Denamarie Ercolani

"...the characters in The Tempest are invited to a meeting to be held after the play in which the puzzling features of their experiences will be explained to them. This seems a curious and unnecessary convention, but it is true to the situation of drama, where the audience always knows more about what is going on than the characters do..." (303).

At the beginning of the play each character is lost in a private drama of his own but gradually throughout the story all the characters identify themselves within the same drama, a drama that the audience sees before they do.
Frye notices that the characters are acquiring self knowledge and seem to be taking their places in a moral hierarchy. We see this before they even realize it due to Shakespeare's comedy. In a Shakespearean comedy the play is opaque: it surrounds us and wraps us up, with nothing to do but to see and hear what is passing.