The Tempest

The Tempest was almost certainly the last play Shakespeare wrote alone, and it reads like a valediction — to the stage, to art, to power, possibly to theater itself. It has no clear source text (unusual for Shakespeare), it observes the classical unities of time and place (unusual for Shakespeare), and it ends with Prospero breaking his staff, drowning his books, and asking the audience to free him by applause. The autobiographical reading — Prospero as Shakespeare, the island as the stage, the magic as the playwright's craft — is obvious enough that scholars spend considerable time arguing against it, which suggests it is essentially correct.

The plot is deceptively simple. Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, has been exiled to an island for twelve years by his usurping brother Antonio, conspiring with Alonso, King of Naples. He has learned magic on the island and has two subjects: Ariel, a spirit he freed from imprisonment in a tree, and Caliban, the island's original inhabitant, whom he has enslaved. The play begins when a ship carrying Antonio, Alonso, and others passes near the island. Prospero raises a tempest, brings them all ashore, and arranges their punishment and his return to power.

But what The Tempest is actually about is harder to pin down than any other Shakespeare play. It is about magic and control. It is about colonialism and what the colonizer tells himself. It is about forgiveness — whether Prospero achieves it, whether Caliban deserves it, whether the play approves of either. It is about art: what it means to make illusions that people believe, and what it costs the maker. The play holds all of these simultaneously and resolves none of them cleanly.

Prospero is the play's most controlling protagonist and its most disputed. He is wronged, genuinely; he is also autocratic, manipulative, and consistently described by Caliban and Ariel in terms that make his benevolence harder to sustain than he presents it. His decision to forgive rather than punish Antonio and Alonso is the play's climax, but his forgiveness is cold — he doesn't feel it, he chooses it — and Antonio never responds.

Caliban is the island's original inhabitant, the son of the witch Sycorax who was imprisoned there. Prospero calls him a monster; Caliban calls himself someone from whom the island was taken. His speech about the island's beauty — "the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not" — is the most lyrical in the play. Postcolonial readings have made him the play's moral center, and the text supports this reading without quite endorsing it.

Ariel serves Prospero under a promise of freedom and throughout the play asks when that freedom will come. The dynamic between Prospero's gratitude and his continuing demands, between Ariel's loyal service and its not-quite-suppressed resentment, is the play's most uncomfortable relationship.

Miranda has spent twelve years on the island with Prospero as her only human company. Her first sight of other humans — "O brave new world / That has such people in't" — is the play's most ambiguous line: Prospero's response is "Tis new to thee," which could be gentle, could be ironic, could be the correction of experience to innocence.

No. 1 · "Our revels now are ended" (Act IV, Scene 1). Prospero interrupts the masque he has staged for Miranda and Ferdinand when he remembers Caliban's plot. His speech — "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep" — is one of the most discussed passages in Shakespeare, and its context matters: he delivers it agitated, not serenely. The equation of the pageant with life itself is not resigned; it is the thought of a man realizing what his art has been for.

No. 2 · Caliban's island speech (Act III, Scene 2). Caliban explains the island to Stephano and Trinculo — a drunk butler and a jester, the play's comic relief. "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises." The speech is extraordinary in its beauty and stranger in its context: Caliban is trying to reassure two men he hopes will help him murder Prospero. The beauty of the island is real, the murderous intent is real, and Shakespeare refuses to let either cancel the other.

No. 3 · Prospero's epilogue. Prospero, no longer duke or magician, stands alone on the stage and asks the audience to free him. "Let your indulgence set me free." It is unlike anything else in Shakespeare: the fourth wall demolished, the character's status dissolved into the actor's, the actor's into the playwright's. Whether this is Shakespeare's personal farewell to the stage is unprovable, but the emotional register of the passage makes the question impossible to dismiss.

Film: Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991) is a visually extraordinary meditation on the play rather than an adaptation. Derek Jarman's 1979 version is provocative and strange. Julie Taymor's 2010 film with Helen Mirren as Prospera is more accessible.

Read this if you are… A reader who has finished the major tragedies and wants the late romances. Anyone interested in the postcolonial dimension of early modern English literature — the play is the central text in that conversation. Readers interested in the relationship between art, power, and ethics. Anyone who wants to think about what forgiveness means when the wrongdoer doesn't acknowledge the wrong.

Skip it if you are… A first-time Shakespeare reader — the play's interest is partly contextual and benefits from knowing the canon around it. If you want narrative drive, The Tempest moves slowly and the plot is thinner than it appears. The play's resolution is deliberately unsatisfying if you want clean moral conclusions.

Read the play knowing it is a romance, not a tragedy — Shakespeare's late genre. The conventions include: improbable reunions, a father-daughter relationship at the center, magic that is clearly theatrical, forgiveness rather than punishment. Once you know the genre, you can read against it.

Pay attention to Prospero's relationship to time throughout the play. He is obsessed with the astrological moment: "the very minute bids thee ope thine ear." The whole play takes place in a single afternoon, and he manages it like a stage production. The theatrical metaphor is not incidental.

Read the epilogue aloud. It does not work silently.

• Aimé Césaire — A Tempest (Une Tempête, 1969). A direct rewriting of Shakespeare's play from Caliban's perspective, written by the Martinican poet during the period of Caribbean decolonization. The most important response to the play's colonial dimension; illuminates what Shakespeare left implicit.
• Jorge Luis Borges — "Labyrinths" (1962). Borges shares Prospero's interest in the relationship between books, power, and reality. His short fictions approach the same territory from a different angle. "The Library of Babel" is the closest thematic companion.

1. Prospero forgives Antonio, but Antonio never speaks a word of acknowledgment or remorse. Is this forgiveness or the exercise of power under another name?
2. Caliban says Prospero has taken the island from him. Prospero says Caliban tried to rape Miranda. Both things can be true. How does the play distribute sympathy, and does it ask us to resolve the conflict?
3. Ariel serves Prospero loyally under the promise of freedom. Is Ariel's service freely given or coerced? Does the distinction matter?
4. Miranda's "O brave new world" is usually performed as naive. Is it? What does the play know that Miranda doesn't, and what does it not know that she does?
5. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" equates human life with theatrical performance. Is this a consolation or a diminishment?
6. The autobiographical reading of Prospero as Shakespeare breaking his staff is appealing but unverifiable. Does it change how you read the play? Should the author's biography be part of the literary experience?