The Tempest

The Tempest is probably the last play William Shakespeare wrote on his own, and it has long been read as his farewell to the stage. On a remote island, Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, overthrown twelve years earlier by his brother and set adrift with his baby daughter Miranda, has become a powerful magician. When fortune brings his enemies’ ship near the island, he raises a storm, wrecks them on his shore unharmed, and with the help of the airy spirit Ariel leads them through a series of enchantments — terror, temptation, remorse — while his daughter falls in love with the son of the King of Naples, and his enslaved servant Caliban, the island’s original inhabitant, plots rebellion with two drunken sailors. At the climax, with all his enemies in his power, Prospero chooses forgiveness, frees Ariel, renounces his magic and prepares to return home.

It is a play of magic and music, dream and illusion, set on an island of strange noises; a romance with a happy ending; and, in our time, one of the central texts for thinking about colonialism, power and freedom.

At a glance

The story

A ship is caught in a terrible storm. On board are Alonso, King of Naples; his son Ferdinand; his brother Sebastian; Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan; the honest old counsellor Gonzalo; and others, returning from the wedding of Alonso’s daughter to the King of Tunis. The boatswain, struggling to save the ship, tells the nobles to keep out of the way: “What cares these roarers for the name of king?” The ship seems to split.

On the island, Miranda, fifteen, has watched the wreck from the shore with horror and begs her father to calm the storm. Prospero assures her that no one has been harmed, and tells her, for the first time, the story of their past. Twelve years ago he was Duke of Milan, but, “rapt in secret studies”, he left the government to his brother Antonio, who, with the help of Alonso, King of Naples, his enemy, seized the dukedom and set Prospero and the three-year-old Miranda adrift in a rotten boat. Good Gonzalo secretly provided food, clothes and Prospero’s beloved books — “volumes that I prize above my dukedom”. They came ashore on this island. Now “bountiful Fortune” has brought his enemies near, and he must act. He charms Miranda to sleep.

Ariel, his spirit servant, reports that he flamed amazement through the ship, made everyone leap overboard, and brought them all safe ashore in scattered groups, the ship hidden in harbour with the sailors asleep. Ariel asks for his promised freedom. Prospero angrily reminds him that he rescued him from the witch Sycorax, who had imprisoned him in a cloven pine for twelve years for refusing her “earthy and abhorred commands”; Sycorax, banished from Algiers, had come to the island pregnant and died there. Prospero promises to free Ariel in two days.

Prospero summons Caliban, Sycorax’s son, “a freckled whelp, hag-born”, whom Prospero has enslaved. Caliban curses him and claims the island:

This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first, Thou strok’st me and made much of me… and then I loved thee And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile. Cursed be I that did so!… For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’ th’ island.

Prospero replies that he treated Caliban kindly, lodging him in his own cell, until Caliban tried to rape Miranda. “O ho, O ho! Would’t had been done! / Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans.” Miranda reminds him that she taught him language; he answers: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!”

Ariel, invisible, leads Ferdinand, who believes his father drowned, to Miranda with a song: “Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes: / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” Ferdinand and Miranda — who has never seen a man other than her father and Caliban — fall in love at first sight. Prospero, pleased but wanting to test the young man, accuses him of being a spy, freezes his sword with a charm, and sets him to carrying logs.

Elsewhere, the King and his courtiers wander the island. Gonzalo tries to cheer Alonso, who mourns his son, and imagines how he would rule the island: a commonwealth without commerce, magistrates, letters, riches, poverty, property or work — “all men idle, all” — a passage taken almost word for word from Montaigne’s essay on the “cannibals” of Brazil. Antonio and Sebastian mock him. Ariel puts the others to sleep, and Antonio tempts Sebastian to murder his brother the king and take the crown of Naples, as Antonio himself did in Milan. They draw their swords — and Ariel wakes Gonzalo just in time.

On another part of the island, Caliban, carrying wood, hides from Trinculo, the king’s jester, who crawls under Caliban’s cloak to shelter from another storm. Stephano, a drunken butler who floated ashore on a butt of wine, finds a four-legged “monster” and gives it wine. Caliban, enchanted by the “celestial liquor”, worships Stephano as a god and offers to show him the island — and to be his slave: “‘Ban, ‘Ban, Ca-Caliban / Has a new master: get a new man. / Freedom, high-day! high-day, freedom!”

Ferdinand carries logs cheerfully for Miranda’s sake; she offers to carry them for him; they declare their love and pledge to marry, while Prospero watches, delighted. Caliban persuades Stephano and Trinculo to kill Prospero — “Remember / First to possess his books; for without them / He’s but a sot” — and take the island and Miranda. Ariel mischievously torments them with music. Caliban, reassuring the frightened sailors, speaks the play’s most beautiful lines:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.

Strange shapes bring a banquet to the starving courtiers; as they move to eat, Ariel appears as a harpy, makes the banquet vanish, and denounces Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian as “three men of sin” who drove Prospero from Milan; the sea has taken Alonso’s son in punishment, and only “heart-sorrow / And a clear life ensuing” can save them. The three are driven mad with guilt and fear.

Prospero releases Ferdinand from his trials and gives him Miranda, warning him to respect her chastity before the wedding. To celebrate their betrothal he has spirits perform a masque: the goddesses Iris, Ceres and Juno bless the couple with fertility and plenty, and nymphs and reapers dance. Suddenly Prospero remembers Caliban’s plot and stops the masque in agitation. Seeing Ferdinand’s alarm, he says:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were 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 inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Ariel lures Stephano and Trinculo with glittering clothes hung on a line; they waste their time trying them on, despite Caliban’s protests, and are hunted by spirit-hounds.

Now, at the sixth hour, Prospero’s project “gathers to a head”. Ariel describes the king and his companions, imprisoned in a grove, distracted, and the good Gonzalo weeping: “Your charm so strongly works ‘em / That if you now beheld them, your affections / Would become tender.” “Dost thou think so, spirit?” “Mine would, sir, were I human.” “And mine shall,” says Prospero:

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick, Yet with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury Do I take part: the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further.

Alone, he says farewell to his magic in a great speech (“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves…”), modelled on the witch Medea’s incantation in Ovid, recalling how he has “bedimmed / The noontide sun… and ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault / Set roaring war… graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth” — and vows: “this rough magic / I here abjure… I’ll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book.”

The courtiers are brought in, still charmed, and Prospero reveals himself, dressed as Duke of Milan. He forgives Alonso, who restores his dukedom and begs pardon. He forgives his brother Antonio — “most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive / Thy rankest fault” — who says nothing. He whispers to Sebastian that he knows of his treachery. Then he draws a curtain and reveals Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. Alonso, overwhelmed, embraces his son. Miranda, seeing the crowd of men — most of them villains — exclaims: “O wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t!” Prospero answers drily: “‘Tis new to thee.”

The ship is found miraculously whole and the sailors awake. Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo are driven in, drunk and bedraggled. Prospero acknowledges Caliban: “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine.” Caliban resolves to “be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass / Was I, to take this drunkard for a god.” Prospero invites everyone to his cell to hear his story, and they will sail for Naples in the morning, for the wedding, after which he will retire to Milan, “where / Every third thought shall be my grave.” He frees Ariel: “Then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well!”

Alone on the stage, Prospero speaks an Epilogue to the audience: his charms are all overthrown, his strength is his own, which is “most faint”; he asks them to release him from the island with the help of their “good hands” (applause) and their prayers: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free.”

Themes

Power and forgiveness. Prospero has almost absolute power on the island — over nature, spirits and people — and the play is about what he does with it. He uses it to stage his enemies’ repentance, not to destroy them; the climax is a choice of “virtue” over “vengeance”. Yet his power is also harsh: he threatens Ariel, torments Caliban, manipulates even his daughter. The play invites us to see both the magnanimity and the control.

Colonialism. Written as England was planting its first colonies in Virginia (Jamestown, 1607) and Bermuda, and drawing on accounts of the Bermuda wreck, The Tempest has been read since the mid-twentieth century as a drama of colonisation. Caliban — whose name may be an anagram of “cannibal” — is the dispossessed native, called “savage” and “monster”, taught the colonist’s language and enslaved; Prospero the European who takes his land. Writers from the colonised world have rewritten the play: the Barbadian poet George Lamming (The Pleasures of Exile, 1960), the Cuban Roberto Fernández Retamar (Calibán, 1971), and Aimé Césaire, whose Une Tempête (1969) makes Caliban a Black revolutionary and Ariel a mulatto collaborator. Others caution that Shakespeare’s island is in the Mediterranean and that the play also draws on European traditions of the “wild man”; but the colonial reading has become central.

Freedom and servitude. Ariel constantly asks for his freedom and finally receives it; Caliban rebels and finds only a new master in Stephano (“Freedom, high-day!”); Ferdinand willingly becomes a log-bearer for love; Prospero himself, in the Epilogue, asks the audience to set him free.

Art and illusion. Prospero is a figure for the playwright — controlling the plot, the characters and the time, staging masques and spectacles, and then giving it all up. “Our revels now are ended” and the farewell to magic have long been read as Shakespeare’s own farewell to the theatre (he wrote only collaborative plays afterwards and retired to Stratford). The play is self-consciously theatrical: the island is a stage, the storm a special effect, and life itself “such stuff / As dreams are made on.”

Nature and nurture. Prospero calls Caliban “a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick”, yet Caliban’s speeches are among the most poetic in the play. Miranda is the product of perfect education; the civilised Antonio and Sebastian are the play’s real villains. Montaigne’s argument that the “savage” may be nobler than the “civilised” hovers over the play.

Afterlife

The Tempest has inspired an extraordinary range of works: Dryden and Davenant’s adaptation (1667); Robert Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos”; W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), whose title is Miranda’s line; the science-fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956); Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) with John Gielgud; Julie Taymor’s film with Helen Mirren as “Prospera” (2010); Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed (2016), set in a prison theatre programme; and operas by Thomas Adès (2004) and others.

In conversation

• “Such stuff as dreams are made on” — for the fragility of life and its illusions.
• “O brave new world” — Miranda’s wonder, now usually ironic (via Huxley).
• “What’s past is prologue” — Antonio’s line; the past only sets the stage for what comes next.