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Portrait of The Tempest

Shakespeare · Late romances

The Tempest

c. 1610–11

Late romance — no single narrative source; shaped by the 1609 Bermuda wreck and Montaigne

A deposed Duke of Milan, twelve years marooned on an island with his daughter, raises a storm to wreck his usurping brother's ship on its shore. Over a single afternoon he uses an enslaved spirit and his books of magic to separate, torment and finally forgive the survivors, marries his daughter to the King of Naples' son, frees the spirit and drowns his book. It opens the First Folio and is usually taken as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage.

How to spot them

  • ▸An island, and a storm raised by magic that harms nobody
  • ▸A magician who was Duke of Milan, his daughter, an airy spirit and an earthbound slave
  • ▸A butler and a jester get a monster drunk and plot to murder their master
  • ▸A masque of Iris, Ceres and Juno, broken off when the magician remembers a conspiracy
  • ▸An epilogue in which the speaker asks the audience's applause to release him

Scenes, characters & lines

'O brave new world, / That has such people in't!'

Miranda on seeing the shipwrecked court — and her father's dry reply, ''Tis new to thee'

'Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made'

Ariel's song to Ferdinand, who believes the king drowned

'We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep'

Prospero to Ferdinand after breaking off the wedding masque

'This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou tak'st from me'

Caliban's claim on the island, the line at the centre of postcolonial readings

'Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not'

Caliban calming the drunken Stephano and Trinculo

A magician promises to break his staff and drown his book 'deeper than did ever plummet sound'

Prospero's renunciation of his art in Act 5

A spirit imprisoned in a cloven pine by a witch, and freed on a promise

Ariel, shut in the pine for a dozen years by Sycorax, released by Prospero and serving him until the play's end

Key ideas

  • Almost alone among the plays it keeps the classical unities: one island, one afternoon, one action
  • Caliban — worshipper of Setebos, son of the Algerian witch Sycorax — has become the play's central modern question, read as colonised subject rather than comic monster

Quick-fire facts

  • •Performed before James I at Whitehall on 1 November 1611, and again for the wedding festivities of Princess Elizabeth in 1613
  • •It is printed first in the First Folio of 1623, and had not been printed before
  • •William Strachey's account of the wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda in 1609 supplied the storm and the enchanted island
  • •Gonzalo's ideal commonwealth is adapted from Montaigne's essay 'Of the Cannibals' in Florio's translation
  • •Ariel's masque summons Iris, Ceres and Juno to bless the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda
  • •Dryden and Davenant's 1667 adaptation The Enchanted Island held the stage for well over a century
  • •The 1956 film Forbidden Planet transposes the story to a distant world, with Robby the Robot for Ariel
  • •The moons of Uranus are named after Shakespearean characters, among them Ariel, Miranda, Prospero, Caliban, Sycorax, Setebos, Stephano, Trinculo and Ferdinand

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources