The premise of the story is that Shakespeare actually wrote The Tempest (his last play) as the concluding part of a bargain made with Morpheus (the story takes place before his death at the hands of the Kindly Ones) in order that Shakespeare's works will live on after his passing. He is portrayed as a lonely, unhappy man, wracked by guilt and doubt, and afraid that he will be damned by the pact. He meets the Sandman in a dream (obviously) as he completes the play, they converse awkwardly and uncomfortably, leaving much unsaid and unsettled, and the story drifts to a barely-perceptible end that's more becalmed than tempestuous.

The first impression is one of anti-climax. The quiet death (and subsequent rebirth, after a fashion) of the Sandman has trickled out over nearly nine months (for what might be cynically imagined to be commercial reasons, ie in order to squeeze one last trade paperback collection out of it), and in some ways The Tempest seems like just one issue too far. I suspect that a great deal will depend on how you feel about Shakespeare - personally, I was never moved by his over-mannered, under-subtle style (quite the opposite, in fact, of most of Sandman), and hence find it hard to care enough to plough through the handscript typeface that makes up much of the story here. Shakespeare himself comes across as an unlikeable weed, and the extracts from his plays are by far the least engaging parts of the narrative.

If, on the other hand, you're one of the many people who consider old Will the finest playwright who ever lived, then this deft and delicate study of his life and work will probably enchant you utterly. Gaiman's thoughtful, forceless style is in its element here, and even a devoted fan will find a fresh perspective on the writer's character.

In the end, it's this that saves The Tempest, and enables it to serve as an acceptable epitaph (for both Shakespeare and Morpheus). Gaiman constructs a fine web of detail which draws the reader in and makes the actual subject all but irrelevant, subservient to the story and the grander design. By the end it's not really about Shakespeare at all but, as with the previous 74 issues, about humankind in general and humanity itself. It's all but impossible to be disappointed with it, because it's all but impossible to see it out of context. Which is to say, if you're a Sandman novice, don't read this and hope to find out what all the fuss was about. But to have ended neatly, loose ends all tied and all morals delivered, with THE END in capitals at the bottom of the page, would have betrayed what made the comic so good in the first place.

That said, personally I think the last episode of World's End would have made a better headstone to the story of the Sandman. But then maybe that would have been a little too obvious. And since it was by eschewing the obvious and constantly giving us what we didn't expect that Gaiman created what's surely been the comic of the decade, I'm buggered if I'm going to start telling him how to do his job now.