelist Henry James wrote that ''the value of The Tempest is, exquisitely, in its refinement of power, its renewed artistic freshness . . . Prospero has simply waited, to cast his magic ring into the sea, till the jewel set in it shall have begun to burn as never before.''

Amajor thrust of nineteenth-century criticism of The Tempest was allegorical criticism, wherein the critics see the text as a symbolic representation of something else, and the characters represent ideas or characteristics. Edward R. Russell, for example, argued that Prospero stood for God. Critics like W. A. Schlegel in Germany, Victor Hugo in France, Russell and John Ruskin in England, are but some of the most noteworthy to understand The Tempest as an attempt to represent universals--political or metaphysical or psychological or spiritual truths--symbolically, and who saw the play's characters as representing abstract concepts like beauty, goodness, evil, et cetera.

Starting in the 1930s, scholars like J. Middleton Murry, E. M. W. Tillyard, G. Wilson Knight, Reuben Brower, and Frank Kermode, while not repudiating the past writings on The Tempest, began to treat the play more carefully with regard to its structure, imagery, characters, unity, and historical context than had been the habit of earlier critics.

In the 1980s, as critics grew interested in the connection between literature and historical or social phenomena, the way The Tempest appeared to treat European imperialism and colonial people became a significant topic in critical writing about the play. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, for example, put forth the argument in 1985, in ''The Tempest and Oppression,'' that the real plot of the play is Prospero's anxiety about his legitimacy as ruler of the island, and that the plot towards reconciliation which he generates and which seems to be the main action of the play is really a sub-plot.

References:

Barker, Francis, and Peter Hulme, ''The Tempest and Oppression,'' Shakespeare: The Tempest: A Casebook, edited by D. J. Palmer, Macmillan, 1968, p. 208.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ''An Analysis of Act I,'' in Shakespeare: The Tempest: A Casebook, edited by D. J. Palmer, Macmillan, 1968, p. 47.

Dryden, John, ''The Character of Caliban,'' in Shakespeare: The Tempest: A Casebook, edited by D. J. Palmer, Macmillan, 1968, p. 30.

James, Henry, ''Introduction to The Tempest,'' in Shakespeare: The Tempest: A Casebook, edited by D. J. Palmer, Macmillan, 1968, p. 76.

Martz, William J., The Place of ''The Tempest'' in Shakespeare's Universe of Comedy, Coronado Press, 1978, pp. 22-7.

McFarland, Thomas, '''So Rare a Wondered Father': The Tempest and the Vision of Paradise,'' in Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy, University of North Carolina Press, 1972, p. 146.

Nuttal, A. D., ''The Tempest and Its Romantic Critics'' and ''The Tempest,'' in Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare's The Tempest and the Logic of Allegorical Expression, Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1967, pp. 6-12.

Rowe, Nicholas, ''Solemn and Poetical Magic,'' in Shakespeare: The Tempest: A Casebook, edited by D. J. Palmer, Macmillan, 1968, p. 31 .

Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, edited by Robert Langbaum, Signet Classics, 1964.

Traversi, Derek, ''The Tempest,'' in Shakespeare: The Last Phase, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1953, p. 193.

Warton, Richard, ''Amazing Wildness of Fancy,'' in Shakespeare: The Tempest: A Casebook, edited by D. J. Palmer, Macmillan, 1968, p. 32-6.

West, Robert H., ''Ariel and the Outer Mystery,'' in Shakespeare: 1564-1964, Brown University Press, 1964, p. 115.

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