love in the tempest essay

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Investigate character relationships.

See how their relationship changes during the play by moving the bar to the marked points.

The relationship between these characters remains the same throughout the play.

John Gielgud as Prospero.

Antony Sher as Prospero.

Miranda, Prospero and Caliban.

Ralph Richardson as Prospero.

Malcolm Storry as Prospero.

Jonathan Slinger as Prospero.

John Wood as Prospero.

Prospero was Duke of Milan until his brother Antonio usurped his position and had Prospero cast out to sea in a small boat with his young daughter Miranda . Prospero and Miranda landed on an island where the only other inhabitants are spirits and a strange creature called Caliban , who he now commands.

Facts we learn about Prospero at the start of the play:

• He uses magic to control the spirits of the island.
• He was the Duke of Milan until his brother Antonio betrayed him, supported by Alonso.
• While Prospero was Duke of Milan, he became interested in magic.
• He has lived alone on the island for 12 years, bringing up his daughter Miranda.
• He has a close relationship with Ariel, one of the spirits of the island.

Things they say:

‘Thy father was the Duke of Milan and / A prince of power’ (Prospero, 1:2)

Prospero was a powerful man before arriving on the island.

‘And these, mine enemies, are now knit up / In their distractions. They now are in my power’ (Prospero, 3:3)

Power is important to Prospero and he enjoys having power over his enemies.

Things others say about them:

‘I must obey. His art is of such power / It would control my dam’s god Setebos / And make a vassal of him’ (Caliban, 1:2)

Caliban is scared of Prospero because his magic is even more powerful than anything his mother’s god could do.

‘Never till this day / Saw I him touched with anger, so distempered ’ (Miranda, 4:1)

Prospero is usually calm but can become angry.

‘this famous Duke of Milan / Of whom so often I have heard renown’ (Ferdinand, 5:1)

Prospero was thought of as a good duke when he ruled Milan.

Miranda and Ferdinand.

Miranda sits on a large shell.

Miranda with a wooden doll.

Miranda is Prospero's daughter and his only child. We are not told anything about her mother. She was cast out to sea with her father when she was three-years-old and knows nothing about the world except what her father has taught her. Prospero hopes she and Ferdinand will be attracted to each other. When they immediately fall in love, he pretends to be angry and makes Ferdinand a slave. Once Ferdinand has proved he deserves Miranda, he blesses their engagement with a magical show.

Facts we learn about Miranda at the start of the play:

• She is about 15 years old.
• She has grown up on the island.
• She can’t remember ever seeing any other men besides her father and Caliban, until the shipwreck.

‘O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer’ (Miranda, 1:2)

Miranda doesn’t like to watch people suffer.

'Tis a villain, sir, / I do not love to look on’ (Miranda, 1:2)

Miranda does not like being near Caliban.

‘What foul play had we that we came from thence? / Or blessed was’t we did?’ (Miranda, 1:2)

Miranda seems at home on the island, saying it could be a blessing they were stranded there.

‘I do not know / One of my sex, no woman’s face remember / Save from my glass , mine own’ (Miranda, 3:1)

Miranda has never seen another woman.

‘But you, O you, / So perfect and so peerless, are created / Of every creature’s best’ (Ferdinand, 3:1)

Miranda is beautiful, even compared to the women Ferdinand would have known at court in Naples.

‘This my rich gift’ (Prospero, 4:1)

Miranda has a close relationship with her father, who values her.

Margaret Leighton as Ariel.

Simon Russell Beale as Ariel.

Ariel looks sad.

Alan Badel as Ariel.

Brian Bedford as Ariel.

Ariel as a puppet.

In this production, Ariel was a physical character but also appeared digitally.

Kananu Kirimi as Ariel, suspended by wires.

Scott Handy as Ariel.

Ariel is the chief spirit of the island and controls the other spirits. Prospero found him imprisoned in a pine tree where he had been left by a witch called Sycorax, who died before Prospero arrived. In return for being freed from the tree, Ariel now serves Prospero and carries out his magical orders. Prospero promises Ariel that if he does everything he is asked to, he will be set free. At the end of the play, when Prospero has achieved everything he wanted with Ariel’s help, he says goodbye to Ariel and sets him free.

Facts we learn about Ariel at the start of the play:

• Ariel has the power to create storms.
• Ariel was imprisoned in a tree by Sycorax until Prospero freed him.
• No other character in the play can see Ariel apart from Prospero.
• Ariel is loyal to Prospero but is also keen to have his freedom.

‘I come / to answer thy best pleasure, be’t to fly / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curled clouds, to thy strong bidding task / Ariel and all his quality’ (Ariel, 1:2)

Ariel is willing to obey Prospero and has many skills.

‘I have done thee worthy service / Told thee no lies, made no mistakings, served / Without grudge or grumblings.’ (Ariel, 1:2)

Ariel doesn’t usually complain about serving Prospero.

‘I must / Once a month recount what thou hast been / Which thou forget’st’ (Prospero, 1:2)

Ariel owes Prospero for his freedom but Prospero has to remind him of this every month.

‘For thou wast a spirit too delicate / To act her earthy and abhorred commands, / Refusing her grand hests , she did confine thee’ (Prospero, 1:2)

Ariel disobeyed Sycrorax and was imprisoned for it.

‘My industrious servant, Ariel’ (Prospero, 4:1)

Ariel is hard working.

John Kani as Caliban.

Michael Hordern as Caliban.

Hugh Griffith as Caliban.

Frank Benson as Caliban.

Robert Glenister as Caliban, sitting in a large shell.

Alec Clunes as Caliban.

A man works a puppet of Caliban.

Sycorax, a witch, was abandoned on the island and gave birth to a son, Caliban. When she died, he was left alone on the island with only the invisible spirits for company. When Prospero and Miranda arrive on the island, Caliban lives with them as part of the family but when Prospero catches him about to sexually assault Miranda, he throws Caliban out and treats him as a slave. Caliban wants revenge on Prospero but is afraid of his magical powers. When he meets Stephano , Caliban believes the drunken butler can kill Prospero and become a better master to him. He tries to lead Stephano to kill Prospero but Ariel and Prospero defeat his plans.

Facts we learn about Caliban at the start of the play:

• The son of a witch, he was born on the island and lived there alone for a long time.
• He helped Prospero and Miranda to survive on the island.
• He hates Prospero for treating him like a slave.
• He has never tasted alcohol before and thinks Stephano must be a god for owning it.

‘This island's mine by Sycorax my mother / Which thou tak’st from me’ (Caliban, 1:2)

Caliban should have ruled the island but Prospero took it from him.

‘I’ll be wise hereafter / And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass / Was I to take this drunkard for a god’ (Caliban, 5:1)

Caliban is quite gullible and believes Stephano is a god. He asks forgiveness for this at the end of the play.

‘ Abhorred slave / Which any print of goodness wilt not take / being capable of all ill’ (Miranda, 1:2)

Caliban is hated by Miranda and Prospero.

‘A most ridiculous monster to make a wonder of a poor drunkard’ (Trinculo, 2:2)

Caliban does not look human, but like a ‘monster’.

‘A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick, on whom my pains / Humanely taken, all, all lost quite lost / And as with age his body uglier grows / So his mind cankers ’ (Prospero, 4:1)

Caliban is seen as naturally bad by Prospero who thinks he grows worse as he gets older.

Ariel stands behind Ferdinand.

Ferdinand with Ariel.

Ferdinand in uniform.

Alexander Davion as Ferdinand.

Ferdinand is the only son of Alonso , King of Naples. When the ship seems to be breaking up in the tempest, he swims ashore and believes his father drowned. He falls in love with Miranda at first sight but Prospero thinks they have fallen in love too easily. Prospero uses his magical powers to make Ferdinand a slave and forces him to carry logs. Ferdinand puts up with this so long as he can see Miranda. Eventually, Prospero rewards his loyalty by releasing him and agrees that Ferdinand and Miranda can marry.

Facts we learn about Ferdinand at the start of the play:

• He swam ashore alone after the shipwreck.
• He is loyal to his father.
• He falls in love with Miranda as soon as he sees her and immediately decides to marry her.
• He has heard good things about Prospero and shows respect towards him when he finds out who he is.

‘Sitting on a bank / Weeping again the King my father’s wreck’ (Ferdinand, 1:2)

Ferdinand is close to his father.

‘The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service, there resides / To make me slave to it and for your sake / Am I this patient log-man’ (Ferdinand, 3:1)

Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda instantly and is willing to be her father’s slave.

‘This gallant which thou seest / Was in the wreck, and but he’s something stained / With grief, that’s beauty’s canker, thou mightst call him / A goodly person’ (Prospero, 1:2)

Ferdinand seems a good and gallant person.

‘I might call him / A thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble’ (Miranda, 1:2)

Ferdinand is immediately attractive to Miranda.

‘There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple’ (Miranda, 1:2)

Ferdinand is good looking.

Trinculo and Caliban.

Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo.

Stephano and Trinculo.

Trinculo dressed as a cook.

Trinculo in clown make up.

Trinculo is a jester and serves Alonso , King of Naples. He was washed up alone on the island after the shipwreck. Looking for shelter, he ends up crawling underneath Caliban's cloak with him. His friend Stephano then discovers them and they meet Caliban. Stephano is persuaded to kill Prospero, by Caliban, and Trinculo reluctantly follows along with their plot.

Facts we learn about Trinculo at the start of the play:

• He swam ashore after the shipwreck.
• He is friends with Stephano, Alonso’s butler.
• He gets drunk on Stephano’s wine.
• He feels left out when Caliban and Stephano join together.

‘They say there’s but five upon this isle. We are three of them. If the other two be brained like us, the state totters’ (Trinculo, 3:2)

Trinculo does not have a very high opinion of either his own intelligence or that of Caliban and Stephano.

‘Though thou canst swim like a duck, thou art made like a goose’ (Stephano, 2:2)

Trinculo is unsteady on his feet, like a goose.

‘I will not serve him, he’s not valiant’ (Caliban, 3:2)

Trinculo is not impressive to Caliban, who doesn’t want to serve him.

‘Trinculo is reeling ripe’ (Alonso, 5:1)

Trinculo is also drunk by the end of the play.

Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano.

Caliban and Stephano.

Stephano is butler to Alonso , King of Naples. He was washed up on the island alone and wanders around drunk until he meets up with his friend Trinculo , who is hiding under a cloak with Caliban . Stephano shares his wine with them and Caliban thinks he is a god. Stephano agrees to kill Prospero , rule the island and become Caliban’s new master. However, Ariel watches them and makes sure they do not cause any real trouble.

Facts we learn about Stephano at the start of the play:

• He washes up on the island clinging to a barrel of wine.
• He shares his wine with Caliban and Trinculo, which makes Caliban want to serve him as his new master.
• He enjoys the attention Caliban gives him.

‘If I can recover him and keep him tame, and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor’ (Stephano, 2:2)

Stephano is greedy and thinks he can make money from selling Caliban.

‘Prithee do not turn me about, my stomach is not constant’ (Stephano, 2:2)

Stephano is already drunk when he meets Trinculo .

‘I do begin to have bloody thoughts’ (Stephano, 4:1)

Stephano is prepared to kill Prospero until he is distracted.

‘That’s a brave god and bears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him’ (Caliban, 2:2)

Stephano uses the drink he has to make Caliban worship him.

‘Is not this Stephano, my drunken butler?’ (Alonso, 5:1)

Stephano is often drunk.

Trinculo and Alonso.

Alonso in suit and crown.

Alonso in uniform.

Prospero stands behind Alonso.

Alonso is the King of Naples. He helped Antonio to get rid of Prospero and take his brother’s place as Duke of Milan. He has two children, a daughter called Claribel and a son, Ferdinand . His fleet of ships is returning to Naples from Tunis but they are caught in a huge storm. Travelling with him is his son, his brother and other nobles. They are all washed up on the island after the storm, although Alonso thinks Ferdinand has drowned. When Alonso finally meets Prospero, he apologises and makes him Duke of Milan again. When he is reunited with Ferdinand and finds out about his engagement to Prospero’s daughter Miranda , he is delighted.

Facts we learn about Alonso at the start of the play:

• As King of Naples, he has the highest status of the nobles.
• He helped Antonio to take Prospero’s place.
• His ship is returning from Tunis where his daughter Claribel married the King of Tunis.
• He is very upset at loosing of his son Ferdinand, who he thinks has drowned.

‘Old lord, I cannot blame thee / Who am myself attached with weariness / To the dulling of my spirits. Sit down and rest. / Even here will I put off my hope’ (Alonso, 3:2)

Alonso is determined to find his son and cares for Gonzalo.

‘I will stand to and feed / Although my last, no matter since I feel / The best is past’ (Alonso, 3:3)

Alonso becomes reckless when he thinks he has lost his son.

‘The King of Naples, being an enemy / To me inveterate’ (Prospero, 1:2)

Alonso is Prospero’s long term enemy.

‘Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss / That would not bless our Europe with your daughter / But rather lose her to an African’ (Sebastian, 2:1)

Alonso’s choices as a ruler are not respected by his brother.

‘Here lies your brother / No better than the earth he lies upon / If he were that which now he’s like, that’s dead’ (Antonio, 2:1)

Alonso’s rule in Naples is not secure.

Antonio and Sebastian plot.

Antonio and Sebastian plot to kill Alonso.

Antonio is Prospero's younger brother. Prospero trusted him to help rule the dukedom of Milan but Antonio used this trust against his brother and secretly plotted with Alonso to overthrow Prospero and have him and Miranda removed from the city. Antonio owes a debt to Alonso for his help and wants Sebastian to become King of Naples instead so that he can be released from that debt. He has very few lines in the last scene so it is not clear how he feels about seeing Prospero again.

Facts we learn about Antonio at the start of the play:

• Prospero trusted him to rule Milan while he was studying his magic books.
• Antonio has to give regular payments and support to Naples in return for Alonso's help in overthrowing Prospero.
• Antonio would prefer Sebastian to be King of Naples.

‘O that you bore / The mind that I do, what a sleep were this / For your advancement’ (Antonio, 2:1)

Antonio is opportunistic.

‘I am right glad that he’s so out of hope’ (Antonio, 3:2)

Antonio has no sympathy, even for Alonso who believes his son is dead.

‘in my false brother / Awaked an evil nature, and my trust / Like a good parent, did beget of him / A falsehood in its contrary as great / As my trust was’ (Prospero, 1:2)

Antonio betrayed Prospero, even though Prospero thinks he treated him well.

‘Thy case, dear friend / Shall be my precedent: as thou got’st Milan / I’ll come by Naples’ (Sebastian, 2:1)

Antonio is trusted by Sebastian and uses his trust to persuade him to kill his brother.

‘You brother mine that entertained ambition / Expelled remorse and nature.’ (Prospero, 5:1)

Antonio is motivated by personal ambition, according to Prospero.

Gonzalo with Prospero.

Gonzalo (left) and Alonso (sat in gold).

Gonzalo (left) consoles Alonso.

Gonzalo is chief advisor to Alonso , King of Naples. He is remembered by Prospero for his kindness in making sure that supplies, clothing and books were put aboard the boat when Prospero and Miranda were cast out to sea. He tries to keep Alonso positive as they search the island for Ferdinand and is aware that Sebastian and Antonio make fun of him.

Facts we learn about Gonzalo at the start of the play:

• When Prospero was cast out to sea, Gonzalo helped him by giving him food and drink as well as rich clothing and important magic books from his library.
• He is loyal to Alonso and tries to keep his spirits up as they search the island for Ferdinand.
• He is delighted that Ferdinand and Miranda will become king and queen.

‘You have cause / So have we all, of joy, for our escape / Is much beyond our loss’ (Gonzalo, 2:1)

Gonzalo is positive and tries to see the good in their situation.

‘I can go no further sir / My old bones aches’ (Gonzalo, 3:2)

Gonzalo is old and struggles to walk around the island.

‘A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo / Out of his charity, who being then appointed / Master of this design, did give us, with / Rich garments, linens, stuffs, and necessaries / Which since have steaded much’ (Prospero, 1:2)

Gonzalo helped Prospero and Miranda to escape Milan and gave them provisions.

‘Look, he’s winding up the watch of his wit’ (Sebastian, 2:1)

Gonzalo is not quick witted, something Sebastian finds humorous.

‘O good Gonzalo / My true preserver and a loyal sir / To him thou followest’ (Prospero, 5:1)

Gonzalo is loyal, both to Prospero and to Alonso.

Explore their relationships

Prospero - miranda.

Prospero and Miranda have a strong relationship at the beginning of the play. They have been alone on the island together for 12 years.

‘my dearest father’ (Miranda, 1:2)

‘I have done nothing but in care of thee’ (Prospero, 1:2)

In Act 1 Scene 2, when Miranda first meets Ferdinand, her loyalty to her father is tested. She is attracted to Ferdinand as soon as she sees him and is then upset with her father for being mean to Ferdinand.

‘O dear father / Make not too rash a trial of him’ (Miranda, 1:2)

In Act 3, Miranda finds her loyalty divided between her father and Ferdinand, the man she has promised to marry. She visits Ferdinand and tells him her name even though her father told her not to.

‘Miranda – O my father / I have broke your hest to say so’ (Miranda, 3:1)

In Act 4, Prospero reveals that he is actually really pleased that Miranda and Ferdinand have fallen in love. Ferdinand will be his son-in-law. Prospero agrees to their marriage.

‘Here afore heaven / I ratify this my rich gift’ (Prospero, 4:1)

In Act 5, Prospero has to acknowledge that his daughter has grown up and moved on. He has lost his daughter to Ferdinand but he and Alonso share their delight that their children will marry and will one day rule over Milan and Naples together.

‘For I / Have lost a daughter… / In this last tempest’ (Prospero, 5:1)

Prospero - Antonio

When Prospero was Duke of Milan, his brother supported him and helped to rule the city state.

‘he whom next thyself / Of all the world I loved and to him put / The manage of my state’ (Prospero, 1:2)

Antonio betrayed Prospero by plotting with Alonso to throw him out of Milan and take his place as Duke.

‘he needs will be / Absolute Milan’ (Prospero, 1:2)

In Act 1, Prospero creates a storm to wreck Alonso and Antonio's ship. He hopes he can repair his fortunes and make his enemies sorry for how they treated him.

‘By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune, / Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies / Brought to this shore’ (Prospero, 1:2)

In Act 3 Scene 3, Prospero has Ariel appear as a harpy and tell Antonio, Alonso and Sebastian that they are being punished for their ‘foul deed’. Antonio then acts strangely and tries to fight invisible demons and Prospero seems happy they are under his control.

‘All three of them are desperate, their great guilt / Like poison given to work a great time after / Now ‘gins to bit the spirits’ (Prospero, 3:3)

‘They are now in my power’ (Prospero, 3:3)

In Act 5, Prospero forgives Antonio for everything he has done. Antonio has no lines expressing how he feels about seeing Prospero again.

‘I do forgive thee / Unnatural though thou art’ (Prospero, 5:1)

Prospero - Ariel

In Act 1 Scene 2, it seems that Prospero and Ariel have a very close relationship. While it is clear that Prospero values Ariel, he also holds power over him. Ariel says

‘All hail, great master’ and ‘I come / To answer thy best pleasure’ (Ariel, 1:2)

Prospero calls Ariel

’My brave spirit’ (Prospero, 1:2)

Prospero first found Ariel imprisoned in a tree and freed him. When Ariel questions him in Act 1, Prospero threatens to imprison him in another tree if he does not do what he is told.

‘If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak / And peg thee in his knotty entrails’ (Prospero, 1:2)

In Act 4, Ariel’s relationship with Prospero seems quite close. When Prospero calls him, ‘Come with a thought’, Ariel says, ‘Thy thoughts I cleave to. What’s thy pleasure?’ (4:1) but Ariel does seeks approval from Prospero.

‘Do you love me, master?’ (Ariel, 4:1)

At the beginning of Act 5, Prospero asks Ariel’s opinion when he is considering what to do with his enemies. This may suggest a more equal moment in their relationship.

‘Dost thou think so, spirit? (Prospero, 5:1)

At the end of the play, Prospero sets Ariel free. His words are quite affectionate as he gives Ariel his last instruction.

‘My Ariel, chick, / That is thy charge. Then to the elements / Be free, and fare thee well’ (Prospero, 5:1)

Prospero - Caliban

When Prospero first landed on the island, Prospero and Caliban helped each other. Caliban helped him to find food, water, shelter and fuel and Prospero was grateful.

‘When thou cam’st first, / Thou strok’st me and made much of me’ (Caliban, 1:2)

‘I lodged thee in mine own cell’ (Prospero, 1:2)

Prospero and Caliban’s relationship broke down when Caliban tried to ‘violate the honour’ of Miranda (1:2). Then Prospero used his powers to throw Caliban out of their home and turn him into a slave.

Caliban hates Prospero and feels Prospero has used his power to exploit him and steal his island. Caliban says he must obey Prospero because ‘His art is of such power’ (1:2).

‘This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother / Which thou tak’st from me’ (Caliban, 1:2)

Caliban thinks Stephano can become his new master and set him free from Prospero’s power. He tells Stephano he will lead him to where Prospero sleeps.

‘Where thou mayst knock a nail into his head’ (Caliban, 3:2)

In Act 5, Prospero calls Caliban ‘mine’. This might mean that Caliban is a slave he owns, or he might be recognising that he has had a role to play in how Caliban behaves.

‘This thing of darkness I /Acknowledge mine’ (Prospero, 5:1)

Prospero - Gonzalo

Miranda - prospero, miranda - caliban, miranda - ferdinand, ariel - prospero, caliban - prospero, caliban - stephano, caliban - miranda, ferdinand - alonso.

Alonso and his son Ferdinand are together on the ship in Act 1 Scene 1, returning from seeing Ferdinand’s sister Claribel get married in Tunis. They are together during the storm.

’The King and Prince are at prayers’ (Gonzalo, 1:1)

In Act 1 Scene 2, Ferdinand weeps because he thinks his father has drowned in the shipwreck. Alonso is also very upset because he believes his son has drowned.

‘Sitting on a bank, / Weeping again the King my father’s wreck’ (Ferdinand, 1:2)

‘O thou mine heir / Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish / Hath made his meal on thee?’ (Alonso, 2:1)

As Ferdinand falls more in love with Miranda in Act 3, he thinks less about his father. He sadly accepts that his father is dead and looks forward to his life with Miranda.

‘I am, in my condition. / A prince, Miranda; I do think a king, / I would not so’ (Ferdinand, 3:1)

In Act 5, Ferdinand and Alonso are both delighted to be reunited and to discover that the other is still alive.

Ferdinand: ‘Though the seas threaten, they are merciful. / I have cursed them without cause.’

Alonso: ‘Now all the blessings / Of a glad father compass thee about’ (5:1)

Ferdinand - Miranda

Trinculo - stephano.

Stephano and Trinculo seem to be good friends and are very pleased to see each other when they are both washed up on the island after the shipwreck.

‘I am Trinculo, be not afeared, thy good friend Trinculo’ (Trinculo, 2:2)

When Caliban begins to worship Stephano, Trinculo thinks it’s ridiculous. Stephano defends Caliban and we see that Stephano has power over Trinculo because he threatens to beat him.

‘Interrupt the monster one word further and by this hand…’ (Stephano, 3:2)

In Act 4, Stephano and Trinculo are friends again but Stephano still has more power, telling Trinculo what to do.

‘Put off that gown, Trinculo. By this hand, I’ll have that gown’ (Stephano, 4:1)

In Act 5, Stephano and Trinculo are reunited with the nobles and are back in their positions as servants.

Stephano - Trinculo

Stephano - caliban, alonso - ferdinand, alonso - antonio.

In Act 1, Prospero tells Miranda that Alonso helped Antonio to steal the dukedom in return for an ‘annual tribute’ and ‘homage’ (1:2). This means Antonio has to give money and service to Alonso, so Alonso has a lot of power over Antonio.

In Act 2, Antonio tries to take power from Alonso by killing him. He persuades Sebastian that if they kill Alonso, Sebastian can be king instead and free Antonio from paying money to Alonso. Sebastian agrees.

‘Draw thy sword – one stroke / Shall free thee from the tribute which thou payest / And I the king shall love thee’ (Antonio, 2:1)

In Act 5, Alonso pays no attention to Antonio and uses his power to give Prospero back the dukedom of Milan. Antonio has no lines to express how he might feel about this.

‘Thy dukedom I resign, and do entreat / Thou pardon me my wrongs’ (Alonso, 5:1)

Alonso - Gonzalo

Antonio - prospero, antonio - alonso, antonio - gonzalo, gonzalo - alonso, gonzalo - antonio, gonzalo - prospero, teacher notes.

On this page students can arrange the characters on the screen, showing the connections between the characters and their relationships. They can then print this using the button on the page and label them with their own quotes.

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The Tempest

William shakespeare, everything you need for every book you read..

A raging storm at sea threatens a ship bearing Alonso , King of Naples, and his court on their voyage home from the wedding of Alonso's daughter in Tunisia. Frustrated and afraid, the courtiers and the ship's crew exchange insults as the ship goes down.

From a nearby island, Prospero , the former Duke of Milan, and his daughter Miranda watch the ship. Miranda worries about the ship's passengers, suspects that her father has created the storm using his magical powers, and begs him to calm the waters. Prospero then reveals to Miranda the details of their past, telling how, 12 years ago, his brother Antonio betrayed and overthrew him. With the help of Alonso, Antonio arranged for Prospero and Miranda to be kidnapped and set adrift at sea. Now, Prospero says, circumstances allow him to take revenge on his enemies, and for this reason he has conjured the storm.

Prospero charms Miranda, and she falls asleep. He then summons his spirit-servant Ariel , who created the storm. Ariel says that he has made sure everyone made it to the island alive, but scattered separately, then mentions that Prospero promised to free him from servitude early in return for good service. Prospero angrily reminds the spirit that he saved him from the prison in which the witch Sycorax put him. (Sycorax was the previous ruler of the island.) Ariel apologizes and follows Prospero's orders—he makes himself invisible and goes to spy on the shipwrecked courtiers. Prospero then awakens Miranda and summons his servant Caliban , the son of Sycorax. Caliban curses Prospero, and denies that he owes Prospero anything for educating him. To prove his point, he recounts how Prospero stripped him of his rulership of the island.

Meanwhile, Ariel, still invisible, leads Ferdinand , Alonso's son, to Prospero. Ferdinand and Miranda fall immediately in love, but Prospero puts a spell on Ferdinand and takes him into custody. Elsewhere, Alonso, Gonzalo (an advisor to Alonso), Antonio, and Sebastian (Alonso's brother) awaken to find themselves safely on shore. Alonso mourns, thinking that Ferdinand has drowned in the storm. Ariel enters and plays solemn music that puts Gonzalo and Alonso to sleep. While they sleep, Antonio persuades Sebastian to try to murder Alonso and become king of Naples. Ariel wakes the sleeping men just in time to prevent the deed.

On still another part of the island, Caliban encounters Alonso's butler Stephano and jester Trinculo . He mistakes them for gods because they give him wine and get him drunk. With Ariel listening in, Caliban persuades them to help him murder Prospero with the promise that he will serve them as lords of the island.

While Ferdinand does hard labor for Prospero, he encounters Miranda. They express their affection for each other. With Prospero secretly looking on, they agree to marry.

A bit later, Antonio and Sebastian resume their plot against Alonso, but Ariel again disrupts it. Appearing as a harpy, he accuses them and Alonso of overthrowing Prospero and says that only sincere repentance can save them now. Alonso immediately repents. Antonio and Sebastian pledge to fight back, but Prospero soon enchants and traps them all.

Back at Prospero's cave, Prospero gives his blessing to Miranda and Ferdinand's marriage. He summons spirits to perform an elaborate masque (dramatic performance) for the couple. Suddenly, Prospero remembers Caliban's plot to murder him. He abruptly ends the masque and, with Ariel's help, tricks and then chases off the three would-be murderers.

In the play's final scene, Prospero, with Ariel's counsel, decides that rather than taking revenge he will instead give up his magic and forgive his enemies. He presents himself to them in the robes he wore as Duke of Milan. The courtiers are astounded. Alonso apologizes and relinquishes control of Milan, though Antonio remains silent. Alonso and Ferdinand are reunited, and Alonso gives his blessing to the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand. Prospero summons Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban and exposes them to general scorn. Caliban curses himself for mistaking them for gods. Prospero then charges Ariel to ensure a safe voyage back to Italy for all, and then grants Ariel his freedom. The play ends with Prospero's epilogue, in which he asks the audience to applaud and set him free.

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A Modern Perspective: The Tempest

By Barbara A. Mowat

Somewhat past the midpoint of The Tempest, King Alonso and his courtiers reach a temporary still point in their journey on Prospero’s island. Shipwrecked, they have searched for the lost Prince Ferdinand; now, exhausted, they give up the search. Into this moment of fatigue—and, for Alonso, despair—at the center of what Gonzalo calls their “maze,” enters the maze’s monster: a Harpy who threatens them with lingering torment worse than any death. For Alonso, the Harpy’s recounting of his long-ago crimes against Prospero is “monstrous”; maddened, he rushes off to leap (he thinks) into the sea, to join (he thinks) his drowned son Ferdinand.

King Alonso’s confrontation with the Harpy ( 3.3.23 –133) brings together powerfully The Tempest ’s intricate set of travel stories and its technique of presenting key dramatic moments as theatrical fantasy. The presentation of dancing islanders, a disappearing banquet, and a descending monster is the first big spectacle since the play’s opening tempest. The unexpected appearance of these island “spirits,” combined with the power of the Harpy’s speech, gives the Harpy confrontation a solidity within the story world that seems designed to rivet audience attention. At the same time, audience response to the scene is inevitably colored by curiosity about the “quaint device” that makes the banquet vanish and by awareness of Prospero looking down on his trapped enemies from “the top,” commenting on them in asides, and obtrusively turning the Harpy/king encounter into make-believe, first by telling us that the Harpy was only Ariel reciting a speech and, second, by reminding us, just before Alonso’s desperate exit to join Ferdinand in the ocean’s ooze, that Ferdinand is, at this moment, courting Miranda.

The double signals here—to the powerful moment within the story and to the deliberate theatricality with which the moment is staged—reflect larger doublenesses in this drama. They reflect, first of all, major differences in the temporal and spatial dimensions of the drama’s “story” and its “play.” The Tempest ’s “story” stretches over more than twenty-four years and several sea journeys; it embeds elements of the mythological voyages of Aeneas and of Jason and the Argonauts, of the biblical voyages of St. Paul, and of actual contemporary voyages to the new world of Virginia. The “play” that The Tempest actually presents is, in contrast, constricted within a plot-time of a single afternoon and confined to the space imagined for an island. 1 Through this particular doubling, Shakespeare creates in The Tempest a form that allows him to bring familiar voyage material to the stage in a (literally) spectacular new way.

The “story” that The Tempest tells is a story of voyages—Sycorax’s journey from Algiers, Prospero and Miranda’s journey from Milan to the island in the rotten carcass of a butt, Alonso’s voyage from Naples to Tunis across the Mediterranean Sea and thence to the island—and, on the island, a set of journeys (Ferdinand’s journey across yellow sands; Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo’s through briers and filthy-mantled pools, and Alonso and his men’s through strange mazes) that lead, finally, back to the sea and the ship and to yet another sea journey. This complex narrative, with its immense span of chronological time, its routes stretching over most of the Mediterranean, its violent separations and losses and its culmination in royal betrothals and restorations, is the kind of story told in the massive novels, popular in Shakespeare’s time, called Greek Romances. The Tempest ’s story could have filled one or more such romance volumes or could have been presented in a narrative-like drama such as Shakespeare himself had created in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale . Instead, within the brief period of The Tempest ’s supposed action, the narrative of the twenty-four or more years preceding the shipwreck of King Alonso and his courtiers on the island—worked out by Shakespeare in elaborate detail—is told to us elaborately. The second and third scenes of The Tempest —that is, 1.2 . and 2.1 —contain close to half the lines in the play, and close to half of those lines are past-tense narration. Through Prospero, through Ariel, through Caliban, through Gonzalo, through Sebastian, through Antonio, characters in our presence (and our present) tell us their pasts.

If we take the sets of narratives embedded in 1.2 and 2.1 and roll them back to where they belong chronologically, the first story (and the most fantastic) is that of the witch Sycorax, her exile on the island, her “littering” of Caliban there, and her imprisoning of Ariel ( 1.2.308 –47)—twelve years before Prospero is thrust forth from Milan. That thrusting-forth is the subject of the next story (next chronologically, that is): the narrative of Antonio’s betrayal of Prospero and of Prospero and Miranda’s sea journey and arrival on the island ( 1.2.66 –200). Then comes the story of what happened on the island during the next twelve years, a story in which narratives that tell of Caliban ( 1.2.396 –451), of Ariel ( 1.2.287 –306, 340 –47), and of Miranda and Prospero ( 1.2.205 –8) overlap and intersect. Finally comes the story from the most recent past—the story of the Princess Claribel and her “loathness” to the marriage arranged by her father ( 2.1.131 –40), of Claribel’s wedding in Tunis ( 2.1.71 –111), of the return journey of Alonso and his courtiers ( 2.1.112 –17), and of the shipwreck as described by Ariel ( 1.2.232 –80).

One of the most powerful features of the form Shakespeare crafted in The Tempest is that this detailed, complex narrative, told us in the first part of the play, keeps reappearing within the play’s action. The story of the coup d’état that expelled Prospero “twelve year since,” for example, is made the model for the Antonio/Sebastian assassination plot (“Thy case, dear friend,” says Sebastian to Antonio, “shall be my precedent: as thou got’st Milan, I’ll come by Naples” [ 2.1.332 –34]); the story appears at the center of the Harpy’s message ( 3.3.86 –93); and it is told yet once again by Prospero when, in the play’s final scene, he attempts to forgive Antonio ( 5.1.80 –89). Caliban’s story—“this island is mine”; “I serve a tyrant”—is told by him again and again. The story of Sycorax, who died years before the dramatic “now,” is alluded to so often—her powers described one last time by Prospero even as the play is ending ( 5.1.323 –26)—that she seems to haunt the play, as does the absent, distant, unhappy Claribel.

As the play reaches its conclusion, each of the stories recounted in the early narrative scenes is conjured up a final time, though the pressure now is toward the future—toward the nuptials of the royal couple, toward a royal lineage with Prospero’s heirs as kings of Naples. As that virtual future is created, the structuring process of the opening scenes is reversed: where narrative was there incorporated into the play, now the play opens back out into the next pages of the narrative from which it had emerged. As we watch and listen, the play we have been experiencing moves into the past, becomes a moment in the tale Prospero promises to tell to the voyagers—“such discourse as . . . shall make [the night] / Go quick away: the story of my life / And the particular accidents gone by / Since I came to this isle” ( 5.1.361 –64). As Alonso notes, this is a “story . . . which must / Take the ear strangely” ( 5.1.371 –72).

By folding the story into the play and then unfolding the play into its own virtual narrative future, Shakespeare creates a form in which past and future press on the present dramatic moment with peculiar intensity. We sense this throughout the play, but see it with special clarity in the confrontation between Alonso and the Harpy. The Harpy brings the past to Alonso as a burden Alonso must pick up—an intolerable burden for Alonso, who goes mad under the simultaneous recognition of his guilt and its consequences, given to him as Time Past, Time Present, and Time Future. In Time Past: “you . . . / From Milan did supplant good Prospero, / Exposed unto the sea . . . / Him and his innocent child” ( 3.3.87 –90); in Time Present: “for which foul deed, / The powers . . . have / Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures / Against your peace. Thee of thy son, Alonso, / They have bereft” ( 90 –94); and finally, in Time Future: “Ling’ring perdition . . . shall step by step attend / You and your ways, whose wraths to guard you from— / Which here, in this most desolate isle, else fells / Upon your heads—is nothing but heart’s sorrow / And a clear life ensuing” ( 95 –101). This pressure of past and future on the present moment—a pressure that is created in large part by the way Shakespeare folds chronological time into plot-time, and that we feel throughout the play in Prospero’s tension, in Ariel’s restiveness, in Caliban’s fury—makes believable in The Tempest that which is normally suspect: namely, instant repentance, instant inner transformation. Because the dramatic present is so permeated with the play’s virtual past, so pressured by the future—the six o’clock toward which the play rushes, after which Time as Opportunity will be gone—that Alonso’s anguished repentance, his descent into silence, madness, and unceasing tears, his immediate surrender of Milan to Prospero and the reward of being given back his lost son—can all take place in moments, and can, even so, seem credible and wonderful.

The interplay between The Tempest ’s elaborate voyage story and its tightly constricted “play” is not the only doubleness toward which the drama’s Harpy/king encounter points us. It points as well to two kinds of travel tales embedded in the drama: ancient, fictional voyage narratives and contemporary travelers’ tales buzzing around London at the time the play was being written. The Harpy/king encounter is shaped as a sequence of verbal and visual events that in effect reenact and thus recall ancient confrontations between harpies and sea voyagers. In each of these harpy incidents—from the third century B.C. Argonautica through the first century B.C. Aeneid to The Tempest itself—harpies are ministers of the gods sent to punish those who have angered the gods; they punish by devouring or despoiling food; and they are associated with dire prophecies. The Tempest ’s enactment of the harpy encounter is thus one in a line of harpy stories stretching into the past from this island and this set of voyagers to Aeneas, and through Aeneas back to Jason and the crucial encounter between the terrible harpies (the “hounds of mighty Zeus”) and the Argonauts. 2 In replicating the sequence of events of voyagers meeting harpies, combining details from Jason’s story and from the Aeneid, Shakespeare directs attention to the specific context in which such harpy confrontations appear and within which The Tempest clearly belongs—that of literary fictional voyages.

At the same time, he surrounds the encounter with dialogue that would remind his audience of present-day voyages of their own fellow Londoners. Geographical expansion, around-the-world journeys, explorations of the new world of the Americas had heightened the stay-at-homes’ fascination with the strange creatures reported by travelers. Real-world creatures like crocodiles and hippopotami, fantastic creatures like unicorns and griffins, reported monstrosities like the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders—all were, at the time, equally real (or unreal) and equally fascinating. The dialogue preceding the Harpy’s descent in The Tempest centers on such fabulous creatures. When the supposed “islanders”—creatures of “monstrous shape”—appear, bringing in the banquet, Sebastian says: “Now I will believe / That there are unicorns, that in Arabia / There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne, one phoenix / At this hour reigning there.” “Travelers ne’er did lie,” says Antonio, “Though fools at home condemn ’em.” Gonzalo adds, “If in Naples / I should report this now, would they believe me? / If I should say I saw such islanders . . . ” ( 3.3.26 –36). It is into this dialogue-context that the Harpy descends—that is, into a discussion of fantastic travelers’ tales and fabulous creatures.

When the Harpy—one of these creatures—actually appears, claps its wings upon the table, and somehow makes the food disappear ( 3.3.69 SD), she is very real to Alonso and his men—as real as the harpies were to Jason and to Aeneas; as real as the hippopotami and anthropophagi were to fifteenth-century explorers; as real as is Caliban, the monster mooncalf, to his discoverers Stephano and Trinculo. The attempts to kill the Harpy are classical responses—that is, they are the responses of Jason and Aeneas when confronted by the terrible bird-women. The response of Stephano and Trinculo to their man-monster is a more typically sixteenth-century response to the fabulous. When, for example, Stephano finds Trinculo and Caliban huddled under a cloak and thinks he has discovered a “most delicate monster” with four legs and two voices, he responds with the greed that we associate with Martin Frobisher and other sixteenth-century New World explorers who brought natives from North America to England to put on display: “If I can recover him,” says Stephano, “and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather. . . . He shall pay for him that hath him, and that soundly” ( 2.2.69 –81). Trinculo had responded with equal greed to his first sight of the frightened Caliban:

What have we here, a man or a fish? . . . A strange fish. Were I in England . . . and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.

( 2.2.25 –34)

While the finding and subjugating of “wild men” was a feature that ancient and new-world voyage stories held in common (for example, Jupiter promises that Aeneas, as the climax of his sea journeys, will “wage a great war in Italy, and . . . crush wild peoples and set up laws for men and build walls” 3 ), Prospero’s subjugation of Caliban has a particularly New World flavor. The play itself, no matter how steeped it is in ancient voyage literature and no matter how much emphasis it places on its Mediterranean setting, is also a representation of New World exploration. While it retells the stories of Aeneas and of Jason, it also stages a particular Virginia voyage that, in 1610–11, was the topic of sermons, published government accounts, and first-person epistles, many of which Shakespeare drew on in crafting The Tempest . The story, in brief, goes as follows: A fleet of ships set out in 1609 from England carrying a new governor—Sir Thomas Gates—to the struggling Virginia colony in Jamestown. The fleet was caught in a tempest off the coast of Bermuda. All of the ships survived the storm and sailed on to Virginia—except the flagship, the Sea-Venture, carrying the governor, the admiral of the fleet, and other important officials. A year later, the exhausted and dispirited colonists in Jamestown were astounded when two boats sailed up the James River carrying the supposedly drowned governor and his companions. The crew and passengers on the flagship had survived the storm, had lived for a year in the Bermudas, had built new ships, and had made it safely to Virginia. News of the happy ending to this “tragicomedy,” as one who reported the story called it, soon reached London, and many details of the story are preserved in The Tempest .

Among the details may be the disturbing picture of the relationship of the “settlers” and the “Indians” in Jamestown, represented perhaps in Caliban and his relationship with Prospero. In one of the documents used by Shakespeare in writing The Tempest, William Strachey describes an incident in which “certain Indians,” finding a man alone, “seized the poor fellow and led him up in to the woods and sacrificed him.” Strachey writes that the lieutenant governor was very disturbed by this incident, since hitherto he “would not by any means be wrought to a violent proceeding against them [i.e., the Indians] for all the practices of villainy with which they daily endangered our men.” This incident, though, made him “well perceive” that “fair and noble treatment” had little effect “upon a barbarous disposition,” and “therefore . . . purposed to be revenged.” The revenge took the form of an attack upon an Indian village. 4

As we read Strachey’s account today, we find much in the behavior of the settlers toward the natives that is appalling, so that the account is not for us simply that of “good white men” against “bad Indians,” as it was for Strachey. In the same way, whether or not this particular lieutenant governor and these treacherous “Indians” are represented in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s decision to include a “wild man” among his island’s cast of characters, and (as Stephen Greenblatt notes) to place him in opposition to a European prince whose power lies in his language and his books, 5 raises a host of questions for us about the play. The Tempest was written just as England was beginning what would become massive empire-building through the subjugating of others and the possessing of their lands. European nations—Spain, in particular—had already taken over major land areas, and Shakespeare and his contemporaries had available to them many accounts of native peoples and of European colonizers’ treatment of such peoples. Many such accounts are like Strachey’s: they describe a barbarous people who refuse to be “civilized,” who have no language, who have a “nature” on which “nurture will never stick” (as Prospero says of Caliban). Other accounts describe instead cultural differences in which that which is different is not necessarily inferior or “barbarous.” When Gonzalo says (at 2.1.157 –60), “Had I plantation [i.e., colonization] of this isle . . . And were the King on ’t, what would I do?” he answers his own question by describing the Utopia he would set up ( lines 162 –84), taking his description from Montaigne’s essay “Of the Cannibals.” In this essay, Montaigne (“whose supple mind,” writes Ronald Wright, “exemplifies Western civilization at its best” 6 ) argues in effect that American “savages” are in many ways more moral, more humane people than so-called civilized Europeans.

As with so much of The Tempest, Caliban may be seen as representing two quite different images. Shakespeare gives him negative traits attached to New World natives (traits that seem to many today to smack of racist responses to the strange and to the Other) while giving him at the same time a richly poetic language and a sensitive awareness of nature and the supernatural. He places Caliban in relation to Prospero (as Caliban’s master and the island’s “colonizer”), to Miranda (as the girl who taught Caliban language and whom he tried to rape), and indirectly to Ferdinand (who, like Caliban, is made to carry logs and who will father Miranda’s children as Caliban had wished to do). Shakespeare thus creates in the center of this otherworldly play a confrontation that speaks eloquently to late-twentieth-century readers and audiences living with the aftereffects of the massive colonizing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and observing the continuing life of “empire” in the interactions between the powerful and the formerly colonized states. 7 As many readers and audiences today look back at the centuries of colonization of the Americas, Africa, and India from, as it were, Caliban’s perspective, The Tempest, once considered Shakespeare’s most serene, most lyrical play, is now put forward as his representation, for good or ill, of the colonizing and the colonized. 8

This relatively new interest in the colonization depicted in The Tempest has had a profound impact on attitudes toward Prospero. For centuries seen as spokesman for Shakespeare himself, as the benign, profound magician-artist who presides like a god over an otherworldly kingdom, Prospero is now perceived as one of Shakespeare’s most complex creations. He brings to the island books, Old World language, and the power to hurt and to control; he thus figures an early form of the colonizer. But he carries with him other, complicating associations. He is, for example, a figure familiar in voyage romances popular in Shakespeare’s day. The hermit magician (or exiled doctor, or some equivalent) in Greek Romance tales comes to the aid of heroes and heroines, protects them, heals them, often teaches them who they really are. In such stories, the focus is always on the lost, shipwrecked, searching man or woman—that is, on the Alonso figure or the Ferdinand or the Miranda figure. In The Tempest, Prospero, the hermit magician, is center stage, and the lost, shipwrecked, and searching are seen by us through him and in relation to him. Prospero thus carries a kind of power and an aura of ultimately benevolent intention that complicates the colonizer image.

Prospero is also the creator of the maze in which the other characters find themselves—“as strange a maze as e’er men trod,” says Alonso ( 5.1.293 )—and thus carries yet other complicating associations. The scene of the Harpy/king encounter opens with Gonzalo’s “Here’s a maze trod indeed through forthrights and meanders,” a statement that picks up suggestively Ovid’s description of that most infamous of mazes, created by Daedalus to enclose the Minotaur. The Daedalus story has unexpected but rich links with The Tempest . Daedalus, the quintessential artist/engineer/magician, built the maze to sty the monstrous creature that he had helped to bring into being. (It was sired by a bull on King Minos’ queen, but it was Daedalus who had lured the bull to the queen, encasing her, at her urgings, in the wooden shape of a cow.) Having built the maze, Daedalus (in Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis ) “scarce himselfe could find the meanes to wind himself well out / So busie and so intricate” was the labyrinth he had created (Book 8, lines 210–20).

The story of the maze and its Minotaur is a familiar one, involving the sacrifice of Greek youths to the bloodthirsty Minotaur, an annual horror that stopped only with Theseus’ slaughter of the Minotaur and his escape from the maze through the aid of King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, whom Theseus marries and then abandons. Less familiar is the connection between the story of the maze and that of Daedalus and his son Icarus’ flight from the island of Crete:

Now in this while [when Theseus was overcoming

the Minotaur] gan Daedalus a weariness to take

Of living like a banisht man and prisoner such a time

In Crete, and longed in his heart to see his native

But Seas enclosed him as if he had in prison be.

Then thought he: though both Sea and land King

Minos stop fro me,

I am assured he cannot stop the Aire and open

It is at this point that Daedalus turns to “uncoth Arts” (i.e., magic), bending “the force of all his wits / To alter natures course by craft”—and he constructs the famous wings that take him home, at the cost of the life of his son, who falls into the sea and drowns.

When Prospero stands “on the top,” looking down and commenting on the trapped figures below him, he to some extent figures the magician/artist Daedalus. Throughout the play he, like Daedalus, is almost trapped in his own intricate maze, an exile who “gan . . . a weariness to take / Of living like a banisht man and prisoner such a time,” who “longed in his heart to see his native Clime,” and who thus bent “the force of all his wits” and his magic powers to find a way to get himself and his child home. The associations of Prospero with Daedalus, his maze, and his magic flight are less accessible to us today than they would have been to a Renaissance audience. But the sense of Prospero’s weariness, of his hatred of exile, of the danger facing him as he heads back to Milan having abjured his magic—these complicating emotional factors, even without a specific awareness of the Daedalus parallels, are available to us. We notice them especially in Prospero’s epilogue, where he begs our help in wafting him off the island and safely back home.

Like The Tempest itself, then, Prospero is complicated, double. He, like the play, is woven from a variety of story materials, and like the play he represents a particular moment, the moment at which began a period of colonizing and empire-building that would completely alter the world, leaving a legacy with which we still live. But he, like the play, also embodies ancient stories of travel and exile and the emotions that accompany them. And The Tempest ’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century retellings and sequels (Browning’s “Caliban on Setebos,” Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror,” and such film versions as Forbidden Planet and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, to name but a few) suggest that those stories and emotions have continued to intrigue. The magician fascinates, the journey and the maze still tempt, despite the near certainty that magic—like all power—tends to corrupt and that islands and labyrinths hold as many monsters as they do “revels.”

• I am using the word “story” here both in its general sense of a narration of events and in the more particular sense that translates the Russian formalists’ term “fabula”—that is, the events sequenced in chronological order. The formalists contrast the “fabula” with the “szujet”—the fiction as structured by the author (a term I translate as “play”). See Keir Elam’s The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), pp. 119–26.
• See Barbara A. Mowat, “‘And that’s true, too’: Structures and Meaning in The Tempest ,” Renaissance Papers 1976 , pp. 37–50. The pertinent sections of the Argonaut stories are Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2:178–535, and Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 4:422–636; Virgil’s account of the Harpies as encountered by Aeneas and his men is found in the Aeneid 3:210–69.
• Aeneid , Book I, lines 261–64 (Guildford trans.).
• “A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight,” in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609 , ed. Louis B. Wright (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1964), pp. 1–101, esp. pp. 88–89.
• “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 23–26.
• Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993).
• See Edward W. Said, “Empire, Geography, and Culture” and “Images of the Past, Pure and Impure,” in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 3–14, 15–19.
• For example, in “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest ,” Alternative Shakespeares , ed. John Drakakis (pp. 192–205), Francis Barker and Peter Hulme state that “the discourse of colonialism” is the “dominant discursive con-text” for the play.

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The Tempest

Synopsis and plot overview of shakespeare's the tempest.

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TL;DR: A crew of men are shipwrecked on a magical island and tormented by an old man and his slaves.

The Tempest Summary

Prospero uses magic to conjure a storm and torment the survivors of a shipwreck, including the King of Naples and Prospero’s treacherous brother, Antonio. Prospero’s slave, Caliban, plots to rid himself of his master, but is thwarted by Prospero’s spirit-servant Ariel. The King’s young son Ferdinand, thought to be dead, falls in love with Prospero’s daughter Miranda. Their celebrations are cut short when Prospero confronts his brother and reveals his identity as the usurped Duke of Milan. The families are reunited and all conflict is resolved. Prospero grants Ariel his freedom and prepares to leave the island.

More detail: 2 minute read

Close to a Mediterranean island, a storm overcomes a ship that carries King Alonso of Naples, his son Ferdinand, and his brother Sebastian. They were on their way home home from Tunis to Italy when the storm hit and demolished their ship. Shipwrecked with them are the courtier, Gonzalo, and the Duke of Milan, Antonio. 

From the island, Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, watches the storm and shipwreck with his 15 year-old daughter, Miranda. Miranda fears for the ship's crew, but Prospero assures her that everything is fine. He decides to open up about his past, telling her how 12 years previously, his brother Antonio had deposed him in a coup. 

With the aid of Gonzalo, Prospero had escaped in a boat with the infant Miranda and his books of magic. They travelled to the island, made it their home, and enslaved the only native islander, Caliban. The only other inhabitants of the island are the spirits including Ariel, whom Prospero had rescued from imprisonment in a tree. Since Antonio was on the boat that is now shipwrecked, Prospero hopes finally to rectify his past. 

As Miranda sleeps, Prospero discusses his role in the shipwreck with Ariel. They plot about what to do with the men now that they are on the shore. 

The courtiers from the ship are cast ashore unharmed. But the King is near despair, believing that Ferdinand, his son, drowned. Ferdinand has actually arrived safely on a different part of the island where he meets Miranda and they instantly fall in love. Prospero, fearing for his daughter, captures Ferdinand and forces him to carry wood.  In the meantime, Ariel seeks his freedom. Prospero promises that he will liberate Ariel from servitude following the completion of just a few more tasks (typical). 

O brave new world that has such people in't! — The Tempest, Act 5 Scene 1

Ariel uses music to lead the courtiers astray, while Sebastian and Antonio plot to kill the King while he is asleep. Their attempt is foiled by Ariel. All the people from the ship become ever more confused as they wander around. In another part of the island, the timid court fool, Trinculo, has come ashore and discovered Caliban. Trinculo hides beside Caliban from an approaching storm, and the ship's butler, Stephano finds them.    

Stephano, Caliban, and Trinculo, at Caliban's suggestion, intend to kill Prospero and make Stephano lord of the island. They get very drunk before setting off to the cell to kill Prospero.  Ariel, who saw the whole thing in his invisible state, reports this wicked plot to his master. Meanwhile, Prospero has relented and gives his blessing for Ferdinand and Miranda's marriage. Then he entertains them with a masque of goddesses and dancing reapers before he remembers Caliban's plots.  

Prospero and Ariel then set a trap for the three plotters. Stephano and Trinculo fall for the plot and become distracted by gaudy clothes hung out for them. After they touch the clothing, they are chased away by spirits disguised as dogs.

We are such stuff As dreams are made on — The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1

Ariel brings all the courtiers to the cell where Prospero, renouncing his magic, reveals himself. Instead of enacting his revenge, he forgives them and accepts the return of his dukedom. Ferdinand and Miranda are betrothed. Sailors come to announce that the ship is safe. Prospero fulfils his promise and frees Ariel while Caliban and the drunken servants are rebuked. The play ends as all go to celebrate their reunions, and Prospero asks the audience to release him from the play.  

Let your indulgence set me free — The Tempest, Act 5 Epilogue

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The Tempest

Taking a second look at courtly love: shakespeare's the tempest madison csejka college.

William Shakespeare’s usage of the trope of courtly love in The Tempest is not what it seems. In The Tempest , a man trained in the art of magic, Prospero, causes a shipwreck on his island. On this ship is his brother, Antonio, who usurped Prospero's dukedom in Milan and sent him off to sea. The King of Napes, Alonso, is also on this ship, and his son, Ferdinand, falls in love with Prospero’s daughter, Miranda. The trope of courtly love is most clearly seen in the affection between Miranda and Ferdinand. This trope emerged in medieval European literature, and some of its characteristics include a flawless lady who is unattainable or not easily accessed, a need for secrecy, and participants taken from the nobility. At first, one may think that courtly love is used to show how fairytale-perfect Miranda and Ferdinand’s love is, but actually, the utter perfection of their love calls upon the reader to question its authenticity. This skepticism adds yet another layer to Prospero’s character, as he might be the one controlling the love, and speaks to the condition of women during Shakespeare's own time.

Aspects of Ferdinand and Miranda’s relationship clearly align with the trope of courtly love. When Ferdinand first lays eyes on...

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 26, 2020 • ( 1 )

Many commentators agree in the belief that The Tempest is the last creation of Shakespeare. I will readily believe it. There is in The Tempest the solemn tone of a testament. It might be said that, before his death, the poet, in this epopee of the ideal, had designed a codicil for the Future. . . . The Tempest is the supreme denouement, dreamed by Shakespeare, for the bloody drama of Genesis. It is the expiation of the primordial crime. The region whither it transports us is the enchanted land where the sentence of damnation is absolved by clemency, and where reconciliation is ensured by amnesty to the fratricide. And, at the close of the piece, when the poet, touched by emotion, throws Antonio into the arms of Prospero, he has made Cain pardoned by Abel.

—Victor Hugo , Oeuvres complètes de Shakespeare

It is inevitable, given the position of The Tempest as William Shakespeare’s final solo dramatic work, to hear in Prospero’s epilogue to the play, Shakespeare’s farewell to his audience:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. . . . . . Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.

Prospero bows out on a note of forgiveness, the tone that finally rules the play along with an affirmation in the essential goodness of humanity. It has been tempting, therefore, to view Prospero’s sentiment and his play as Shakespeare’s last word, his summation of a career and a philosophy, what critic Gary Taylor has called “the valedictory culmination of Shakespeare’s life work.” First performed at court on November 1, 1611, before the playwright’s exit to Stratford, The Tempest , however, is technically neither Shakespeare’s finale nor requiem. Two years later Shakespeare was back in London, collaborating with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII, and the lost play Cardenio. As intriguing as the biographical reading is, it is only one of The Tempest ’s multiple layers of meaning and significance. Called by critic T. M. Parrot, “perhaps the best loved of all Shakespeare’s plays,” and by William Hazlitt as among the “most original and perfect of Shakespeare’s productions,” The Tempest continues to be one of the most performed and interpreted plays in the canon, generating (and withstanding) autobiographical, allegorical, religious, metaphysical, and more recently postcolonial readings. The play’s central figure has likewise shifted from Prospero, who fascinated the romantics, to Miranda, who has claimed the attention of feminists, to Caliban, who is exhibit A in the reading of the play as “a veritable document of early Anglo-American history,” according to writer Sydney Lee, containing “the whole history of imperialist America,” as stated by critic Leslie Fiedler. The Tempest has served as a poetic treasure trove and springboard for other writers, with allusions detectable in John Milton’s Comus , T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, and countless other works. Based on its popularity, persistence, and universality, The Tempest remains one of the richest and most fascinating of Shakespeare’s plays.

The Tempest is a composite work with elements derived from multiple sources. Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals,” whose romantic primitivism is satirized in Gonzalo’s plan for organizing society on Prospero’s island in the second act, is a possible source. So, too, are a German play, Comedy of the Beautiful Sidea, by Jacob Ayrer, about a magician prince whose only daughter falls in love with the son of his enemy, and several Italian commedia dell’arte pastoral tragicomedies set on remote islands and featuring benevolent magicians. Accounts of the Sea-Venture, the ship sent to Virginia to bolster John Smith’s colony that was wrecked on the coast of Bermuda in 1609, may have furnished Shakespeare with some of the details for the play’s opening storm. However, the most substantial borrowing for the plot of The Tempest comes from Shakespeare’s own previous plays, so much so, that scholar Stephen Greenblatt has described The Tempest as “a kind of echo chamber of Shakespearean motifs.” The complications following a shipwreck revisits Twelfth Night ; the relocation of court society to the wilderness is featured in As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which also employs spirits and the supernatural to teach lessons and settle scores. The backstory of The Tempest —Prospero, the former duke of Milan, usurped by his brother—recalls  Hamlet and King Lear . Miranda’s being raised in ignorance of her past and status as well as the debate between nature and nurture echo Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. Like both, The Tempest mixes light and dark, tragic and comic elements, yet compared to their baroque complexity, the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays after Macbeth obeys the Aristotelian unities of place and time (the only other Shakespearean play to do so is The Comedy of Errors ), with its action confined to Prospero’s island, taking place over a period roughly corresponding to its performance time.

The Tempest begins with one of the most spectacular scenes in all of Shakespeare: the storm at sea that threatens the vessel whose passengers include King Alonso of Naples, his son Ferdinand, and Prospero’s hated brother Antonio, the usurping duke of Milan. Their life-and-death struggle enacted on stage is subjected to a double focus as Prospero reassures his daughter, Miranda, distraught over the fate of the passengers and crew, that he controls the tempest and that their danger is an illusion. The disaster, which he calls a “spectacle,” is artifice, and the play establishes an analogy between Prospero’s magic and the theatrical sleight of hand that initially seemed so realistic and thrilling. Prospero stands in for the artist here: Both magician and playwrights are conjurors, able to manipulate nature and make others believe in a reality without substance. The contrast between illusion and reality will be sounded throughout the play, suggesting that The Tempest is a metadrama: a play about playwriting and the power and limitations of the imagination. Prospero finally tells his daughter how they arrived on the island; how his brother, Antonio, joined in a conspiracy with Alonso to usurp his place as duke of Milan; how 12 years before Prospero and Miranda were set adrift at sea, provisioned only by a compassionate Neapolitan, Gonzalo. Friend and foes, aboard the vessel Prospero has seemed to wreck, are now under his control on the island where Prospero intends to exact his vengeance. Prospero, therefore, will use his long-studied magical arts to stage a reckoning for past offenses. The play proceeds under Prospero’s direction with a cast that either cooperates or complicates his intentions. Serving him are the ethereal Ariel, whom Prospero promises to free after completing his bidding, and the contrasting earthly and brutish Caliban, a witch’s son, whom Prospero says he has “us’d thee / (Filth as thou art) with human care, and lodg’d thee / In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate / The honor of my child.” Prospero, therefore, controls symbols of both sides of human nature: aspects of the imagination and fancy and baser instincts that come in conflict on the island as the play progresses.

As playwright Prospero must juggle three subplots: Miranda’s relationship with Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, who mourns his loss at sea; the plotting of Prospero’s brother, Antonio, and the king’s brother, Sebastian, to murder Alonso and seize his throne; and Caliban’s alliance with the jester Trinculo and butler Stefano to kill Prospero and reign in his stead. The first goes so well—Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love at first sight—that Prospero tests Ferdinand’s fidelity by appearing to punish him by making him his servant. Ferdinand, however, proves his devotion by gladly accepting his humiliation to be near Miranda. Prospero ends Ferdinand’s penance and testing in the first scene of act 4, declaring: “All thy vexations / Were but my trials of thy love, and thou / Hast strangely stood the test.” To seal the nuptial vows a ritual masque is performed by various mythological goddesses and pastoral figures. In the midst of the dance Prospero stops the performance to deliver one of the most celebrated speeches in all of Shakespeare’s plays:

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-capp’d 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.

Jaques in As You Like It asserted “All the world’s a stage,” and Macbeth described life as “a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” Prospero’s speech suggests the transience of both human life and art, with its reference to “the great globe,” the name of Shakespeare’s theater, that, along with towers, palaces, and temples, “shall dissolve . . . like this insubstantial pageant.”

Made aware by Ariel of Caliban’s conspiracy with Trinculo and Stefano, Prospero distracts them from their purpose of murder by rich attire, which Trinculo and Stefano put on before being set upon by spirits. Their comic rebellion is matched by the more serious plot of Antonio and Sebastian to kill Alonso. An assassination attempt is halted by the appearance of spirits providing a banquet for the hungry men. Just as they try to satisfy their hunger the food disappears, replaced by Ariel, “like a harpy,” who accuses Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio of their crimes against Prospero and delivers their sentences:

. . . But remember, For that’s my business to you, that you three From Milan did supplant good Prospero; Exposed unto the sea, which hath requit it ,Him, and his innocent child; for which foul deed The powers, delaying not forgetting, have Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures, Against your peace. Thee of thy son, Alonso, They have bereft; and do pronounce by me Ling’ring perdition, worse than any death Can be at once, shall step by step attend You and your ways; whose wraths to guard you from— Which here, in this most desolate isle, else fall sUpon your heads—is nothing but heart’s sorrow, And a clear life ensuing.

Prospero, approving of Ariel’s performance, declares, “They now are in my pow’r,” and the play turns on how he will decide to use that power.

At the start of the fifth act Prospero announces the climax of his plan: “Now does my project gather to a head,” with his victims now imprisoned to confront their guilt and fate. It is Ariel who shifts Prospero from vengeance to forgiveness by saying, “Your charm so strongly works ’em / That if you now beheld them your affections / Would become tender.” Ariel’s suggestion of what should be the reaction to human suffering shames Prospero into compassion:

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art? 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. Go release them, Ariel; My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore, And they shall be themselves.

Prospero turns away from revenge and the pursuit of power that had formerly ruled the destinies of so many Shakespearean heroes, including Hamlet, Macbeth , and many more. Prospero changes the plot of his play at its climax and then turns away from his art to reenter the human community:

. . . But this rough magic I here abjure. And, when I have required Some heavenly music—which even now I do— To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, 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 end of Prospero’s plot, his art, and the play conjoin. Ariel returns with the prisoners, and Prospero pardons all, including his brother, before reclaiming his dukedom and reuniting father and son. Miranda, overcome by so many nobles on their formerly deserted island, declares:

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in’t!

Prospero, more soberly and less optimistically, responds to her words: “’Tis new to thee.” Finally, Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo are brought in. The lowly status and ridiculousness of the latter two are exposed, prompting Caliban to assert:

I’ll be wise hereafter, And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass Was I to take this drunkard for a god, And worship this dull fool!

Having reestablished order and a harmonious future in the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand, Prospero delivers on his promise to free Ariel before turning to the audience to ask for the same compassion and forgiveness he has shown. As Prospero has released the spirit Ariel, we are asked to do the same for Prospero. We now hold the power and the art to use it as we will:

. . . Now ’tis true I must be here confined by you Or sent to Naples. Let me not ,Since I have my dukedom got, And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands.

If the play is not Shakespeare’s last will and testament, there scarcely can be a better: a play that affirms essential human goodness while acknowledging the presence of human evil, written in the full powers of the imagination, while conscious of its limitations and responsibilities.

The Tempest Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

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William Shakespeare: Father-Daughter Relationship in “The Tempest” Essay

The relationships between fathers and daughters are usually particular. This connection is greater when a father have to bring up a daughter himself. It is obvious that no matter how old a daughter is a father always considers her as a small girl who needs care and protection.

The appearance of one more man near a lovely daughter is usually considered as the attempt to still the dearest person in the world, that is why many fathers are usually against their daughters’ relationships with other men no matter how good these men are. The denial is the first reaction fathers usually experience and their desire to check a man is understood.

One of the main conditions according to which a daughter is going to be protected in the future is the strong assuredness that a daughter is in good and loving hands, protected like under the father’s care. Reading the play The Tempest by William Shakespeare, it becomes obvious that the same situation is happening among Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand.

Starting the discussion with Prospero and Miranda it should be mentioned that living on the island, Prospero understands how cruel the surrounding world may be. However, Miranda is really naïve and cannot distract the simple problem from the real disaster.

Taking care for a daughter, Prospero is ready to create the fake problems and put the intentions of loving Ferdinand under question just to make sure that the man is ready to fight for his daughter and to win in this battle.

At the very beginning of the play Prospero says the following to Miranda,

I have done nothing but I care of thee,

Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who

Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing

Of whence I am: nor that I am more better

Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,

And thy no greater father (Shakespeare 7).

This phrase directs the further relations between Prospero, Miranda and the men who surround her. Everything Miranda knows is the merit of her farther. Being educated, polite and well bread, Miranda is a great example of an ideal daughter and a wife. It seems that father is going to be glad when she meets a person with whom they are going to live together, however, everything is absolutely different.

Trying to make sure that Miranda is going to be safe and protected, Prospero in interested in pleasing her at the island. Still, he could not predict the appearance of Ferdinand who spoiled all the dreams of the father. Each father wants their daughters to be happy, however, at the same time, many fathers are sure that their children are going to be near them all the time.

The appearance of Ferdinand on the island and the first scene where Miranda and Ferdinand meet each other seems too dangerous for Prospero. Prospero cannot trust Ferdinand and tries to check his intentions.

Prospero understands that Miranda is going to fall in love with Ferdinand as there is no another way out. A girl has been at the island for the last 12 years (since she was 15) and the natural desire of a young woman to love and to be loved is essential. However, Prospero does not want Ferdinand to get such a great woman as his daughter for free, without battles.

Prospero understands that being restricted from the whole world, Miranda is not going to reject Ferdinand’s courtship. At the same time considering his daughter as a great prize, too expensive and unique, Prospero uses his magic to force Ferdinand to suffer. Even though Miranda has never been fallen in love, she understands that she is ready to do anything for her lover,

[I weep] at mine unworthiness, that dare not offer

What I desire to give, and much less take

What I shall die to want. But this is trifling,

And all the more it seeks to hide itself

The bigger bulk it shows. Hence, bashful cunning,

And prompt me, plain and holy innocence.

I am your wife, if you will marry me.

If not, I’ll die your maid. To be your fellow

You may deny me, but I’ll be your servant

Whether you will or no (Shakespeare 60)

The further dialogue is the expression of the feelings where two young people exchange the desire to be together “a thousand thousand” hours (Shakespeare 60). Even though this scene presupposes that two lovers are not going to meet any difficulties, that these people are not going to suffer, Miranda’s father thinks differently.

The story of love discussed in the play is like any other love-story has to suffer greatly to have a happy end. Being able to control everything and everyone on the island, it is difficult to imagine that Prospero is not going to use an opportunity to create difficulties for the fiancé if the bride is not ready (or is not taught) to create those.

It is impossible to say whether it is the desire to make sure that all the rules are followed as when people love each other they are to be together. It seems that the author of the pay intentionally creates the sarcastic situation. Lovers can be together without any difficulties, however, the usual estate of affairs is different and there is a person who can create the complications.

Still, the lovers are predicted to be together. The author shows the reader that it is Prospero who unites two lovers to underline the fact that everything on the island is under his control.

Therefore, it may be concluded that the romantic relationships between Miranda and Ferdinand are possible only because Miranda’s father allows them. At the same time, looking at the situation from the perspective of the acknowledgeable audience, it becomes obvious that Prospero is exactly the person who has created additional circumstances on the way for lovers’ union.

Why is it necessary? Whether the desire to create the situation which usually appears is that great? Reading the final words Prospero expresses to the audience, it becomes obvious that Prospero believes himself the director of the destinies of people who surround him.

Miranda and Ferdinand’s love is neither predicted nor directed by Prospero, that is why he wants to make sure that all the occasions which happen on the island (like it was before Ferdinand and his family arrived) are caused or controlled by him.

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors…” (Shakespeare 82) are the final words in the play which support the idea of Prospero’s desire to control the whole island with people there. Therefore, the love of two people sometimes depends not on the circumstances which appear, but on people who surround them as sometimes the desire to be the main person in the lives of others may put under question the positive intentions.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest . New York: Cricket House Books LLC, 2010. Print.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Tempest — The Combination of Love and Witchcraft in The Tempest

The Combination of Love and Witchcraft in The Tempest

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The Tempest Themes

Theme is a pervasive idea, belief, or point of view presented in a literary work. Themes in The Tempest, a masterpiece of William Shakespeare , present the issue of freedom and confinement, including themes of betrayal, compassion, and love. Some of the major themes in The Tempest have been analyzed below.

Themes in The Tempest

The Illusion of Justice

Prospero is expelled from his own dukedom when his elder brother rises against him and usurps his powers. The rest of the play is about Prospero plotting on taking the powers back from Alonso. This shows that justice is done if Prospero gets back his throne. However, he keeps Caliban and Ariel his slaves and does not release Ariel despite promises. Prospero uses exploitation and manipulates the situations in his favor, which is contrary to his idea of justice. He uses Ariel against his enemies, as well. When he becomes a merciful monarch, he releases slaves, forgives his enemies, and even abandons using magic. It shows that justice means the happy ending that Prospero establishes by the end of the play.

Superiority of Human Beings

The play revolves around the happy ending and shows the superiority of human beings in a bleak way. When Prospero and his daughter Miranda are stranded on the island, they live there for almost twelve years. Yet, they know how to exploit other humans and creatures for their ends. Ariel is at the beck and call of Prospero, while Miranda deals with Caliban, who tries to attack her. Though Ariel remains faithful, Prospero does not trust him. He believes that he should keep him until they have the means to escape or leave the island.

Allurement of Rule

Human nature loves the romance of allurement in the shape of barren land for adventure as well as an island for the allurement of infinite power . Prospero finds it very easy to rule the island when he has magical powers. Prospero has infinite possibilities of ruling the island all by himself without having resisting subjects . He successfully educates Miranda, his daughter, and exploits Ariel.  Caliban protests against Prospero, but this allurement of the rule does not happen. Gonzalo also imagines setting up a utopia over the island for his own rule. Caliban’s proposals lights imaginations of Stephano to set up his own government, having full power too. Even his wishful thinking of marrying Miranda brings laughter when he states Trinculo as his future viceroy, along with Caliban.

Power and Exploitation

In the first instance, Antonio exploits power given by Prospero. When Prospero delegates him Milan to him, he uses it to expel the same person from the dukedom. Prospero goes into exile to save his life. When Prospero learns about Ariel, a sprite, he starts exerting his own power on him. This unique magical power gives him opportunities to take revenge from his enemies. This is another show of power and exploitation. With Ariel, Prospero, also becomes the master of Caliban, the son of a witch, having subhuman nature. Prospero continues exploiting both of these spirits with his magical powers until he changes his heart and learns to forgive his enemies.

Prospero uses magic to keep himself and Miranda safe using magic. He also controls sprites like Ariel and half-witch, Caliban. The incident of tempest and ship tossed during the storm shows is also magic. In the end, he leaves magic as he learns to forgive and sets Ariel free.

Revenge and Forgiveness

At first, Prospero is shown ruling an island, keeping Ariel and Caliban as a slave. He learns magic from books to exact revenge on his enemies. He is determined to seek justice by taking the rightful place of the duke from which he was overthrown by his brother. This revenge takes him too far as he exploits sprite, Ariel, and witch’s son, Caliban. Prospero succeeds in exacting revenge, and he finally forgives his brother. Similarly, when Caliban, too, follows the same path for wrongs and maltreatment by swearing allegiance to Stephano as his new master. Although Prospero shows him the way by the end. Almost all the characters either have conscience or remorse.

Power of Language

Most characters in the play use the power of language to seize power, confuse, confound, convince or manipulate. Prospero stands tall among other characters as he uses superior language. He is good at speaking because he reads books. Through his wit and words, he uses Ariel for his ulterior motives. This even becomes prominent in the case of Caliban, who has not only learned the language but also tries to use it against the mentor Prospero. He clearly curses Miranda telling her that he understands; her father as well as the daughter. When Prospero and Caliban battles for power using language, their speech becomes rhythmic. Caliban tells Prospero that all others hate him for his power of language.

Colonization

When Prospero and his daughter Miranda lands on the island after they are exiled, Caliban and Ariel are the real inhabitants. However, Prospero uses his power and knowledge to display his superiority on the original inhabitants. Due to this colonization, Ariel laments losing his freedom, and Caliban curses that he has learned language from Prospero. They consider Prospero and his daughter as settlers who have colonized their land. Prospero does not see Caliban fit to rule his island. Caliban also conspires to throw him out of his land to end his rule.

The Supernatural

The existence, power, and use of supernatural powers and supernatural entities are seen in the play. The first sign of the power of the supernatural emerges when Prospero is exiled to the island, and he finds magic. He uses magic to enslaves a sprite, Ariel, and then the son of a witch, Caliban. Ariel’s presence is entirely supernatural. First, when he brings tempest in the sea, and second is when he causes Ferdinand to fall in love with Miranda at the request of Prospero.

Slavery is shown in two ways in the play. At first, Ariel is shown working as a slave under Prospero. He is promised freedom once Prospero achieves justice. He bears through the discomfort and helps Prospero to cause havoc on his enemies. Caliban is also a slave doing other chores for him and Miranda.

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Inside the Garrick, the Elite Men-Only London Club Rocked by Criticism

Founded in 1831, the opulent private club has long guarded its membership list closely. A leak this month caused a scandal.

By Mark Landler

Reporting from London

On a side street in Covent Garden stands an imposing palazzo-style building, strangely out of place amid the burger joints and neon marquees of London’s theater district. It houses the Garrick Club, one of Britain’s oldest men’s clubs, and on any given weekday, a lunch table in its baronial dining room is one of the hottest tickets in town.

A visitor lucky enough to cadge an invitation from a member might end up in the company of a Supreme Court justice, the master of an Oxford college or the editor of a London newspaper. The odds are that person would be a man. Women are excluded from membership in the Garrick and permitted only as guests, a long-simmering source of tension that has recently erupted into a full-blown furor.

After The Guardian, a London newspaper, put a fresh spotlight on the Garrick’s men-only policy, naming and shaming some of its rarefied members from a leaked membership list, two senior British government officials resigned from the club: Richard Moore, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, and Simon Case , the cabinet secretary, who oversees nearly half a million public employees.

Only days earlier, under questioning at a Parliamentary hearing, Mr. Case defended his membership by saying he was trying to reform an “antediluvian” institution from within rather “than chuck rocks from the outside,” a line that provoked derisory laughs. Mr. Moore’s membership seemed at odds with his efforts to bring more racial and gender diversity to the British spy agency, known as MI6.

Now, the club’s 1,300 members are debating the future of the Garrick over lamb chops in the dining room, after-dinner drinks in the lounge under the main staircase and in a WhatsApp group, where they swap fretful messages about the latest developments. Some welcome the pressure to admit women as long overdue; others lament that doing so would forever change the character of the place.

“The Garrick Club has an absolute right to decide who its members are,” said Simon Jenkins, a columnist at The Guardian and a former editor of The Times of London who is a longtime member. “That said, it is indefensible for any social club these days not to have women as members.”

“Judi Dench, for God’s sake — why shouldn’t she be a member?” he added.

Or Jude Kelly, an award-winning former theater director. Ms. Kelly, who now runs the charity Women of the World, said that excluding women from membership in the Garrick deprived them of access to an elite social circle where professional opportunities inevitably flowed with the brandy.

“We’re in 2024,” Ms. Kelly said. “These are incredibly senior people. Many of them are espousing diversity and inclusion in their professional lives. Being on the inside for a long time makes you complicit.”

The Garrick Club is not the only private club in London that does not admit women: White’s, Boodle’s, the Beefsteak Club and the Savile Club are also men only. But what makes the Garrick unique is its star-studded membership list, which ranges across the worlds of politics, law, arts, theater and journalism.

Members, based on The Guardian’s leaked list, include the actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Brian Cox and Stephen Fry; Mark Knopfler, the guitarist of the rock band Dire Straits; Paul Smith, the fashion designer; the BBC correspondent John Simpson; Oliver Dowden, Britain’s deputy prime minister; and, yes, King Charles III (on an honorary basis).

The boldfaced names have lent the dispute extra piquancy, especially since many of them would seem the kind of bien-pensant progressives who would abhor any kind of discriminatory policy. Indeed, Mr. Cox, Mr. Fry and Mr. Simpson are among those who have come out publicly in favor of admitting women.

The last time the members voted on the question, in 2015, a slender majority — 50.5 percent — said they supported it. But the club’s bylaws require a two-thirds majority to change the policy on membership, and a new vote, if it were scheduled, would not be held until the summer. A club official declined to comment on the matter.

For all the misgivings that members have about not admitting women, some predict they would still fail to reach the two-thirds threshold. The dispute has, perhaps inevitably, turned bitter, pitting a handful of committed campaigners against a larger, older group, many of whom are fine with women as guests but are reluctant to rock a boat that has sailed grandly since 1831.

In New York City, private clubs like the Union League and the Century Association began admitting women in the 1980s, often under the pressure of legal judgments. But in London, where clubs like the Garrick are more zealous about being social rather than professional networking institutions, defenders argue that the case for preserving male-only membership is more justifiable.

These members say they go to the Garrick to drink wine, unwind and enjoy themselves. They crack jokes they wouldn’t make in mixed company. They are not allowed to conduct business; even pulling papers out of a briefcase is looked down upon.

Some dismissed it as a tempest in a teapot. Jonathan Sumption, a lawyer and former justice in the Supreme Court, said he supported the admission of women, but added that those who opposed it were entitled to their opinion.

“The Garrick Club is not a public body and the whole issue is too unimportant to make a fuss of,” Mr. Sumption said. “It is still a pretty good club.”

Mr. Jenkins, the columnist, agreed, suggesting that some of the news coverage had caricatured the Garrick as a vaguely sinister place where men gather to plot against women. Women, he said, were welcome at the communal table in the dining room, perhaps the club’s most hallowed place.

The only room off limits to women is the members’ lounge, known as Under the Stairs, where men gather after dinner. Yet, as Ms. Kelly and other women note, the most valuable relationships are often formed in such informal settings.

To that extent, the Garrick is different from White’s, an even more exclusive men’s club in St. James’s, where Queen Elizabeth II was the only woman ever invited as a guest. When President Donald J. Trump’s ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, held lunches there with his senior staff, he could not invite his own political counselor because she was a woman. Female employees at the embassy complained to the State Department, and he was urged to end the practice.

But White’s and its old-line, Conservative-friendly brethren “tend to be high Tory places, where the question wouldn’t arise,” said Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, who resigned from the Garrick more than a decade ago.

“The Garrick membership is more a mix of actors, journalists and lawyers,” he said. “Thus, it’s a more pertinent question.”

Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Mark Landler