The play is a magical “how to” manual for playwrights.  Prospero teaches us how to write a Comedy, a Tragedy, a History, a Romance all in one play.  He shows us exactly what elements the playwright needs: for example, here’s what young lovers say and do at the beginning of love, how old men feel and act at the end of life, why vengeful plots repeat and repeat, when happy endings are possible and at what cost.  But Prospero, like all playwrights, is a guilty creature.  He creates illusions.  Masques.  He grants us the ability to experience without the actual experience. To cross boundaries without risk.  To observe from a distance.  To act in safety and seclusion.  To speak secrets and seek revenge.  Yet his work is all tissue paper.  Art.  Artifice.  Words.  And, like all playwrights, he knows it.  For when theatre is gone, it’s gone, along with “the great globe itself.” Yet the illusion is necessary for life, especially for youth (since young people think the world is real, permanent).  Caliban the monster (monere = to warn) knows its fleeting nature too: “. . . when I wak’d,/I cried to dream again.”  He warns us of Prospero’s “rough magic.”  Yet the young sometimes rescue the old.  The old sometimes forgive.  And we sometimes release the actors from the stage — the drama from its spell — through our applause.  Earlier, Prospero reprimanded Ferdinand during the performance and said “Hush and be mute,/Or else our spell is marr’d.”  But once the “revels now are ended” and the “charms are all o’erthrown,” it is Prospero who asks for our spell-breaking applause, then reconsiders, and instead, asks for a benediction. Do not clap.  Do not break the spell.  But pray.  Pray for a character who desperately wants to live forever, created by a playwright who knows he will not.