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The Tempest

At the Fourth act of The Tempest, Prospero spoke of the said lines after recalling of the threats about his life. As a result Prospero decided to send away the wedding masque to allow him to deal with the threats in his life. Reading the quote suggests an obvious feel of sadness in tis tone. The sadness in the tone can be related to the character’s forgetfulness within the significant part of the play. Prospero is so worn out by his visions as and drowned by the magic power he possesses that there are times he almost drift away from the norms of his life and its realities. From that point on the character repeatedly talks about the “end of his labor”.

Furthermore, Prospero constantly contemplates about destroying his staff and magic book. One of Prospero’s goals to bring his past enemies to the island appears to be extricating his from his position of reaching absolute power, which in effect makes him less concern about his real life. The character looks forward to going back to Milan where the third of his thoughts would bring him closer to his grave. In the epilogue part he mentioned that he already had given up his powers, which brings a sense of relief. Prospero’s statement in the scenes of Act IV of the play emphasizes the appreciation of the beauty of the world that he created for his won as well as the sadness of the truth that the real world is somewhat meaningless. This is because the character believes that real world is anything, but deprived of anything substantial.

The Great Globe as Prospero mentioned within the quote would certainly constitute a different meaning to the audience. It could possibly mean to the audience that the character is talking about the Globe Theatre. However, the character is actually referring to world in general. This delivery of speech define Prospero’s theatricality in such as way that the events are controlled such that of a playwright or a director. The character also mentioned about “rack”, in a literal translation, it would mean a wisp of smoke or a shipwreck where the first Act in the play began. The puns conflate Prospero’s island and the theater itself, but when he gave up his magical powers, it signified the end of the play and just like Prospero the audience too would return to their won realities. In addition, as Prospero abandon his powers there will also be no traces of the island left nor the shipwreck, for everything there is was just an illusion.