The Tempest

Overview

The shortest and most tightly built of the late plays. Everything happens in one place between about two in the afternoon and six in the evening, and the characters keep telling each other the time. Shakespeare almost never observed the classical unities of time and place; here he observes them exactly, which suggests he wanted the constraint for a reason.

The plot is unusual in another way: it is over before it starts. The wrong that needs righting happened twelve years ago, and Prospero explains it to Miranda in a long expository scene in Act 1. What the play shows is not a conflict but the execution of a plan by someone who cannot lose. Prospero knows where everyone is at all times, controls the weather, can put people to sleep, and has a spirit who reports back. The suspense is not about whether the plan will work. It is about what he will decide to do when it has.

The text also matters. The Tempest appears first in the Folio of 1623, in an unusually clean state with full stage directions for the spectacle, which means someone prepared it carefully. Sources include accounts of the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture off Bermuda, which were circulating in manuscript, and Montaigne’s essay on cannibals, which Gonzalo borrows from almost verbatim.

What happens

Act 1. A ship breaks up in a storm while the crew and passengers shout at each other, in a scene where a boatswain tells a councillor to get below. Then the island: Miranda begs her father to stop the storm, and Prospero tells her, for the first time, who she is. He was Duke of Milan, absorbed in his books, and his brother Antonio took the state with help from Alonso, King of Naples. They were put to sea in a rotten boat and reached the island, where Prospero freed Ariel from a pine tree and enslaved Caliban. Ariel reports that everyone is safe and separated, and asks when he will be released. Caliban curses. Ferdinand arrives and falls in love with Miranda on sight, which is exactly what Prospero intended.

Act 2. The king’s party wanders the island. Gonzalo describes the commonwealth he would establish, with no trade, no letters, no magistrates and no work, and is mocked for it. Ariel puts everyone to sleep except Antonio and Sebastian, who plan to kill Alonso and take Naples, and are interrupted. Elsewhere Caliban meets two drunks from the ship, Stephano and Trinculo, decides the man with the bottle is a god, and offers to lead them to Prospero so they can kill him and take the island.

Act 3. Ferdinand carries logs and Miranda proposes to him. The drunks quarrel while Ariel throws the blame between them. The king’s party is presented with a banquet that vanishes, and Ariel, as a harpy, tells the three men that the sea has taken Alonso’s son as payment for what they did to Prospero. Alonso goes to pieces.

Act 4. Prospero gives Ferdinand his daughter with a warning about chastity, and produces a wedding masque of goddesses. He breaks it off mid-performance, remembering the conspiracy against him, and speaks the lines about the cloud-capped towers. The drunks are distracted by a line of clothing and then chased offstage by spirits shaped like dogs.

Act 5. Ariel reports that the three lords are penitent, or at least broken, and adds that he would feel for them if he were human. Prospero says he will take the rarer action of forgiving, draws them into a circle, and stands them there while he speaks. He renounces his magic, reveals himself, restores Alonso’s son, is recognised, and forgives Antonio, who says nothing. The ship is whole. Caliban is sent to tidy the cell. Ariel is freed. In the epilogue Prospero, alone and without power, asks the audience to let him go.

How to read it

Read Act 1 scene 2 twice. It is enormously long for a Shakespeare exposition scene, and it contains the play’s three conversations that matter: with Miranda about the past, with Ariel about service, and with Caliban about the island.

Then read Prospero’s speeches in Act 5 slowly and count how often he mentions what he is giving up. The play’s emotional weight is not in the forgiveness but in the renunciation, and the two are in tension. Forgiving is something he does with power he is about to destroy.

Watch the silences. Antonio’s silence at the end is the loudest thing in the play. Caliban’s last speech, in which he says he will seek for grace, is four lines and then he leaves.

Do not settle too quickly on either Prospero as wise magus or Prospero as coloniser. The text supports both and keeps undercutting each with the other. He is the only character in Shakespeare who describes his own art as something he must drown.

If you can, watch a production before finishing the text. The spectacle, the masque, the harpy, the vanishing table, is a third of the play and nearly invisible on the page.

Questions it raises

• Prospero gives up his magic voluntarily. What has he learned that he did not know in Act 1?
• Antonio never speaks again after the forgiveness. Does the play believe in it?
• Caliban was there first, and Sycorax before him. Does the play acknowledge that his claim to the island has any force?
• Is there a difference between the way Prospero treats Ariel and the way he treats Caliban, and what makes it?
• Miranda has known three people. What does her judgement of the new world tell us about her father’s education of her?
• Why does a play about a man who controls everything end with him asking the audience for mercy?