ero:

"These our actors,
As I foretold you, are all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve
And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a wrack behind. _We are such stuff
As dreams are made on_, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

In the face of that vast philosophy, it seems an irrelevance to reason,
as some do, that in the earlier scene in which Gonzalo expounds his
Utopia of incivilisation, Shakspere so arranges the dialogue as to
express his own ridicule of the conception. The interlocutors, it will
be remembered, are Sebastian and Antonio, two of the villains of the
piece, and Alonso, the wrecked usurper. The kind Gonzalo talks of the
ideal community to distract Alonso's troubled thoughts; Sebastian and
Antonio jeer at him; and Alonso finally cries, "Pr'ythee, no more, thou
dost talk nothing to me." Herr Gervinus is quite sure that this was
meant to state Shakspere's prophetic derision for all communisms and
socialisms and peace congresses, Shakspere being the fore-ordained
oracle of the political gospel of his German commentators, on the
principle of "Gott mit uns." And it may well have been that Shakspere,
looking on the society of his age, had no faith in any Utopia, and that
he humorously put what he felt to be a valid criticism of Montaigne's in
the mouth of a surly rascal--he has done as much elsewhere. But he was
surely the last man to have missed seeing that Montaigne's Utopia was no
more Montaigne's personal political counsel to his age than AS YOU LIKE
IT was his own; and, as regards the main purpose of Montaigne's essay,
which was to show that civilisation was no unmixed gain as contrasted
with some forms of barbarism, the author of CYMBELINE was hardly the man
to repugn it, even if he amused himself by putting forward Caliban[196]
as the real "cannibal," in contrast to Montaigne's. He had given his
impression of certain aspects of civilisation in HAMLET, Measure for
Measure, and KING LEAR. As his closing plays show, however, he had
reached the knowledge that for the general as for the private wrong, the
sane man must cease to cherish indignation. That teaching, which he
could not didactically impose, for such a world as his, on the old
tragedy of revenge