Every word is true; his daughter did indeed "preserve"
Shakespeare, and enable him to bear up under the burden of life's
betrayals.
No wonder Prospero begins to apologize for this long-winded confession,
which indeed is "most impertinent" to the play, as he admits, though
most interesting to him and to us, for he is simply Shakespeare telling
us his own feelings at the time. The gentle magician then hears from
Ariel how the shipwreck has been conducted without harming a hair of
anyone.
The whole scene is an extraordinarily faithful and detailed picture of
Shakespeare's soul. I find significance even in the fact that Ariel
wants his freedom "a full year" before the term Prospero had originally
proposed. Shakespeare finished "The Tempest," I believe, and therewith
set the seal on his life's work a full year earlier than he had
intended; he feared lest death might surprise him before he had put the
pinnacle on his work. Ariel's torment, too, is full of meaning for me;
for Ariel is Shakespeare's "shaping spirit of imagination," who was once
the slave of "a foul witch," and by her "imprisoned painfully" for "a
dozen years.
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