In this play, as in the two other original romantic plays, Shakespeare follows the workings of a treacherous act from its performance to the repentance of the sinner and the granting of the victim's forgiveness. In the great plays the victim dies and the sinner does not repent. Presently the wheel comes full circle, and a justice from outside life smites him dead. In these plays the betrayed live to forgive the traitors-- "Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further." In this play, as in the other two and in _Pericles_, much is made of the chances and accidents of life, and of the sudden changes of worldly circumstance due to them. In this play, for the first and last time, Shakespeare treats of the power of the resolved imagination to command the brutish, the base, the noble and the spiritual for wise human ends. It is easy to interpret the play as allegory. Youth in this country has reason to regard allegory as a clumsy man's way of introducing Sunday on a weekday. It is so seldom successful that it may be called the literary method of creative minds below the first rank. Shakespeare's method was never allegorical. The _Tempest_ is perhaps no more allegorical than any other good romance. But the thought of it is so clear that the first impression given is that it is thin. It is the study of a man of intellect, who has been forced from power by a treacherous brother. Living alone with his bright, unspoiled daughter, he attains, by intellectual labour, to a power over destiny. Like the wise man of the proverb, he learns to master his stars. He uses this power nobly to put an end to ancient hatred and old injustice. The minor vision of the play is a study, often very amusing, but deeply earnest, of the coming of the fifth part civilised to the mostly brutal. In Shakespeare's time, men like the quite thoughtless and callous Stephano and Trinculo, the "sea-dogs" who manned our ships, and of whom Raleigh wrote that it was an offence to God to minister oaths to the generality of them, were "spreading civilisation" in various parts of the world. Shakespeare, looking at them gravely, saw them to be, perhaps, more dangerous to the needs of life, to wisdom, and to unlit animal strength than the base Sebastian and the treacherous Antonio. The exquisite lyrics, and the masque of the goddesses, show that the taste of the audience of 1610-11 needed to be tickled. Times had changed since the lion-like and ramping days, eighteen years before, when "Jeronimy" was a new word, and Tamora a serious invention. The man who had changed the times was thinking, like Prospero, that he had "got his dukedom," and that now, having "pardoned the deceiver," he might go to Stratford to enjoy it. _King Henry VIII_, or _All is True_.