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COMPOSED AROUND THE beginning of 1611, The Tempest was probably Shakespeare's last noncollaborative play, and as such it has long been regarded as his artistic valediction: the ripest statement of his vision into the "wide and universal theater" of human affairs. In recent decades, however, the focus of much literary criticism has shifted away from interpretations of the "human condition" (an idea regarded with suspicion in some circles) to a close study of the historical, political, and cultural forces that inform literary works. As a result, The Tempest has been subjected to a variety of sociopolitical readings-New Historicist, postcolonial, feminist, and so forth-all bent on tracking and "interrogating" the ideological agendas at work beneath the play's surface. But there is much to be said for the older perspective, for there are many aspects in The Tempest that do suggest a final synthesis and completion of a fife's work. It is Shakespeare's most classically ordered play: the one that most closely adheres to the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action. It is also his most mysterious play: the entire story removed to a fantastic uncharted island somewhere (or nowhere) in the Mediterranean. And it is arguably his most philosophical play: a profound and compassionate view into the human problems of conflict and discord from a place of wisdom where they are wonderfully dissolved into harmony.
Order, harmony,.. .music. Music, of course, plays a central role in Shakespeare's work, not merely as a feature of theatrical performance, but more significantly as a metaphor, even a metaphysical principle. The age of Shakespeare had inherited the ancient doctrine of the Music of the Spheres, which held that the universe resounds with celestial melodies produced by the motions of the stars and planets. In The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tamas describes how this esoteric idea, attributed to the school of Pythagoras, became a cornerstone of Western cosmology:
The Pythagorean discovery that the harmonics of music were mathematical, that harmonious tones were produced by strings whose measurements were determined by simple mathematical ratios, was regarded as a religious revelation. Those mathematical harmonies maintained a timeless existence as spiritual exemplars, from which all audible musical tones derived. The Pythagoreans believed that the universe in its entirety, especially the heavens,...