The Tempest — themes & analysis

Prospero's grievance is genuine and severe. His younger brother Antonio, while Prospero buried himself in his books, conspired with Alonso of Naples to seize the dukedom of Milan. Prospero and his three-year-old daughter were put into a rotten boat — "a rotten carcass of a butt, not rigged, nor tackle, sail, nor mast" — and pushed out to sea. Only an honest counselor named Gonzalo, who provisioned the boat with food, water, and Prospero's books, kept them alive. Twelve years later Prospero has the men who did this asleep on his beach.

He has the power to do anything he wants to them. The storm has shown that much. Yet from the start the play signals that the revenge will be controlled — no one drowns; not a hair is harmed; the ship rides safe in harbor. What Prospero stages instead is something between trial and theater: he separates the survivors, he frightens them, he brings the guilty into a state of penitence through Ariel's harpy speech, and only then does he reveal himself.

The forgiveness is hard-won and partial. Alonso, who has spent the day believing his son drowned, weeps and asks pardon openly; Prospero gives it openly. Sebastian, who tried to murder his brother in his sleep on this very island, is forgiven without confession. Antonio is forgiven without confession either, and — in the play's most-discussed silence — says nothing in return. He is given his life. He is given no contrition. The reconciliation the comedy needs goes on around him while he stays mute.

What Shakespeare seems to be writing is not a clean moral lesson but a study of what mercy actually costs. Prospero gives up the satisfactions of revenge, the security of certainty about his enemies, and finally his magic itself — and gets, in exchange, his dukedom back, his daughter married into the line that wronged him, and a brother whose silence will outlast every reconciliation speech in the script. The play earns its forgiveness by refusing to pretend it solves everything.

Where to follow it: Scene 2 (Prospero tells Miranda the story), Scene 3 (Antonio repeats his crime on Sebastian), Scene 7 (the harpy accuses the three sinners), Scene 9 (the forgiveness, and Antonio's silence).

Prospero's magic is total within its limits. He can raise a storm, scatter a ship, separate its passengers, put a court to sleep, conjure a banquet and dissolve it, command spirits to perform a wedding masque, set spirit-hounds on a drunken plot. Almost every event in the play is something he has arranged. Shakespeare is careful to keep showing the seams: Ariel is the agent; the storm was a controlled illusion; no harm was actually done. The magic is real, but it is also stage-management.

What the magic cannot do is the work of the heart. It cannot make Antonio repent. It cannot return the years on the island to Miranda or restore Prospero's lost decade in Milan. It cannot, finally, make Ariel free without Prospero giving him up. The book and the staff buy him every effect except the ones that matter most, and the play knows it. Prospero's most-quoted speech in Act 4 — "we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep" — is delivered immediately after he has had to abandon a magical pageant because he forgot a real-world plot to murder him. Magic does not protect against forgetting.

So in Act 5 he gives it up. "I'll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book." Renunciation is the play's final magical act. The gesture is offstage in the strictest reading — what we see is the speech, not the breaking — but staging tradition has made it the climax. The most powerful man in the play voluntarily becomes the least powerful. He will go back to Milan, the speech in Act 5 tells us, where every third thought will be of his grave.

Why magic must end is the play's quiet argument. Magic that lasts becomes tyranny. Caliban is a slave because a magician decided he should be one; Ariel is a servant because a magician rescued him and immediately took him on. To keep the staff is to keep the right to compel other people. Prospero's last freedom is his power to walk away from his own power. The play treats that act as the deepest one available to a human being.

Where to follow it: Scene 1 (the storm), Scene 7 (the vanishing banquet), Scene 8 (the masque, and the interruption), Scene 9 (the renunciation).

Caliban is the son of the witch Sycorax, the only previous human inhabitant of the island, and was its sole human resident when Prospero and the three-year-old Miranda washed up. Prospero befriended him, taught him language, "stroked thee and made much of thee," gave him the names of "the bigger light and the lesser." Caliban, in return, attempted to assault Miranda. Prospero enslaved him. That is the version of the story Prospero tells. Caliban's version is shorter and uglier: "this island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou tak'st from me."

Shakespeare gives him both. He gives him the attempted rape, which the play does not soften. He also gives him some of the most beautiful poetry in the play — the speech about the isle being "full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not." He gives him the great line about education: "you taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse." He makes him a clown, drunken and murderous in his alliance with Stephano and Trinculo, and he makes him, in his last appearance, capable of a kind of self-recognition the courtly characters never reach: "I'll be wise hereafter, and seek for grace."

Twentieth and twenty-first century readings have placed him at the center. The Martinican poet Aimé Césaire rewrote the play as Une Tempête with Caliban as protagonist. The Barbadian writer George Lamming read the play as the Caribbean's foundational text in The Pleasures of Exile. Octavio Mannoni, then Frantz Fanon, then a generation of postcolonial critics treated Caliban as the founding figure of the colonized voice in European literature. The protest "this island's mine" is a question the play does not answer, and refusing to answer it is part of what has kept the play urgent.

Whether Shakespeare meant any of this is a separate question. The play was written shortly after the Virginia Company's first reports back from Jamestown; the wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda in 1609 is one of its known sources. Shakespeare was breathing the air of early colonialism when he wrote it. Whether he saw the structure he was putting on the stage clearly is something the play will not say. What it will say is that Caliban is given a fair share of the script, and that the script, four centuries on, has not let his claim go.

Where to follow it: Scene 2 (Caliban's claim), Scene 4 (Caliban meets the drunkards), Scene 6 ("the isle is full of noises"), Scene 9 ("seek for grace").

The court masque was a real-world entertainment Shakespeare's audience would have recognized: a lavish, allegorical pageant put on at court, full of gods and goddesses descending from machinery, complete with music and dancing. King James loved them; Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones were turning them into the most expensive art form in England. The masque inside The Tempest is partly Shakespeare doing his version — Iris, Ceres, and Juno appear, sing, bless the betrothal, summon nymphs and reapers — and partly a comment on the form. It is offered as a gift and almost immediately revealed as illusion.

Prospero, mid-pageant, remembers Caliban's plot. He stops the masque. The spirits "to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, heavily vanish." Ferdinand and Miranda are bewildered; Prospero turns to them and gives the play's most-quoted speech. "Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air... we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

The speech is doing several things at once. It is consoling Ferdinand, who saw something beautiful disappear; it is acknowledging that Prospero himself, the magician, can have his attention pulled away by mortal fears; it is saying that the masque, the play we are watching, all human creation, and human life itself are made of the same fading material. The four objects in the speech — the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself (with a glance at the Globe theatre) — collapse together. Everything dissolves.

What gives the speech its weight is that it is not despairing. It is matter-of-fact. Shakespeare puts it in a mouth that has just demonstrated the most powerful magic in his canon, and has it admit that its products are no more permanent than a dream. The play does not flinch from this. It builds the rest of its action — the renunciation, the forgiveness, the leaving — on the assumption that the speech is true. If we are made of dream-stuff, then mercy and going home are the only things worth doing while the dream lasts.

Where to follow it: Scene 8 (the masque, and the speech), Scene 9 (the renunciation, in the same key), Scene 10 (the epilogue addresses the audience as dreamers).

The Tempest is structured around acts of service. Ariel performs every magical effect in the play under bond to Prospero; Caliban hauls wood, fetches water, and is whipped if he refuses; Ferdinand carries logs to prove his love for Miranda; Stephano and Trinculo briefly enroll Caliban as their footman in an imaginary kingdom; Prospero himself was once a duke who failed his obligations as a ruler and is now, in some sense, the servant of a project of restoration. Everyone in the play is bound to someone. The question is what the bond is for and when it ends.

Ariel's case is the play's clearest. He was imprisoned in a cloven pine by the witch Sycorax twelve years before; Prospero released him and immediately bound him to "do me business in the veins o' the earth." The bond is for one year, then two, then twelve. Ariel reminds Prospero, with increasing edge, that he was promised freedom. Prospero responds with both irritation and tenderness — "my brave spirit," "my dainty Ariel" — and keeps extending the term. Only at the very end, his magic broken and his enemies forgiven, does Prospero actually say it: "to the elements be free, and fare thou well." Ariel exits singing. The freedom, when it comes, is total and unceremonious.

Caliban's case is the opposite. He serves under the threat of "cramps" and "side-stitches," supernatural pain Prospero can inflict at will. Released into the company of Stephano and Trinculo, he tries to swap masters — "I'll show thee every fertile inch o' the island, and I will kiss thy foot... thou shalt be lord of it" — and the new masters are worse than the old. The play does not give him freedom in the end. He is returned to Prospero's authority, instructed to clean the cell, and shown the dukedom Prospero is about to leave. His last words are about seeking grace, not about being released.

Underneath the Ariel and Caliban arcs runs a question about Prospero himself. He has spent the play giving and withholding freedom, and the closing epilogue inverts the relationship. He stands alone on stage and tells the audience his charms are now overthrown — what strength he has is his own. He cannot leave the stage without their applause. "Let your indulgence set me free." The man who has spent the play binding and releasing others now needs to be released himself.

Where to follow it: Scene 2 (Ariel reminds Prospero of the promise), Scene 5 (Ferdinand serves willingly), Scene 9 ("be free"), Scene 10 (the epilogue).