Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Thomas McFarland

Critical Essay by Thomas McFarland

SOURCE: McFarland, Thomas. “So Rare a Wondered Father: The Tempest and the Vision of Paradise.” In Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy, pp. 146-75. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

In the following essay, McFarland views The Tempest as an affirmation of pastoral values that combines Christian and pastoral perspectives. The critic maintains that Prospero is a godlike figure who presides over a golden world, a place of social harmony where evil is defeated.

Standing first in Heminge and Condell's arrangement of the plays, and last chronologically among Shakespeare's major achievements, The Tempest in still other ways constitutes the alpha and omega of Shakespeare's comedy. For here the two great realities of Shakespeare's comic vision—the movement toward social concord on the one hand, and on the other the recognition of disharmony and disruption (identifiable as early as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and grown almost cancerously into the bitterness of the...
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