Epilogue — spoken by Prospero

The stage has emptied. Ferdinand and Miranda have gone to compose themselves. Alonso and the courtiers have gone to Prospero's cell for the night's storytelling. Caliban is fetching firewood for the last time. Ariel is gone — vanished into the elements, free. What remains is Prospero alone, downstage, in front of the audience. He is no longer wearing the magic robe. The verse he has been speaking in for five acts — long, supple blank verse — has been replaced by the shorter, rhymed couplets of an epilogue.

He addresses the house directly. His charms, he says, are all overthrown. What strength he has now is his own. The island is behind him; he is to be sent to Naples in the morning; but right now, at this moment in the theater, he is technically still confined here — a player who has finished his part and cannot leave the stage until the audience consents. "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 pardoned be, / let your indulgence set me free."

It is the strangest moment in the play. The man who has spent every preceding scene binding and releasing others — Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand, the entire court of Naples — now stands as a supplicant in front of the audience and asks to be released. The breath of their applause is the wind that will carry his ship home. The autobiographical reading — Shakespeare, fifty years old, on the brink of leaving London for Stratford and retirement, his last solo play just ending — has shaped centuries of how the moment is staged and heard. Whether or not Shakespeare intended it, the gesture is one of the great gestures of renunciation in Western drama: an artist, having exhausted his powers, acknowledges that he is now in his audience's hands. The applause comes. The play ends.