The Tempest a guided tour

The protagonist. Twelve years on the island, master of every event in the play. He raised the storm, separated the survivors, set Ferdinand's trial, exposed his brother's continuing treachery, frightened Caliban into submission — and he narrates almost all of this himself, to Miranda and to the audience. He is wise, obsessive, controlling, and exhausted. His final act is to break his staff, drown his book, and forgive his enemies. Whether that makes him saint, tyrant retired, or simply tired is the play's open question.

Fifteen years old, raised on the island since she was three, who has known no human face except her father's and Caliban's. When she first sees Ferdinand and the rest of the shipwrecked court, she utters the line the twentieth century has not let go of — "O brave new world, that has such people in't." Her wonder is genuine; her frame of reference is desperately small. The play loves her and is clear-eyed about her ignorance.

A spirit of air and fire whom Prospero rescued from a cloven pine where Sycorax had imprisoned him, and immediately bound to his own service. Ariel performs every magical task in the play — the storm, the music, the banquet that vanishes, the harpy's curse — and reminds Prospero, with increasing edge, that he was promised freedom. The relationship is the play's most ambiguous: a master who calls the slave "my dainty Ariel" and a slave who serves brilliantly because the alternative is being put back in the tree.

Son of the witch Sycorax, the island's only previous human resident, now Prospero's slave. Prospero taught him language. Caliban uses it to curse him: "you taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse." The play gives him some of its most beautiful poetry — the speech about the isle being full of noises — and also makes him a coarse, drunken figure who plots Prospero's murder with two shipwrecked clowns. He is the most morally uncomfortable character Shakespeare wrote, and modern readings place him at the play's center.

The son of the King of Naples, separated from his shipmates by Prospero's storm and washed ashore alone. He believes his father drowned. He meets Miranda and falls in love within minutes. Prospero immediately accuses him of being a spy, sets him to hauling logs, and tests his constancy — the trial succeeds and the engagement is made. He is decent, well-mannered, and politically convenient: marrying him to Miranda makes Prospero the future grandfather of a king of Naples and seals the reconciliation the play needs.

The man who took the dukedom of Milan twelve years earlier and exiled his brother and infant niece in a rotten boat. He is unrepentant. On the island, when he discovers the King of Naples is asleep and unguarded, he proposes that the king's brother Sebastian murder him on the spot to take the throne — exactly the same crime he committed against Prospero. The play forgives him formally at the end. He says nothing. His silence is the open wound on the comedy's reconciliation.