“Our revels now are ended” (The Tempest) The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most enchanting and enchanted plays: a fantasy or ‘romance’ featuring a magician, the ‘monstrous’ offspring of a wicked witch, fairies, a lavish masque, drunken conspirators, young lovers, and much else. It is one of Shakespeare’s late plays that he wrote alone. In the play, one of the main characters Prospero utters this soliloquy after the masque scene. Critics regard this soliloquy along with the epilogue by Prospero as Shakespeare’s “retirement speech”. This particular speech taps on the theme of the temporality of life and the inevitability of death. Shakespeare beautifully describes life as a cycle, beginning and ending with sleep. What we see amidst, is nothing but an illusion, a dream!
After abruptly stopping the masque, Prospero utters the speech “Our revels now are ended” to his daughter Miranda and her lover Ferdinand. The “revels” of the spirits are ended. Here, “revels” is a metaphor for the lively enjoyment of one’s life. It comes to an end in old age. The speaker Prospero is old. Thus he is under the impression that all his enactments are going to end soon.In the fourth line, the speaker compares the spectacle concerning the spirits vanishing into the thin air to the “baseless fabric of vision”. The phrase “baseless fabric” means a thing without any foundation or base. An elusive or magical scene does not have a foundation. It is just a “baseless fabric” that the audience fails to notice and sees as a real phenomenon. Here, the speaker is talking about the masque as just an illusion of reality. Alongside that, through this line, Shakespeare refers to the acts of one’s life as a mere illusion that lasts as long as he is alive.
The next two lines contain anaphora as they begin with the same word. Using this device, Shakespeare connects this line into the same thread. Here, he uses metonymy to refer to the rulers, aristocrats or rich men, and religious preaches by “cloud-capp’d towers”, “gorgeous palaces”, and “solemn temples”. The speaker says that all those stately buildings or those who reside there die are perishable, including the “great globe” or earth. The “great globe” is a metonym for human beings. The variety used here is “container for the thing contained”. In the next line, the speaker says that all which a human being inherits shall dissolve. This line taps on the theme of death and the futility of life. The things one inherits, by birth or by skill, are temporary. Nothing remains. Through this line, Prospero hints at what he is going to do in the last act of the play.
In these lines of the “Our revels now are ended” speech, the speaker talks about the “insubstantial pageant”. Like this magical pageant, life does not even leave a “rack” or mark behind. Here, “rack” is a reference to “wrack” or shipwreck. Shakespeare uses this pun to remind the audience that the shipwreck in the play is nothing but an illusion. The island and the shipwreck are a magical recreation of reality. In the following line, Prospero refers to life as “stuff” similarly made with the elements that constitute dreams. It means that life is nothing but waking dreams humans see after they wake up from their sleep before birth. Thereafter, he refers to the cycle of life and death. According to him, life begins and ends with sleep. Before birth, an infant sleeps in its mother’s womb. While an everlasting sleep ends this dream of life.
Interestingly, Shakespeare topples the basic definition of dreams that are seen during sleep. According to him, what human beings see during their lifetime is a dream. In this way, he hints at the insubstantial nature of the events in a person’s life. Both happiness and grief are temporary. What is absolute is life and death, (also the speed of the light in space!).
