Cotton Wool Book

Simple yet profound, The Tempest is a heartbreakingly sincere piece of elaborate theatrical artifice. Shakespeare is a magician at the height of his powers, so accomplished at his craft that he can reveal the mechanisms of his most marvelous tricks and still astonish us.

This time through, I was struck by how closely references to language, freedom, power and transformation are bound up together, and how they all seem to point to some metaphysical resolution, even if they don't finally achieve it. But perhaps--by the power of Prospero's staff-- they do?