I have done nothing but in care of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter. The Tempest, I.ii.16–17
Shakespeare created two of his most memorable father-daughter pairs at the beginning and end of his career. The fifteen years that separate the probable date of Romeo and Juliet (1596) from that of The Tempest (1611) correspond roughly to the age of each young heroine. Juliet and Miranda have a great deal more than age in common: they are beautiful, intelligent, refined, and compassionate. Each is an only child, used to being the focus of parental indulgence and approval. They are portrayed at the moment of first love, and both unwittingly choose as the object of that love the only son of their father’s bitterest enemy. Both prove fiercely loyal lovers.
Their fathers, too, have similarities. They are old: Capulet can no longer dance at his own parties, and Prospero anticipates, even in triumph, that “every third thought shall be [his] grave” [All quotations are from the Pelican edition, Northrop Frye, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1970)]. Both feel the burden not only of years but of worldly cares. Capulet is married to a “jealous hood” [All quotations are from the Pelican edition, John E. Hankins, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1970)] (V.iv.13), and he has borne the deaths of all his other children—his “hopes.” Prospero is a widower. Both are noblemen who have paid a bitter price for the luxury and privilege of their rank. Lord Capulet is beset by the violence of a civil feud in which he heads one of the rival families. Prospero, erstwhile Duke of Milan, has suffered betrayal and exile at his once-loved brother’s hands. Each man claims that the major goal of his life is to secure his daughter’s happiness, in the form of marriage to a worthy suitor. But Juliet ends up a suicide, Miranda a radiant bride. Shakespeare implies that the crucial factor in each young woman’s fate is her father’s treatment.
On the surface, the lot of the usurped Duke seems harsher, and his daughter’s chances for happiness more tenuous. He and Miranda are believed dead and, in fact, are confined to a remote island. He is his daughter’s only companion, teacher, and role model. The Capulets, in contrast, hold a prominent place in the busy current of Veronan high society. Juliet has the potential benefit of four parent-figures—her nurse and her father confessor as well as her actual parents. But circumstances prove less fateful than character.
Why is Prospero so much more successful a father than Capulet? The Veronan lord is the consummate man of affairs, extroverted, pragmatic, used to issuing orders and getting prompt results. Like many successful men, he values above all the externals: rank, wealth, and decorum. He is proud of Juliet’s spirit and wit, traits she has certainly not gotten from her rigid mother. But he is wary of emotion, particularly self-doubt, fear, and tenderness. Capulet covers up his discomfort with volatility—angry words or energetic actions. He rushes around issuing orders and doling out tasks because if he stops, he’ll have to look inside both himself and his child. He also clings to a self-flatteringly authoritarian concept of the father/daughter bond: His role is to lavish on her every material comfort and to make all her major decisions; hers, to reflect well on the family—to look lovely and obey.
Capulet prides himself that in choosing Juliet’s future husband, he is acting in her best interests, but he is blind to her point of view. Rash and imperious, he credits neither her objections to his favorite nor her wisdom about the nature of love. It does not occur to Capulet that parents can learn from their children. Complacent and pragmatic, he reflects the values of the community in which he wields power. It takes losing Juliet to make him see beyond ambition and reputation, to recognize her incalculable value as an individual. At the end of the play, that searing realization is reflected in his language. Capulet’s typical tone is blunt and self-assured. Only when Juliet lies dead is he moved to introspection and to poetry.
Prospero is Capulet’s diametrical opposite: intuitive, imaginative, iconoclastic. He has eschewed politics, Capulet’s native element, at the cost of exile and, nearly, of death. But that experience has not made him alter his estimation of the wages of power. Instead, he has created a private commonwealth, become the “god of [the] island” to which he and Miranda were driven. He has raised his daughter alone, without either the family or the society that surround Capulet. Granted, Prospero is a magician who can call on the supernatural for aid. It is inconceivable to picture Capulet in a world that contains Ariel, or to imagine the old lord conjuring up the spirits of Iris and Ceres for his child’s entertainment. But Prospero’s powers are not absolute, and his resolution of Miranda’s fate depends more on empathy and sacrifice than on force.
Prospero’s years of struggle have made him more practical. He realizes that if his daughter is to mature and prosper—his name suggests his character note—she must return to the world she barely remembers. His suffering has taught him above all the unique value of this child. In the beginning of their exile, her love and optimism sustained him. Now he is determined to secure her happiness. Like Capulet, he has a fantasy concept of his daughter’s future. The difference is that he wants to make sure that it is well founded and that she shares it. For Prospero, youth equals inexperience but not ignorance, especially of one’s feelings. He guides but does not coerce his daughter, living by the precept that Capulet only mouths: if a match is to be happy, it must be made with the woman’s free “consent.” Prospero remains true to the assurance he gives Miranda at the play’s outset: “I have done nothing but in care of thee, / Of thee, my dear one, thee my daughter” (I.ii.16–17). The personal pronoun echoes like an affirmation of Miranda’s unique and treasured self.
Prospero has sometimes been accused of being manipulative and tyrannical in pursuit of Miranda’s marriage. But such charges ignore both her acquiescence in his course and the cost to Prospero of attaining it. He must renounce his hard-won powers, forgive his most implacable enemies, and forgo his beloved daughter’s company. Unlike Capulet, Prospero does not need anguished grief to be moved to poetry: it is his natural idiom. His dialogue, with its falling cadence and evocative imagery, contains some of the loveliest speeches in Shakespeare, including the monologue traditionally called the playwright’s farewell to his art. In that parallel, and in his ability to create compelling illusion, Prospero is often seen as Shakespeare’s self-portrait of the artist. He is also the Shakespearean father at his wisest and most benevolent.
One of the most painful scenes in Shakespeare is Lord Capulet’s berating of Juliet. When I first read it, at Juliet’s age, I felt only the scalding force of the father’s rage—wave after wave of insults, threats, and curses. Without understanding what some of his words meant, I was all too clear about their tone: he hated her, his only child, to the point of wishing her dead. And what had Juliet done to provoke this volcano? Said politely that, at fourteen, she was not yet ready to marry—an opinion that Capulet himself had expressed to her suitor, the County Paris, only two days earlier. I understood, too, the enormous gap between the reasons she was giving him and her actual predicament: secretly married to Romeo, the son of her family’s great enemy, Juliet cannot obey her father’s wishes without betraying the precepts of society and religion: bigamy is both a crime and a sin. Her private scruples are even more compelling. The timing of the confrontation is particularly cruel. Juliet has just consummated her marriage and bade her young husband a wrenching farewell. Romeo is making his way out of the Capulet orchard even as her parents enter her room. To so enamored a bride, the thought of admitting a second “husband” to her bed is repellent.
But Juliet never ventures to reveal her true situation to her father, and in that secrecy, too, my adolescent self identified with her. Who could expect such a tyrant to listen, much less sympathize? If Capulet is this furious at her request that he delay the marriage to Paris, what would he say to the news that she has made it impossible—and by marrying a Montague? Juliet is convinced that, to her father, she has done the unforgivable. I agreed with her completely: better to keep the secret, to remain true to Romeo and to her own integrity, even at the risk of death. At that point, I naively assumed that Shakespeare was Capulet, that the playwright was speaking through the enraged man. Only later did I realize that, of course, he was as much the daughter as the father, that he felt Juliet’s hurt and fear and wrote the scene so that I would feel them, too.
The quarrel escalates to the point that Capulet issues Juliet a stark ultimatum: “An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend; / An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets” (III.v.193–94). This is the marriage mart, with the daughter as commodity. Either she agrees to be sold to the highest bidder or she loses all value. How have they come to this terrible impasse? What has happened to turn this child from the pride of her father’s life to the object of his unmitigated fury?
From the beginning, Juliet, like Miranda, is identified in the cast list through her relationship to her father: she is “daughter to Capulet.” But in feud-torn Verona, “Capulet” is not simply a family name: it is a prescribed set of loyalties, an implied code of behavior. As the Prologue tells us, it is the “continuance of their parents’ rage” that will prove fatal to the lovers. In fact, the first time that we see Lord Capulet, he is calling for his sword and claiming that he must wield it to counter “old Montague,” who, he charges, “flourishes his blade in spite of me” (I.i.75–76). Choler and impulsiveness are his character notes. But as he later admits to Paris, that show of force was largely bluster: Keeping the peace, he confides, is no great burden for “men so old” as he. Toward his daughter, Capulet’s rage knows no such limits.
The Montagues, in contrast, never show anger towards Romeo; in fact, they scrupulously avoid intruding on his privacy, even when he is causing them pain. Lord Montague is concerned about Romeo’s “black and portentous humor” (I.i.139) and has “importuned” him to reveal the source of his melancholy. His motive is not idle curiosity but compassion. He assures Benvolio: “We would as willingly give cure as know” (l. 153), and then leaves Romeo in peace to talk over his troubles with his friend. Whether because a son in this society is given more latitude or because they are naturally understanding, the Montagues grant Romeo trust and independence. Juliet’s parents give her neither of these boons.
It is not that Capulet does not love Juliet: the play is his tragedy as well as hers. But he does not show that love in ways that benefit her. He is enormously proud of her grace and eloquence, but that very pride contains the seeds of her destruction, for it is largely the pride of ownership. Capulet himself would never put the case in such crass terms. He sees himself as the indulgent patriarch whose only concern is for his daughter’s happiness. He plays that role when Paris first comes to pay court. Capulet refuses the eager suit by describing Juliet in tenderly protective terms: “My child is yet a stranger in this world,” not yet “ripe to be a bride” (I.ii.8, 11). But almost at once he changes his mind, either because he does not want to put a damper on romance or because, as he later tells Juliet, this is too rich an offer to lose.
He feigns humility about Juliet’s looks, advising the young count to compare her to the other ladies at the feast and “like her most whose merit most shall be” (l. 31). In fact, Capulet, cosmopolite and ladies’ man, knows that Juliet is a striking beauty. The plot depends on the instantaneous passion she inspires in both Paris and Romeo. In spite of the father’s qualms about her youth, he cannot resist showing her off and observing the young man’s reactions. He gives Paris permission to “woo her,” “get her heart.” That done, he says, “My will to her consent is but a part” (ll. 16–17). The rhyme suggests his complacent belief in this liberal attitude—as long as he can designate the suitor. Having approved of Paris’s qualifications, he is ready to grant the girl freedom to second his choice.
At the play’s outset, Juliet is too naive to oppose such a plan. She is the “lamb” and “ladybird” (I.iii.3) of the Nurse’s pet names, a girl eager to please the parents who have indulged her. When her mother introduces the idea of marriage to Paris, Juliet responds politely to what for her is merely a theoretical situation: “It is an honor that I dream not of” (l.66). Clearly, this is a subject that discomforts both mother and daughter. Lady Capulet was herself married very young—as she tells Juliet, she was only about fourteen when she bore her. Her husband is roughly twice her age. (At the ball he hosts, Capulet recalls dancing at a fete that occurred some thirty years before.) That early marriage “marred” (I.ii.13) his wife, he hints to Paris, and certainly Lady Capulet seems stiff and repressed. The necessity of discussing sex with her pubescent daughter brings on waves of embarrassment, and Lady Capulet takes refuge in a formal tone and euphemistic phrasing. Since Juliet has never met Paris, the Lady describes his “beauty” in a series of conventional metaphors. He is a “flower,” a “fair volume” unbound and awaiting a wife to provide a “cover” for the “golden story” of their love (I.iii.85–92). It takes the earthy Nurse, whom the awkward mother has invited to join the tête-à-tête, to undercut the pretty image with ribald candor. She reminds us—and Juliet—what conjugal love really entails: “happy nights” and, for the woman, “growing bigger” with child (ll. 105, 95). Perhaps the discrepancy in the Capulets’ ages accounts for the tension in their marriage, the resentful subjugation of wife to husband, and for the coldness of the mother toward her only child. Their experience of the harmful effects of premature marriage does not, however, dissuade either parent from urging Juliet’s subjection to that fate.
Juliet is embarrassed, too, by both her mother’s awkwardness and the delicacy of the subject. But she sees no objection to the plan and gives the Good Girl’s answer that her mother is waiting to hear: She will “look to like,” as her mother bids, but make no deeper commitment than “your consent” permits (I.iii.97–99). The “your” is plural: Juliet realizes that Lady Capulet is acting as her husband’s emissary.
Falling in love with Romeo dashes the scales from Juliet’s eyes and galvanizes her will. It makes her see beyond the petty enmity wrought by the feud. After she discovers the devastating fact that her new love is “Romeo, and a Montague,” she wills him fancifully: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name” (II.ii.34). Unaware that he is eavesdropping on her “counsel,” she maintains: “Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.” She, in turn, offers to shed her old identity: “be but sworn my love, / And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.” Juliet also comes to understand the generosity essential to love, romantic and familial:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have [ll. 133–35].
The aim should be to give everything that will enhance the beloved’s well being. The giving is its own reward. Juliet’s father, for all his years and experience, is oblivious to those precepts.
Meanwhile, Capulet is pursuing his own scheme for Juliet’s future. When Tybalt is killed, instead of delaying the marriage, the old Lord decides to hasten it. A practical man, he is not deeply grieved by his nephew’s death: “Well, we were born to die” (III.ii.4), he says with facile stoicism. He is annoyed by the inconvenient timing, but agrees at first that Juliet must be granted one night, at least, to mourn her cousin. As Paris begins to take a respectful departure, however, Capulet suddenly disrupts the decorous arrangement. While before he argued with the ardent suitor that Juliet should be allowed two more years to mature, now he rashly accepts the proposal. He admits that he is making “a desperate tender / Of [his] child’s love.” But he adds immediately: “I think she will be ruled / In all respects by me; nay more, I doubt it not.” The tentative claim has become a strident assertion. Lady Capulet’s silence suggests that she is used to bending to her husband’s will.
In Capulet’s mind, County Paris has all the qualifications—rank, wealth, and appearance:
A gentleman of noble parentage,
Of fair demesnes, youthful, and nobly trained,
Stuffed, as they say, with honorable parts… [ll. 181–83].
This suitor is a great bargain, a unique “tender” of “fortune” that Juliet—or rather Capulet—cannot refuse. Ironically, this description would fit Romeo as well as Paris, with the added advantage that the alliance could be the means of ending the pernicious feud. That, in fact, is Friar Laurence’s avowed purpose for agreeing to perform the secret rite. Could Capulet heed his daughter’s pleas, universal happiness would be the likely outcome.
Capulet has an inkling that Juliet will not welcome these huggermugger arrangements. The sign is that he goes into his Lord of the Manor mode, sending his wife on ahead to announce the decision, issued in a series of imperatives: “go you,” “bid her,” “a Thursday tell her / She shall be married to this noble earl” (III.iv.15–21). Lady Capulet recites to her daughter the official line: Juliet’s “careful” father has arranged for her “a sudden day of joy” (III.v.108–09). Once Juliet has cut through the sugar coating and discovered the bitter facts, she protests vehemently to the haste of the match and asserts that she feels no attraction for the suitor she has met only once. Better be wed to Romeo, she tells her mother in a bold double entendre, “whom you know I hate.” But Juliet’s purported freedom of choice, so lately touted by each of her parents, is now only a memory. When she asks Lady Capulet to tell her “lord and father” that she does not wish to marry “yet,” the mother washes her hands of the matter: “Tell him so yourself / And see how he will take it at your hands” (ll. 125–26). The sarcastic tone suggests that she has experienced before her husband’s reaction to opposition.
Juliet tries in every way she can to tell her father—without telling him why—this marriage is repellent to her. Capulet notices that she is crying copiously, but he merely tries to tease her out of her sorrow. He has convinced himself that a little wedding cheer is just the thing to ease Juliet’s grief, supposedly for Tybalt. When his witticisms fail, he returns to the purpose of the family conclave and demands: “How now, wife? / Have you delivered our decree?” (III.v.138–39). As his choice of words underlines, this is a command issued from on high. For response, he expects not only acquiescence but “thanks.”
Juliet is well aware of his expectations, and she tries to balance candor about her true feelings with sensitivity to his wounded pride. When, at last, she refuses outright, he explodes. From his point of view, he has done everything possible to fulfill his paternal duty: all his “care,” he claims melodramatically, “hath been to have her matched” (ll. 179–80). Not, it should be noted, married to one she loves but “matched” with a prestigious mate. In his frustration, Capulet loses all sense of proportion. He calls this supposedly beloved child a “wretched puling fool,” “a whining mammet.” He mocks her voice and her objections: “‘I’ll not wed, I cannot love; / I am too young, I pray you pardon me’” (III.v.187–88). The girl’s pallor, caused by her sleepless wedding night and the shock of this crisis, evokes not pity but scorn: “you tallow-face!” “you green-sickness carrion!” he shouts. Even Lady Capulet is taken aback: “Fie, fie! Are you mad?” she protests. He admits, with an oath, the truth of her charge, though he lays the blame for his outburst on Juliet’s refusal: “God’s bread! it makes me mad” (III.v.177). He utters the terrible wish that “God” had never “lent” them “this only child,” an ominous curse that echoes his wife’s “I would the fool were married to her grave!” (l. 141).
As his tantrum comes to a climax, Capulet puts his claim of ownership in the harshest terms: Juliet is either “his” to “give to [his] friend” or her own to “hang, beg, starve, die in the streets” (ll. 193–94). The hyperbolic verbs suggest how out of control he is: each one stabs. Some might argue that Capulet is no different from other fathers in Shakespeare’s day: that he had not only the power but the duty to arrange his daughter’s marriage. But the play does not support that reading. It criticizes the cruel manner in which he imposes his will, in the shocked protests of both Lady Capulet and the Nurse. More important, it shows the dire results of his treatment in Juliet’s suicide. Shakespeare is no advocate for Capulet’s embodiment of the pater familias.
In fairness, it must be conceded that Capulet has no idea of Juliet’s real motives for refusing Paris’s offer. She never confides in her parents, and he has no such magical device as Prospero’s cloak for eavesdropping on her courtship. But neither does he have the magician’s empathy. It is clear why Juliet feels driven back on her own small resources. When she tries to “beseech … on [her] knees” his “patience” to let her “speak but a word” (III.v.160–61), he silences her with a threat: “Speak not, reply not, do not answer me! My fingers itch.” Some stagings of the scene have shown Capulet in fact striking his daughter. But such physical violence undercuts the emotional pain he is inflicting. A slap, frank and direct, might have been easier for her to bear than the scalding torrent of blame and abuse. Capulet’s final pronouncement reveals the real basis for his rage: “I’ll not be forsworn.” He has given Paris his word as a gentleman. Maintaining his reputation as generous host and undisputed head of his clan means more to him than succoring his only child.
Juliet, as the Chorus implies, has few “means” (II.Cho., 11) for breaking out of the strict course that her father has set her. She is either at home or at church, and she is subject to his rule. But she keeps striving for some control. After Capulet has stalked off, she turns to the parent who might still intercede in her behalf: “O sweet my mother, cast me not away!” It is the most intimate and piteous tone that Juliet has used toward her. She asks her only to “delay this marriage,” and she concludes with a veiled threat of suicide: if she is forced, her “bridal bed” will be in Tybalt’s “monument.” But Lady Capulet is either too status-conscious or too afraid of her husband’s temper to heed her: “Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee,” she says, and leaves the chamber. In her hour of greatest need, Juliet meets total rejection from both her parents.
When the Nurse, too, abandons her, Juliet is left in despair. Her last recourse is the Friar who performed the marriage ceremony. Before going to him, she makes a desperate vow: “If all else fail, myself have power to die.” She has come to see suicide as her last means of asserting her will and remaining “a stainless wife” to Romeo. Rather than condemn this suicide wish as the ultimate sin, in accord with his vocation, the Friar commends her “strength of will” (IV.i.72). He proposes a course nearly as escapist and adolescent as Juliet’s: that she take a potion that simulates death, awaken in the family vault, and run away with Romeo. He warns that the scheme requires enormous “valor” and that no “womanish fear” must deter her (ll. 119–20). Never does Friar Laurence consider going to her parents with the truth and making a plea for this compelling reason to end the feud. Perhaps he, like Juliet, fears Lord Capulet’s probable fury, a qualm that is justified by the outburst that we have just witnessed.
Juliet’s desperation makes her welcome the feigned death that Friar Laurence proposes. With a brief, fervent prayer, “Love give me strength,” she accepts the vial he offers. Her last words to him are affectionate and grateful: “Farewell, dear father.” Imbibing the soporific acts as a kind of rehearsal for her actual suicide and makes it easier for Juliet to carry out her fatal resolve. Unlike Romeo, who at least sends his father a final letter, she has no words of farewell for her actual father. Could Juliet have awakened as her parents discover her supposed corpse, she would no doubt have been amazed at the intensity of their grief.
Capulet, for his part, does not take his rejection of Juliet seriously, as Shakespeare signals when he shifts the action to the father’s point of view. In spite of the quarrel’s rancor, the old lord has gone on happily planning the wedding. The news that Juliet has gone to Laurence’s cell, supposedly to confess her wrongs, makes him jubilant. “He may chance to do her good,” Capulet says condescendingly, and describes Juliet in tones of grumbling affection: “A peevish self-willed harlotry it is” (IV.ii.14). His mood becomes positively buoyant when she returns “with merry look.” His words to her are fond and teasing: “How now, my headstrong? Where have you been gadding?” On one level, he is proud of her show of temper, seeing in it a reflection of his own strong will. Juliet has learned the futility of revealing her true feelings. Instead, she assumes the persona of the Penitent Child, supposedly advocated by Friar Laurence. In her eagerness to try the Friar’s dire remedy, she overplays the role. She will “fall prostrate,” she says, and “beg [her father’s] pardon.” And she adds the cunning lie: “Henceforward, I am ever ruled by you” (ll. 20–22). Capulet is entirely fooled: “This is well…. This is as’t should be” (ll. 28–29). He congratulates himself on his success as moral authority: “My heart is wondrous light, / Since this same wayward girl is so reclaimed” (ll. 46–47). In his delight, he moves the wedding a fatal day forward, careless of the sleepless night and hasty preparations that the change entails.
Why does Juliet die? In a nutshell, because her father’s own concept of her future makes him oblivious to hers. Seen from Capulet’s perspective, his plan is not only reasonable but generous. He has found an ideal suitor for her, accepted the young man’s proposal, and arranged a gala celebration in the couple’s honor. When the girl unexpectedly refuses, claiming to be too young and too shocked by her cousin’s death, he dismisses those pleas as callow. When Juliet persists, he throws the sort of tantrum that has always before allowed him to prevail. We have seen a minor instance of Capulet’s temper in his squelching of Tybalt’s own tantrum at the feast: “Am I the master here or you?” the old lord demanded. Ownership is authority. The girl is naturally shocked by the suddenness of the match, he reasons, so she cries and whines, but he refrains from striking her and waits for her to see her duty. Juliet returns from confession apparently persuaded that he is right. Capulet, elated, is convinced both that father knows best and that he has won, for himself and for her.
Juliet’s sudden “death” knocks flat the whole self-flattering facade. Lord Capulet’s reaction is more complex than his wife’s and the Nurse’s hysteria. Stunned, he begins not by lamenting the fact of Juliet’s death but by describing its effect on her body in terms of almost scientific objectivity: “she’s cold! / Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff” (IV.v.25–26). Then, as the truth sinks in, Capulet goes through several stages of shock and grief. Juliet’s beauty and youth come suddenly clear to him with a poignancy he never felt when he considered those qualities his to display. He is moved to mournful simile: “Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field” (ll. 28–29).
For a few moments, he is too overcome to speak further: “Death … ties up [his] tongue” (IV.v.31–32). With the entrance of Paris and the Friar, his poetic sentiments take a grotesque turn. Death becomes personified as his “son-in-law” and “heir,” “deflowerer” of Juliet, “Flower as she was.” Abruptly, Capulet realizes that his loss is final and absolute: “I will die / And leave him all. Life, living, all is Death’s” (ll. 39–40). He becomes more overwrought, first tenderly addressing the dead girl and then arriving at a more intimate understanding of the tragedy:
O child, o child! my soul, and not my child!
Dead art thou—alack my child is dead,
And with my child my joys are buried [ll. 62–64].
He has come finally to a realization so simple that he has never before acknowledged it: Juliet was uniquely precious, his only child, the person whose “soul” most resembled his own. With her have died any possibility of future encounters, any hope of replicating her features in a grandchild, any foreseeable happiness.
Capulet is moved not only to a full sense of his loss but, at last, to empathy for his daughter’s anguish. The other mourners describe only the effects of the death on them, but he seems in addition to sense what Juliet suffered in her final hours, when she was “Despised, distressed, hated, martyred, killed.” At the end, Paris still believes that Juliet died of “grief” over Tybalt’s loss (V.iii.50–51). Only when she is actually dead will the Friar reveal the “true ground of all these piteous woes” (l. 180)—that Lord Capulet “would have married her perforce” (l. 238).
Juliet is not faultless. She marries without her parents’ consent and then keeps the act a secret. She never confides in them the real explanation for her angst and so gives them no chance to react, either to manifest their opposition or to overcome it. On the other hand, every approach that she makes to such confiding, every plea for understanding, meets with rejection. Admittedly, this is art, not life: the pace and circumstances of the lovers’ crisis are more extreme than they would likely be in actuality. Still, in stylized form, the ways that feelings lead to actions ring true. People in general and adolescents in particular often only hint at their deepest hopes and fears. Those who care about them must listen for what they mean as well as what they say. Denial and coercion breed deception: Capulet drives Juliet to show him the image of herself that he has demanded to see. He discovers her actual plight—and her worth—only when it is too late.
Capulet understands the effect of the feud in causing the scourge on the families. He tells Montague that the lovers are “poor sacrifices of our enmity” (l. 304). As in The Tempest, the old enemies are reconciled by their children’s love, though by partaking not in “wedding cheer” but “sad burial feast” (IV.v.87). The bereaved fathers take refuge in the only consolation they can conceive: providing “statue[s] in pure gold” of their dead children. Capulet is oblivious to the irony that Juliet’s “rate” is once again being expressed in material terms. How fully does he realize that even the “ancient grudge” would not have killed his daughter if he had listened with “patient ears” (first Chorus) to her soul’s voice?
The Tempest is Miranda’s coming of age ritual. It begins with the revelation of her true identity and ends with her betrothal. Every stage in this initiation process is overseen by her magician-father. Prospero is one of the earliest examples in literature of father as single parent. He protects Miranda, both from knowledge that would make her unhappy and from physical and emotional danger. He lavishes affection on her, never hesitating to say how and why he prizes her. At the same time, he respects her individuality. He has acted as Miranda’s “schoolmaster,” setting high standards and training her mind. Like a good teacher, he encourages her to express herself and to make her own choices, even to the extent of countermanding his orders about how she should behave. Although Prospero has pressing reasons for wishing her match with Ferdinand, the young prince whom his magic brings to the island—it is Miranda’s and Prospero’s one chance for future security—he will not force her to acquiesce. In fact, he does everything possible both to gauge her feelings and to test the young man’s worth before giving his own consent. In this, he is strikingly different from Capulet who, in spite of Juliet’s abundance of potential suitors, is grimly insistent on Paris. Finally, Prospero frees Miranda to leave the sanctuary he created for her and to enter the larger world.
A daughter raised in such hermetic circumstances could be helpless or rebellious—incapable of asserting herself, resentful of her father’s authority. Instead, Miranda is self-assured, resourceful, and kind. She reciprocates Prospero’s love and respect, but she does not feel constrained to limit her circle of affection to him. Despite her isolated childhood, she is quick and prescient in judging others, and she recognizes in Ferdinand her soulmate. Miranda shows the confidence of a child who can love and trust others because she has been loved and trusted herself.
For Prospero the quest for Miranda’s happiness is fraught with difficulties. The young suitor he has provided could prove unworthy—Prospero has never met him, and, as the son of his enemy, he does not have a promising heritage. Even should Ferdinand fulfill Prospero’s hopes, the magician must face an arduous confrontation with the men who betrayed him. If his plan succeeds, the price he must pay is the loss of his powers and a lonely old age. He must return to governing Milan, while Miranda will join her new husband in ruling the Kingdom of Naples. Yet for the sake of his daughter’s well-being, Prospero is willing to sacrifice the chief consolation of his life, his delight in her company. The emotional motor of The Tempest is the bittersweet satisfaction parents feel when they let their children go.
As the play opens, Prospero senses that the moment has come for Miranda’s emergence into womanhood. The rousing action of the storm is followed by a long tête-à-tête in which he recounts her past and hints at her future. Prospero knows that this is the turning point in Miranda’s self-awareness: “naught knowing” (I.i.18) of his origins, she is “ignorant” of what she is. The child’s status is derivative, dependent on the parent’s titles and goods, which she stands to inherit. Always before, he has deflected her questions about her past. Now, he tells her, “’Tis time / I should inform thee further” (ll. 22–23).
Miranda, who was only three when they arrived on the island, has little memory of her early years. He begins with the most shocking fact:
Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since,
Thy father was the Duke of Milan and
A prince of power [ll. 53–55].
The echoed words and the falling cadence resonate with The Tempest’s peculiar elegiac music. Prospero was subjected to exile by the perfidy of his younger brother Antonio, whom, he tells Miranda bitterly, “next thyself / Of all the world I loved” (I.ii.68–69). Prospero recognizes his own fault in “neglecting worldly ends” and giving Antonio “the manage of [his] state” while he himself was “rapt in secret studies” (l. 77). Antonio eventually joined in league with Alonso, the King of Naples, “an enemy … inveterate” to Prospero. With Alonso’s aid, Antonio drove the “right duke of Milan” out to sea in a “rotten” bark, its only passengers, he tells the girl, “me and thy crying self” (ll. 128–48).
Miranda wonders, wisely, if it was “foul play” or a “blessed event” that brought them to the island, and he responds, “Both, both, my girl!” (ll. 60–61). Their rescue came about not only by “providence divine” but human “charity” (ll. 159, 162)—that of the faithful old councilor Gonzalo. He furnished them with clothes and the “volumes” on magical lore which, Prospero asserts, “I prize above my dukedom” (l. 168). During the hard voyage, the child seemed to her father “a cherubim … that did preserve [him].” His care for her and “a fortitude from heaven” gave him the will to endure.
Now it is Prospero who must play the role of divine protector for Miranda. The “god” of his island-kingdom, he presides over spirits evil and benevolent, directs the forces of nature, and influences the acts of mortals. But he is not omnipotent. Prospero can precipitate certain events, but he cannot guarantee their outcome; he must act swiftly, be ever vigilant, and hope for the best. He depends on Ariel, his “tricksy spirit” (I.ii.226), to carry out his plans. He must be on guard against Ariel’s weariness with his duties and stanch his eagerness to be set free, in accord with Prospero’s promise. The time for fulfilling that vow is almost upon them: as the play opens, it is within “two days” (I.ii.299). “Bountiful Fortune” (I.ii.178) has brought Prospero’s enemies near; the tempest that he devised and Ariel wrought have driven them to the island. Now the dreamy scholar, the man who preferred his books to his dukedom, must act quickly and decisively. As he reveals to Miranda, both intuition and astrology, “prescience” and “a most auspicious star,” assert that this is his one chance to right his life’s wrongs (ll. 180–84).
What he does not tell the girl is that her fortunes, too, depend on his vigilance and agility. Should he fail, she would be left with an aging, Ariel-bereft father, in danger of some day facing the monster Caliban alone. A mark of Prospero’s compassion is that he only hints at this dire future; he spares Miranda the anguish that full knowledge would entail. Like the sleep he casts over her while he and Ariel plot, the aim of his love is to protect and sustain. He strives not to bind his daughter to him but to free her, as he will his airy “son.” But in Miranda’s case he intends to make certain first that, vulnerable as she is, she is going to other loving arms and a safe haven.
It is clear that Miranda has inherited more than Prospero’s rank. From him and, possibly, her late mother, “a piece of virtue” (I.ii.56), she has learned kindness and trust, and she treats her father with the love that he has shown her. She is a sympathetic listener to his story of betrayal, desperation, and rescue. “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness” (I.ii.106), she tells him, and sighs “Alack, for pity!” She senses the supernatural quality of his power: her first question is whether his “art” (I.ii.1) has created the tempest. She is sure, too, of his benevolence: her term of address is “dearest father.” Miranda’s concern is not her own safety but the fate of the “brave vessel” she has seen “dashed all to pieces” (l. 8). She exclaims: “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!” Prospero hastens to comfort her: “Tell your piteous heart / There’s no harm done,” “No harm” (ll. 14–15), he repeats soothingly. He assures her that he has “so safely ordered” things that all on the ship are protected. Thus, the play’s main values—compassion, resourcefulness, loyalty—are all introduced by the end of Prospero’s account, and father and daughter share them.
This ideal mentorship has not come easily. Prospero’s previous efforts at nurture, first of his younger brother Antonio and then of the creature Caliban, have been bitter failures. As a brother, he was not, he admits, merely negligent but also naive. His “trust, / Like a good parent,” “awoke” in Antonio “an evil nature” (ll. 93–94). The choice of metaphor is telling: Prospero feels a paternal sense of betrayal. But he did not, of course, raise Antonio, and he has taken great care with his actual child.
The chief threat to her well-being has come from the other object of Prospero’s nurture, the “hag-born” (I.ii.283) monster, Caliban. Offspring of the witch Sycorax, he is a native of the island. Prospero virtually adopted the forlorn creature after the witch’s death, treated him “with humane care” and “lodged” him in his “own cell” (ll. 346–47). But, he discovered to his fury, no “kindness” could alter the character of such a brute. The proof? When Miranda was only twelve, Caliban “did seek to violate [her] honor.” The creature admits gleefully to this charge, boasting that if Prospero had not intervened, he “had peopled else / This isle with Calibans” (ll. 350–51).
For Prospero, the rape of a child is an unforgivable crime. He ceases all kindness to Caliban, makes him his “slave,” and controls him with pinches, “cramps,” “side-stitches,” and threats of more such pains. The brute, unrepentant but wary of the magician’s power, obeys and waits his chance for revenge. There has been a tendency lately to romanticize Caliban as a noble savage and to see the magician’s habitation of the island as a metaphor for imperialism and his subjection of Caliban as tyranny over the native population. But such an interpretation ignores Caliban’s malice and lack of remorse. In the play, the would-be child molester is literally a monster, his savagery softened by buffoonery but not, until he repents at the end, by sympathy. Shakespeare is on Prospero’s side.
Caliban is easily cowed and Prospero despises him. Why then is the magician so disturbed at the creature’s plot to overthrow him? In the midst of blessing Miranda’s and Ferdinand’s union, Prospero suddenly recalls Caliban’s “foul conspiracy.” He is “touched with anger so distempered” (IV.i.145) that he cuts short a magical dance he had commanded in the couple’s honor. He is moved to make his great speech about the transience of earthly “revels,” and then tells the lovers that he must walk “to still [his] beating mind.” Ariel appears shortly afterward and assures him that the three plotters—Caliban, the drunken butler Stephano, and the clown Trinculo—have been led in “calf-like” subjection into a “filthy mantled pool” (l. 182): a fittingly comic fall for such incompetent villains. But Prospero remains grimly disillusioned by Caliban’s latest betrayal, and denounces him as
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost! [ll. 188–90].
Prospero never shows such rage toward his more dangerous enemies. Nor is this, like Capulet’s, a tantrum but a fixed rancor. Perhaps it conceals his fear, either that the daughter whose “nurture” he has overseen so lovingly might prove likewise false or, more probably, that, should his plan fail, she could be left at the mercy of this “devil.”
The spirit Ariel, whom Prospero freed from a wicked spell, is his good stepson to Caliban’s bad. In some ways, magician and servant are like two aspects—thought and action—of the same being. But Ariel is also a separate creature. Only Prospero can see and speak to him in his numinous form. Although he can delegate tasks of creating illusion and exerting control, he must constantly determine by anxious questioning if Ariel has carried them out: “Hast thou, spirit / Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?” (I.ii.193–94). “But are they, Ariel, safe?” (l. 217). Prospero lavishes affection on him, calling him “my dainty Ariel” (V.i.95) and “chick” (l. 316). He responds to Ariel’s child-like question about whether he loves him with the fond affirmative “dearly” (IV.i.49). But Ariel is not of his master’s element and their natures cannot mix forever.
In his “prescience,” Prospero has known all along that the foundering ship contains not only his enemies but his likely future son-in-law. They have never met. But, although Ferdinand is the son of Antonio’s co-conspirator, the King of Naples, it is clear from his first appearance that he is worthy of Prospero’s hopes. While the rest of the passengers and crew react to the tempest with curses and despair, the King and Prince of Naples are “at prayers” (I.i.50). After the ship splits asunder, Ariel lands Ferdinand alone, as Prospero instructs. Thinking the others drowned, the young man gives way to grief, sitting with “his arms in [a] sad knot” (I.ii.222–24) and “weeping again the King [his] father’s wrack” (l. 437). Ferdinand is the good son of a bad father. That point should be qualified: the King, although a corrupt ruler, is a loving parent. As his despair over Ferdinand’s supposed drowning shows, the affection between father and son is deep and mutual.
Ferdinand also proves a Romeo-like ideal lover, bold, ardent, and strikingly handsome—“a goodly person,” in Prospero’s measured description to Miranda, though “something stained with grief (that’s beauty’s canker)” (ll. 415–16). Miranda, who has seen no other man but her father, expresses no qualms about the young man’s looks: “I might call him a thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble.” Though Ferdinand has known a number of other noblewomen, he is no less hyperbolic about Miranda’s beauty. He thinks her “a goddess,” and, before he discovers that she can speak his language, marvels: “O you wonder!” Prospero, watching this meeting, sees this mutual attraction as confirmation of his plan’s rightness. He confides to Ariel in asides: “It goes on, I see, as my soul prompts it” (ll. 420–21). From the first, then, Prospero sees Ferdinand not as his rival but as his successor in Miranda’s affections. He does not want to monopolize his daughter but to share her. As he later muses in soliloquy, he thinks of her as “his and mine loved darling” (III.iii.93).
Although his behavior may seem voyeuristic, Prospero is not observing the lovers for prurient ends. Miranda is utterly innocent and Ferdinand a still unproven entity. Prospero wants to be sure of the young man’s mettle before he leaves his “loved darling” in his charge. All his magic would be mockery if the object of it were corrupt or weak. He puts Ferdinand to a number of tests, both to slow the hot pace of the courtship, “lest too light winning make the prize too light” (I.ii.452–53), and to gauge Ferdinand’s worth. He accuses the prince of being a “spy” and a “traitor” (ll. 456, 461) who has come to usurp the island kingdom. When Ferdinand protests, Prospero devises cruel punishments: manacles, and a diet of sea water, mussels, and acorn husks—Prodigal Son fare. Ferdinand bravely draws his sword to defend himself but is “charmed from moving.”
Such mistreatment spurs Miranda to action. Dismayed by Ferdinand’s arrest, she “hang[s] on [her father’s] garments” and cries, “Sir, have pity. / I’ll be his surety.” She is convinced of his goodness by his beauty: “so fair a house,” she argues, could not contain an “ill spirit” (l. 459). In this idyllic world, Ferdinand proves worthy of Miranda’s intuitive trust. Although he chafes at Prospero’s harshness in sentencing him to menial labor, he gallantly refuses both her urging to disobey her father’s orders and her offer of working in his stead. He lavishes praise on her, calling her “perfect” and “peerless,” and begs to know her name, that he might include it in his prayers. When she reveals it, he relishes playing on its derivation: “Admired Miranda … the top of admiration” (ll. 37–38).
Ferdinand’s trials are also a test of Miranda’s bond with her father. To her plea for her lover’s release, Prospero barks: “What, I say, my foot my tutor?” (I.ii.469–70). When she continues to protest, he warns, “One word more / Shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee” (ll. 476–77). This is the only time in the play that Prospero expresses an unkind feeling toward his daughter. Although his anger is mild compared to Capulet’s toward Juliet or his own toward Caliban, it could be disturbing. But Miranda seems to sense that it is feigned, or at least transient. Secure in a lifetime of devotion, she is unperturbed by his harsh words. As Ferdinand is led off to begin his sentence, she lingers to assure him:
My father’s of a better nature, sir,
Than he appears by speech. This is unwonted
Which now came from him [ll. 496–99].
Miranda is also undeterred by Prospero’s “hests” about her behavior. He has told her not to reveal her name and not to “prattle” to Ferdinand of her love. He evidently wants her actions to be governed by “modesty” and her charms to retain an air of mystery. But Miranda ignores these directives. Juliet-like, she asks Ferdinand candidly: “Do you love me?” He responds ardently: “I / Beyond all limit of what else i’ th’world / Do love, prize, honor you” (III.i.71–73). The declaration moves her to “weep” with happiness. Like Juliet, in spite or perhaps because of being a novice, she banishes “bashful cunning” and herself proposes marriage. She goes a step further and offers to “die [Ferdinand’s] maid” if he refuses her and, in the meantime, to be his “servant.” Miranda is taking a great chance on rejection, humiliation, even danger. But her instincts are sound. Though more idealistic than the father who has sheltered her from the world’s wiles, she has his perspicacity.
Miranda has been right to feel no fear of Prospero’s wrath. Unlike Juliet, she has no soliloquies—no secrets from her father. One reason is that she is a simpler character, a sketch to Juliet’s fully rounded young woman. But on the level of psychological realism, Miranda is so open because she is so secure. There is no need for guile with a father who senses her needs and puts her happiness before his own. In the idyllic world of The Tempest, the daughter’s desired match is not only sanctioned but orchestrated by her father.
Prospero, who has entered “unseen,” has been watching the proposal. But he is careful not to disturb the tête-à-tête: he arranges its circumstances, but he leaves the outcome to the lovers. Not only is he unperturbed by Miranda’s disobedience, he expresses the utmost pleasure in this “Fair encounter / Of two most rare affections.” He prays that the “grace” of the “heavens” will bless “that which breeds between ’em,” (ll. 74–76), an allusion not only to their love but to the offspring that he hopes it will bring, the traditional fruits of a happy union.
Prospero later conveys his paternal blessing directly. He explains to Ferdinand that the “vexations” he has been made to suffer have been “but trials of thy love.” Then he praises the suitor for having “strangely stood the test.” His “compensation” is marriage to one who, her father boasts, “will outstrip all praise / And make it halt behind” (IV.i.10–11). Unlike Capulet, he does not hesitate to praise Miranda to her face and before her suitor. A last condition remains: the young man must not “break her virgin knot” before the wedding, on penalty of incurring a marriage marred by “barren hate, / Sour-eyed disdain, and discord” (ll. 19–20). Prospero is teaching him that care of Miranda is a sacred trust. Ferdinand is a willing disciple. He promises to eschew “lust” as he “hope[s] / For quiet days, fair issue, and long life” (ll. 23–24).
It takes more than words, however, to reinforce the lesson of chastity. When the magician goes off, the lovers quickly give way to “dalliance.” Prospero returns and reproaches Ferdinand, warning him in Polonius-like terms against temptation: “the strongest oaths are straw / To the fire in the blood. Be more abstemious, / Or else good night your vow!” (ll. 51–54). He then creates a show of pagan goddesses. The avowed purpose is to entertain the betrothed couple. But the spectacle also serves as a reminder not only of Prospero’s values but his powers: this is not a father-in-law whom Ferdinand would want to risk offending.
The theme of the show is stated by Iris, goddess of the rainbow: “A contract of true love to celebrate” (IV.i.84). Chastity is an important element of this concept: Venus and Cupid have been excluded, so that no “wanton claim” can entice the lovers into performing a “bed-right” before the wedding. Prospero will take no chance that Miranda be seduced and abandoned. As reward for abstinence, all the worldly blessings are promised the couple—in the words of Juno, queen of the gods: “Honor, riches, marriage blessing / Long continuance, and increasing” (ll. 106–07). As Prospero admits, he has summoned the spirits “to enact / [his] present fancies” (ll. 121–22): a fond father’s fondest wishes. Ferdinand responds with awe and gratitude:
So rare a wond’red father and a wise
Makes this place a Paradise [ll. 123–24].
Gone is his previous resentment, his conviction that Prospero is “all harshness.” Father and fiancé have become allies.
But Prospero knows too well that the couple cannot stay in this Eden. These are earthly blessings he is conferring, and for the lovers to receive them, he must engineer their return to the larger world. The conditions of that return are the defeat of his old enemies and the rescue of Ferdinand’s father, King Alonso. The news of Caliban’s “foul conspiracy” (IV.i.139) recalls Prospero to his duty and his pain. “My old brain is troubled,” he confesses to the young people.
Prospero is right to be anxious. The two younger brothers, Antonio and Sebastian, are particularly corrupt: envious, cynical, murderous. When their fellow conspirator Alonso weakens, they turn against him. Deeply depressed by the supposed drowning of Ferdinand, he would be an easy prey to their assassination plot without Prospero’s protection. His prayer before sinking into a heavy sleep—“Give us kind keepers, heavens!”—is heard by Ariel and granted by the man whose dukedom Alonso helped usurp.
Prospero knows the evildoers’ hearts and is tempted to destroy them. In a subtle twist, he must be urged to empathy by Ariel, who imagines that his own “affections would become tender” if he were “human” (V.i.17–20). But it is Prospero’s care for Miranda that chiefly restrains his fury. He chooses not the revenge that he would be justified in seeking but forgiveness and generosity. In return, he vows to ask only the villains’ “penitence” (ll. 26–28). But when he confronts Antonio and Sebastian face to face, he admits that even that condition will go unfulfilled. His own brother is the worst of the lot. Grimly, Prospero says, “I do forgive thee, / Unnatural though thou art” (ll. 78–79). Antonio remains unmoved by this mercy. Except for a wisecrack about Caliban’s marketability as a “plain fish,” he says nothing during this trial. Ruthless and vindictive, he and his moral twin Sebastian represent the continuing presence of evil in the world. If The Tempest were a tragedy, their malice would predominate. In the romance, they are reduced to Iago-like spectators at the idyllic celebration.
In contrast, Alonso, Prospero’s future in-law and Ferdinand’s father, does undergo a change of heart. He admits his old “trespass” against Prospero, and blames that sin for Ferdinand’s supposed death. When Prospero suddenly reappears in his ducal robes, Alonso repents spontaneously: “Thy dukedom I resign and do entreat / Thou pardon me my wrongs” (V.i.118–19). Prospero is not soft in his compassion. He “require[s]” that Antonio formally “restore” the title that Alonso has offered, and he torments the king a while longer with Ferdinand’s loss. He will not, however, let his fellow ruler give way to remorse: “be cheerful,” he counsels, “And think of each thing well” (ll. 250–51).
The main cheering element is the restoration of Ferdinand, and not Ferdinand alone but as half of a loving couple. Like his son, Alonso first mistakes Miranda for “a goddess,” and he readily assents to the match. The prince asserts that she is his “by immortal providence”—whose agent we have seen is Prospero—and describes the magician affectionately as a “second father” (V.i.195). Even Caliban shares in the general reformation. A grotesque shadow of his master, he had been devising a twisted plan for Miranda’s future: to match her with the sottish Stephano, the man he would have overthrow Prospero and rule the island. When Caliban sees the butler’s greed and incompetence, he repents: “I’ll be wise hereafter, and seek for grace” (V.i.295–96). It is a sentiment worthy at last of Prospero’s nurture.
Miranda is enchanted by the “beauty” of the noble visitors from the “brave new world.” Her father’s response is wry: “’Tis new to thee” (V.i.184). Yet he is careful not to spoil the mood of celebration. He keeps silent about his inside knowledge of the evildoers, and he alludes only in a brief aside to the toll that parting from Miranda will take. For all his advice to Alonso about remaining cheerful, Prospero’s own mood at the end of the “revels” he has devised is bleak. His one remaining wish is “to see the nuptial / Of these our dear-beloved solemnized” in Naples. Afterwards, he will “retire me to my Milan, where / Every third thought shall be my grave” (ll. 310–11). This line recalls his earlier description of Miranda to Ferdinand as “a third of mine own life / or that for which I live” (IV.i.3–4). Once he has carried out his vow to “abjure” his “rough magic,” to “break [his] staff” and “drown [his] book,” the old scholar will have only memories and his native “most faint” (Epilogue) strength to sustain him. But he shakes off his melancholy to perform a last benevolent act: he will use his magic to assure the travelers “calm seas” on their voyages home.
Prospero is in some ways the ultimate patriarch, protecting and guiding his child, engineering her future by means human and supernatural. But he embodies that figure in its most benevolent form. He accepts that the time has come for Miranda to pass from childhood into womanhood; in Shakespeare’s day the main rite of passage was marriage. The match that he arranges for Miranda is the one that she would—and does—choose for herself, and the union brings concord between nations and reunion between brothers. Miranda, with the confidence and resilience of the loved child, expresses no qualms about setting forth for the “brave new world.” Her father approves, her husband-to-be is all she could wish, she is looking forward only to happiness. Prospero has not burdened her with his cares. His parting wishes to Ariel could as fittingly be addressed to her: “to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well!” (V.i.317–18). It is Prospero’s willing sacrifice of his own well-being for the sake of his daughter’s that gives the play its wistful, nostalgic tone. The “music of the island” is hauntingly sweet and sad. The Tempest is a fable of fatherly wish-fulfillment and ideal nurture.
By the time that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, his own daughters were well past the vulnerable age of his heroine. According to Blakemore Evans’ dating of the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, 1611, Susanna would have been twenty-eight and Judith twenty-six at the time of its composition. The older sister had married in 1607, at the reasonable age of twenty-four; Judith was to marry the year of her father’s death, 1616, at the rather advanced age for those times of thirty-one. In 1596, the year most scholars estimate that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, his elder daughter was about Juliet’s age—thirteen—and he had just lost his only son. While no one would claim that Capulet is a stand-in for the playwright, it is possible that the intensity of the old man’s grief has an autobiographical source.
Whether or not Shakespeare’s relationship with his own daughters inspired The Tempest, the tone is one of nostalgic celebration, the main character a father devoted to a beloved child. This is not to suggest that Prospero is soft or self-effacing. He has an iron will, marked courage, and a temper every bit as fierce as Capulet’s. He also has a comparable belief in his own authority. But he exercises those qualities not against but in sensitive concord with his daughter’s feelings. His grief at his impending separation from Miranda is tempered by satisfaction that he has secured her happiness and by the prospect of future reunions. Capulet has no such consolations for his old age. By the final act, his oppression of Juliet has turned the wedding dance he anticipated into a dirge. In contrast, in The Tempest, under Prospero’s guiding hand, the “music of the island” has come to soothe and bless all who have ears to hear it.