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The Tempest is one of Shakespeare's very latest plays. Internal evidence, afforded partly by the versification and partly by the obvious relation of the play to certain accounts of a famous shipwreck which occurred in the year 1609, enables scholars to attribute the play, with a fair degree of accuracy, to 1610–1611. Certain critics, notably Lowell and Brooke, think that it must be read as the dramatist's allegorical farewell to the stage (see, in particular, Prospero's adieu to magic, V. i. 33 ff., and the Epilogue); but, owing chiefly to the over-subtle application of the allegory to the details of the drama, this theory has of late been somewhat discredited.

Ben Jonson almost certainly refers to The Tempest in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair (acted 1614), where the Scrivener, speaking on behalf of the author, is made to say, 'If there be never a servant-monster in the Fair, who can help it? He is loth to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and suchlike drolleries.' This would seem to indicate that Shakespeare's comedies, A Winter's Tale and The Tempest, had achieved immediate favor with theatregoers, and that Caliban was a particularly popular character with them.

We know that The Tempest was acted at court in 1611 and in 1613. Its appropriateness to court-production may have been due in part to its preeminently scenic character. The comedy was no doubt popularly known as a splendid spectacle. Even a casual reader will note the elaborateness of the stage directions, the introduction of the masque, and the novelty of such scenes as the shipwreck, the