"The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance."

Likely one of Shakespeare's final plays and probably the last play he wrote on his own, The Tempest is Shakespeare at his height as a dramatist and a humanist. If it is his farewell, then he exits as Jacques at the end of As You Like It; with hints of melancholy, sadness, and even anger. With a conclusion that is open-ended, and not realized in reality as it was dreamt of in the mirror.

The Tempest is, foremost, about mirrors. We see re-enactments, imitations and contemplations of the same event -the usurpation of Prospero- many times throughout the course of the magical afternoon when the storm and the shipwreck happens. And as Jan Kott so aptly notes in Prospero's Staff, so much of the essence of Shakespeare's drama is holding up mirrors -concave and convex- as reflection, distortion and alteration of an event to reveal to us the secrets of our humanity. Hamlet tells the players that the essence of good acting is "To hold a mirror up to nature", but there are many different kinds of mirrors, and we see all of them in this play.