Watched the ending of Shakespeare's The Tempest twice today, switching between two productions on DVD I've been showing to a class to whom I've been teaching the play. What a strange play it is. We know perfectly well how it will end from the beginning: Prospero will reveal himself to all and be acknowledged as the true Duke of Milan, and will marry his daughter off to the king's son in the process, and all will be well. Except it won't, will it?
Nothing has really changed at the end. Perfidy is acknowledged, but hardly punished. Indeed, it's kind of accepted as being an inherent aspect of what it is to be human. Art changes nothing, but eases our passage through the storms that necessarily assail us. There's nothing remotely uplifting about the end of the comedy. Yet it offers a melancholy satisfaction in its absolute honesty.
By the way, the two Prosperos I've been watching, Roger Allam in one of those productions at the Globe and Simon Russell Beale from an RSC production at Stratford, could hardly have been more different in their approaches - Allam being wonderfully crowd-pleasing and Beale disturbingly intense. And I loved both.
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