'Our Revels now are Ended' - from 'The Tempest

I am going to duck out on an introduction for these most famous words and leave it to Aubrey Lewis via Anthony Clare. I will put my own sixpennorth in at the end though for what it is worth.

Professor Clare appeared on Radio Four's 'With Great Pleasure' in 1985. Some of you will remember his long running series 'In The Psychiatrist's Chair'?

Here are his concluding remarks to his own collection that also included Eliot's 'Journey of the Magi', 'The Second Coming' by Yeats, John Clare's 'Written in Northampton County Asylum'.


"I intended to end my selection with Emily Dickinson, a poet who more than once concerned herself with medicine and madness. It was she who wrote:

Faith is a fine convention
For gentlemen who see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.

As fine a comment on the limits of belief and usefulness of science as I know.
But my last choice is Shakespeare. Having once seen Gielgud as Prospero, it can only be that great speech in which the mystery and abyss of existence is stared in the eye. Before it, and excerpt from a great psychiatrist, the late Sir Aubrey Lewis, one time director of the Maudsley Hospital, where I trained and spent many happy years. Here is Lewis speculating on the character of Shakespeare".


The Psychology of Shakespeare by Aubrey Lewis

It may be that in his early manhood, when witty talkers, young lovers and fiery adventurers predominated in his plays, Shakespeare himself was ardent and bold; later when deep and moral problems, the crudities and sufferings that sexuality entails, the humiliations imposed by the imperious body and its desires, the meaning of death, frustration and disillusionment - when these were the central themes of his plays, and the chief characters in them were powerful fathers and rulers who suffered defeat, we may, hesitantly, surmise that Shakespeare had himself an anguished maturity, to be succeeded at last by the relative serenity and renunciation which are expressed in 'The Tempest', his final play. There he had come to the time when he must break his magic staff and drown his book deeper than ever did plummet sound; he asked for solemn music, and he spoke his farewell nobly:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a wrack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.




So, what would I have the temerity to change about the selection made by my most eminent colleagues?

Well I would go for the epilogue itself spoke by Prospero, or, as more than one commentator has suggested, Shakespeare himself, standing aside from his creation and  speaking his own, last words in a direct personal appeal to his audience, through whose agency alone, his words can free - and be freed.


Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

I see that Simon Russell Beale is Prospero at the new production of the play in Stratford at the moment.