In brief
Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, was put to sea twelve years ago with his small daughter Miranda when his brother Antonio took his title with the help of Alonso, King of Naples. He landed on an island and made himself its master through his books of magic, with the spirit Ariel and the native Caliban as his servants. Now his enemies sail within reach. He raises a storm, wrecks them without a scratch, and spends the next three hours working on them. Alonso’s son Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda, as planned. Alonso and his party wander in grief and are terrified by a harpy. Caliban recruits two drunks, Stephano and Trinculo, to murder his master. Prospero stages a masque for the lovers, breaks it off, forgives his enemies, frees Ariel, drowns his book, and walks forward to ask the audience to let him go home.
The argument
The play is usually called a play of forgiveness. I think it is more interesting as an experiment in the limits of power. Prospero has what no other Shakespearean ruler has: he controls the weather, the sleep and the movements of everyone present, and he can have a slave pinched “As thick as honeycomb” (1.2) for answering back. He uses all of it to produce one thing he cannot compel, which is remorse.
It half works. Alonso does repent, sincerely and at once. Then Prospero announces his great decision, “the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (5.1), with a condition attached: “they being penitent”. He has not checked. Ariel has just had to tell him that a spirit would feel for the prisoners, “Mine would, sir, were I human” (5.1), and this is what turns him. His brother gets a pardon through clenched teeth: “I do forgive / Thy rankest fault” (5.1), from a man who says that merely calling him brother “Would even infect my mouth”. Antonio does not answer. Stephen Orgel’s Oxford edition points out that he is given no speech of remorse, and the only thing he says for the rest of the play is a joke about whether Caliban is for sale: “Is a plain fish, and, no doubt, marketable” (5.1).
So the man who could raise the dead cannot get an apology. That is what the magic comes to, and it is why the ending is so subdued. Prospero gets a dynastic marriage and his dukedom back, and the only prospect he offers himself is that “Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1).
The shape of the play
Like The Comedy of Errors, and unlike most of Shakespeare, The Tempest keeps roughly to the unities of time, place and action. Its events take about as long as they take to perform. Alonso says the wreck was “three hours since” (5.1), and the Boatswain’s reckoning agrees. The Winter’s Tale, from about the same time, jumps sixteen years.
The compression shifts a great deal of the past into talk. The long second scene is largely Prospero telling Miranda, Ariel and Caliban in turn what they owe him, and each history is told so as to justify his rule. Miranda hears of “the dark backward and abysm of time” (1.2), and we have only his word for what is in it. After that, three plots run in parallel on separate parts of the island: the lovers, the nobles and the drunks. Each is a small version of the same usurpation or its cure. Antonio tempts Sebastian to kill his brother Alonso with the line “what’s past is prologue” (2.1), and Stephano’s party plays the same plot as farce.
The island and who owns it
Caliban’s claim comes within moments of his entrance, and it is put with force: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me” (1.2). He says that Prospero first stroked him and taught him to name the sun and moon, that he in return showed “all the qualities o’ th’ isle”, and that he is now kept in a rock: “For I am all the subjects that you have, / Which first was mine own King”. And then the line every reader remembers: “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t / Is, I know how to curse”.
From about 1950 this speech was read as history. Octave Mannoni’s Psychology of Colonization (1950) took Prospero and Caliban as figures for coloniser and colonised, and in the 1960s and 1970s Caliban’s claim became a rallying cry for African and Caribbean writers. George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960) and Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969) are the central texts. Paul Brown’s essay on “this thing of darkness” (1985) carried the argument into English criticism. The play gives them plenty. Trinculo, finding Caliban, thinks at once of showing him for money in England, where people “will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (2.2), and Gonzalo’s dream of an ideal society opens “Had I plantation of this isle” (2.1) and borrows from Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne on the cannibals.
The reading has limits, and Meredith Anne Skura set them out in Shakespeare Quarterly in 1989: it projects later empires back on to a play of the 1610s. Prospero does not set out to colonise anyone. He is cast adrift, he plants nothing, and he leaves. The ship is travelling from Tunis to Naples, so the island lies in the Mediterranean. Caliban’s title, moreover, comes from a mother who arrived from “Argier” (1.2) and enslaved Ariel, so the island’s first coloniser in the play is Sycorax. And Prospero’s reason for confining him cannot be read away. Caliban tried to rape Miranda, and says so without regret: “I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans” (1.2).
My view is that the colonial reading is a true account of what the play makes possible and a false account of what it is about. Shakespeare gave the slave the argument, and then the loveliest speech in the play. “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises” (3.2) belongs to the character Prospero calls “A devil, a born devil” (4.1). Prospero’s final “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1) may be ownership or admission, and no staging has to choose. What becomes of Caliban once the boats leave, the text does not say.
The wreck and the pamphlets
In 1609 the Sea Venture, sailing for Virginia, was wrecked on Bermuda, and its people were given up for dead until they arrived the next year. William Strachey, a survivor, described it in a letter dated 15 July 1610, not printed until 1625 and thought to have reached Shakespeare in manuscript through his contacts with the Virginia Company. Silvester Jourdain, another survivor, published A Discovery of the Barmudas in 1610, and the Council of Virginia issued a True Declaration the same year. These are the documents meant by the Bermuda pamphlets.
How much the play takes from them is argued over. Some scholars find close verbal debts in Strachey; others think the echoes have been exaggerated. The word itself occurs once, when Ariel recalls fetching dew from “the still-vex’d Bermoothes” (1.2), and there it names a remote place, not this island. The pamphlets supply a mood and a shipwreck from which everyone turns up alive, but no plot. No single source for the plot has ever been found.
The masque and the farewell
Prospero’s betrothal present to the lovers is a miniature court masque in 4.1, with Iris, Ceres and Juno played by his spirits. Its stiff couplets have led some critics to give it to another hand, but stiffness suits a performance within a performance. Its plot is chastity. After warning Ferdinand about the “virgin knot” in the same scene, Prospero has Iris report that Venus has been turned back and “Mars’s hot minion is return’d again”. The King’s Men played The Tempest at Whitehall on 1 November 1611 and again in the winter of 1612–13, among the festivities for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. A wedding masque would have suited that occasion, but the earlier performance stands in the way of supposing it was written for it, and no record says it was added.
The masque is broken off by the only thing in the play that Prospero is shown forgetting: “I had forgot that foul conspiracy” (4.1). He is shaken, more than the threat warrants. Then comes the speech of “cloud-capp’d towers” and “the great globe itself”, which is partly an apology to Ferdinand, and which ends not in serenity but in “Sir, I am vex’d”.
Here the tempting claim enters. Thomas Campbell suggested in 1838 that Prospero partly stood for Shakespeare, then dropped the idea on coming to believe the play early. It has survived as the belief that the abjured magic and the drowned book are Shakespeare’s retirement from the stage, because the speech does fit: “graves at my command / Have wak’d their sleepers” (5.1) describes nothing Prospero has been shown doing, and Samuel Schoenbaum observed that it suits a dramatist better. But this remains a reading and not a fact. The speech is largely borrowed from Medea, a witch in Ovid, known in Golding’s English of 1567, which is an odd way to sign off. Shakespeare went on to collaborate with John Fletcher on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, so this was not his last work, only probably his last alone. No record connects the speech to his own plans. And an epilogue that begs the audience’s applause is a convention he had used before in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It.
What can be said is that the Epilogue is strange for its kind. Prospero, stripped of “Spirits to enforce, art to enchant” (Epilogue), says the audience now holds the power he has given up, and that his ending “is despair” without their prayer. “Let your indulgence set me free” makes the audience Prospero for a moment, and it asks of them what he barely managed.
The voices
The island is full of music. “Full fathom five thy father lies” (1.2) is sung to a son about a father who is not dead, and it gives English the phrase “a sea-change”. Prospero’s long narrations are knotted and close-packed, and Caliban speaks easy verse where the drunks speak prose, which is the plainest thing in the play that favours him. His last lines promise “I’ll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace” (5.1), and whether that is growth or a beaten man’s manners is left to the actor.
The people
Prospero
Prospero admits his own part in the coup: he was “rapt in secret studies” (1.2) and left the state to his brother. He is an unpleasant master, quick to threaten Ariel with imprisonment in an oak and Ferdinand with hard labour.
Caliban
Caliban was long a monster on the stage and has more recently been a wronged native; the text insists on both his crime and his grievance. His freedom song, “Freedom, high-day!” (2.2), is sung as he takes a new master.
Ariel
Ariel was imprisoned by Sycorax and released by Prospero into a service that keeps being extended. Ariel’s questions are the most human lines in the part: “Was’t well done?” (5.1) and “Do you love me, master? no?” (4.1). Men and women have both played the role.
Miranda and Ferdinand
Miranda’s “O brave new world / That has such people in ’t!” (5.1) is said on first seeing a crowd that includes the usurpers, and Prospero’s “’Tis new to thee” is the shortest possible answer. In the Folio she, not her father, also speaks the “Abhorred slave” speech to Caliban. The free text linked here gives it to Prospero, as other editions have done, and the choice changes her part considerably.
Antonio and Gonzalo
Antonio is the play’s unconverted remainder. Gonzalo, who supplied the books and the food twelve years ago, is its good old man and the butt of its best joke: his commonwealth without “sovereignty” is mocked with “Yet he would be King on’t” (2.1).
Text, readers and critics
The Tempest stands first in the First Folio of 1623, its only early text and one of the cleanest. It was set from a transcript by the scrivener Ralph Crane, whose hand may lie behind the elaborate stage directions. Ben Jonson’s induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) sneers at “Tales, Tempests” and a “servant-monster”, which is usually taken as a dig at this play and at its audience. Frank Kermode’s Arden edition of 1954 praised Prospero’s white magic over Sycorax’s black. Stephen Orgel’s Oxford edition (1987) rejects that contrast as too simple, and Alden and Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Arden (1999) is the other modern standard.
Afterlives
For nearly two centuries audiences mostly saw it rewritten. William Davenant and John Dryden’s The Enchanted Island (1667) gave Miranda a sister and heavily cut the play, and Thomas Shadwell turned that into an opera in 1674. Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos” (1864) makes the slave a theologian, and Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror continues the play past its ending. Sibelius wrote music for it in 1926, and Thomas Adès an opera in 2004.
On film it has gone to Altair IV in Forbidden Planet (1956), to Derek Jarman’s film of 1979, whose climax is Elisabeth Welch singing “Stormy Weather”, and to Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), where John Gielgud at 87 speaks everyone’s lines. Julie Taymor’s film of 2010 cast Helen Mirren as Prospera. Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016) puts the play in a prison.
How to read it
- Go slowly through the second scene. 1.2 is the longest in the play and the hardest. It tells you the whole past, and only Prospero is telling it.
- Listen to who gets what metre. Compare Caliban in 3.2 with the prose of Stephano and Trinculo around him.
- Get an edition that argues. The Vaughans’ Arden and Orgel’s Oxford are the fullest. The Folger text is free online, as are the Folio at the Internet Shakespeare Editions and Gutenberg #2235.
- Watch Antonio in the last scene. Decide what his silence means, because a production must.
Read next
- William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (about 1610–11). The neighbouring romance, where forgiveness takes sixteen years instead of three hours.
- Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête (1969). The rewrite in which Caliban is a rebel and Ariel a negotiator.
- Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals” (Florio’s English, 1603). The essay behind Gonzalo’s commonwealth.
- Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed (2016). A theatre director staging the play with prisoners.