The Tempest
Printed as the first play in the Folio, The Tempest has always enjoyed a special prominence in the Shakespeare canon. Its first recorded performance took place at James I’s court on 1 November 1611, and it cannot have been much more than a year old then. The Tempest is indebted to three texts unavailable before the autumn of 1610, namely William *Strachey’s True Reportary of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates (completed in Virginia in July 1610, and circulated in manuscript before its eventual publication in 1625), Sylvester *Jourdan’s Discovery of the Bermudas (printed in 1610, with a dedication dated 13 October), and the Council of Virginia’s True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony in Virginia (entered in the *Stationers’ Register in November 1610 and printed before the end of the year). An apparently irresistible urge to identify Prospero with Shakespeare (visible since the 1660s) has led many commentators to think of The Tempest as the playwright’s personal farewell to the stage, and while this view seems both sentimental and slightly inaccurate (since Shakespeare was yet to co-write Cardenio, All Is True (Henry VIII), and The Two Noble Kinsmen with *Fletcher), this probably was his last unassisted work for the theatre, completed in 1611. Its position in the Folio may reflect his colleagues’ recognition of this fact.
Text: The Folio provides the only authoritative text of the play: it was prepared with care, apparently from a literary transcript by the scribe Ralph *Crane. The text’s unusually detailed stage directions were probably elaborated by Crane for the benefit of readers from briefer indications in his copy, but they may well reflect his accurate recollections of seeing the play staged. The Tempest calls for an unusual quantity of *music, and the words of its *songs are preserved in a number of 17th-century manuscripts. These all seem to derive from the Folio text, but some may supplement it by accurately recording where breaks came between verses and refrains.
Sources: The three texts from late 1610 which lie behind this play supplied Shakespeare with the story of a much-discussed shipwreck in the West Indies. The Sea-Adventure, flagship of a nine-strong flotilla taking 500 colonists from Plymouth to Virginia, struck the coast of Bermuda in a storm on 29 July 1609 and was presumed lost, but in May 1610 the bulk of its crew and passengers reached Jamestown, having wintered on Bermuda and built themselves pinnaces. The accounts Shakespeare read, which gave hints for details in the play such as the St Elmo’s fire with which *Ariel adorns the storm (1.2.197–204), represent the preservation of the survivors as the work of Providence (just as Gonzalo regards the outcome of the play’s story, 5.1.204–16). It may be significant to the play’s depictions of authority and subordination that these texts are almost as interested in the suppression of potential mutiny as they are in the unfamiliar climate and natural history of Bermuda, and it is probably relevant to the play that before their landing there the mariners had regarded the island as a haunt of evil spirits.
Beyond these local sources, the play is indebted to Shakespeare’s other reading about *travel, trade, and *colonialism, notably in Robert Eden’s History of Travel (1577), from which he derived the name of Sycorax’s god Setebos, and in *Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Cannibals’, the source for Gonzalo’s vision of an ideal commonwealth (2.1.149–74). *Caliban’s name may be related to ‘Carib’ as well as to ‘Cannibal’, suggesting that Shakespeare had read early accounts of *Caribbean native cultures. Other important debts are to *Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from which Shakespeare took Prospero’s farewell to his magic (5.1.33–57) almost verbatim (tellingly, from a speech by the sorceress Medea), and to *Virgil’s Aeneid, particularly its depiction of Aeneas’ dealings with Dido, Queen of Carthage, whom Shakespeare remembered often during this play about a ship wrecked between Tunis and Italy. The main plot of the play, though—unusually, largely told in retrospect, the play neoclassically confining itself to showing the last few hours of the story in a single location—is Shakespeare’s own.
Synopsis: 1.1 Alonso, King of Naples, his son Ferdinand, their ally Antonio, Duke of Milan, and a number of courtiers are returning to Italy from Alonso’s daughter’s wedding to the King of Tunis when their ship is driven aground in a violent storm, the sailors struggling in vain to preserve it between the interruptions of their aristocratic passengers. All are convinced they are about to drown.
A famous textual crux in The Tempest (4.1.123): ‘wise’ or ‘wife’? Is the crucial letter a worn ‘f’, a long ‘s’, or a long ‘s’ mistakenly substituting for an ‘f’? (Cf. the specimens of ‘s’ and ‘f’ in ‘present fancies’ at the end of Prospero’s previous speech.) The differing forensic verdicts of successive textual critics have inevitably been influenced by their critical understanding of the line’s context and purport.
1.2 After the storm, Prospero reassures his daughter Miranda that no one has perished in the shipwreck, which he caused and controlled by magic. For the first time he tells her of how, twelve years earlier, they came to this island. The rightful Duke of Milan, Prospero was usurped by his brother Antonio, who, governing the state while Prospero studied magic, promised that Milan would pay tribute to Naples in return for Alonso’s military backing for his coup. Prospero and the 3-year-old Miranda were set adrift far out to sea in a small boat provisioned and supplied with Prospero’s books only at the insistence of a humane Neapolitan courtier, Gonzalo. Since then Prospero has brought Miranda up on the island where they came ashore, in ignorance of his royalty, but now his enemies have been brought to the island and their future depends on the next few hours. While Miranda falls into a magically induced sleep, Prospero summons his spirit Ariel, who describes how he executed the storm and how he has left the mariners and passengers, the former asleep on the safely harboured ship, Ferdinand alone, and the rest dispersed around the island. When Ariel reminds Prospero of his promise to free him from his labours, the enchanter reminds him of his twelve-year confinement in a pine at the hands of the banished Algerian witch Sycorax (now dead, though survived by her son Caliban), and threatens to renew such an imprisonment if Ariel complains again. Promising to free him after two days, Prospero commands Ariel to reappear as a sea-nymph, visible only to him. Miranda awakens and Prospero summons their slave Caliban, who curses them, remembering their kinder treatment when they first came to the island, which he insists is rightfully his. He has been enslaved since an attempt to rape Miranda, which he unrepentantly remembers. Prospero sends him to fetch fuel, threatening him with torments. After Caliban’s departure, the invisible Ariel leads Ferdinand to them with the song ‘Come unto these yellow sands’, confirming the Prince’s belief that his father has drowned with another, ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’. Ferdinand and Miranda fall in love instantly, and he proposes to her: this is just as Prospero has planned, but he feigns displeasure, offering to imprison Ferdinand, who is magically paralysed when he attempts to draw his sword.
2.1 Elsewhere on the island, Gonzalo tries to comfort Alonso, who is convinced Ferdinand has drowned: Antonio and Alonso’s brother Sebastian, however, ridicule Gonzalo and reproach Alonso for marrying his daughter to an African. Gonzalo, further mocked by Antonio and Sebastian, speaks of the utopian community he imagines establishing on the island. The invisible Ariel plays music and all sleep except Antonio and Sebastian: Antonio persuades Sebastian he should seize the opportunity to make himself King of Naples by violence, and they both draw swords to kill Alonso and Gonzalo. Ariel, however, rouses Gonzalo with a song, ‘While you here do snoring lie’, and the whole party awakens, obliging the two would-be assassins to pretend they have drawn because alarmed by a noise as of lions.
2.2 Caliban, seeing the jester Trinculo, thinks he is one of Prospero’s tormenting spirits, and lies hiding under his gaberdine: Trinculo, finding him, at first thinks him a monstrous fish whom he wishes he could exhibit lucratively at English fairs, but decides he must be a thunder-struck native. When it begins to rain, he too takes shelter under the gaberdine. Alonso’s drunken butler Stefano, drinking sack preserved from the wreck and singing, thinks the gaberdine is a four-legged monster, then a two-headed one too, before he realizes the truth and is reunited with Trinculo. Caliban, given some of Stefano’s sack, thinks him a god, swears allegiance to him, and sings in joy of his deliverance from Prospero’s slavery.
3.1 Concealed, Prospero watches with approval as Ferdinand, enslaved and bearing logs for him, speaks with Miranda and the two vow to marry.
3.2 Increasingly drunk, Caliban begins to fall out with Trinculo, a quarrel exacerbated by Ariel, who invisibly simulates Trinculo’s voice and contradicts Caliban as he speaks of Prospero. Caliban proposes that Stefano should murder Prospero during his afternoon nap and marry Miranda, a scheme to which he and Trinculo agree. They sing a catch, the tune of which Ariel invisibly plays on a tabor and pipe. Caliban reassures the Italians that the island is full of harmless magical sounds.
3.3 Alonso and his hungry fellows are astonished when spirits lay out a banquet before them, inviting them to dine. As Prospero watches invisibly from above, Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian are about to eat when Ariel appears in the shape of a harpy, makes the banquet disappear, and speaks of the three’s sinfulness, reminding them of the banishment of Prospero. Prospero congratulates Ariel on his performance. Alonso, convinced Ferdinand has died in punishment for his own role in Antonio’s usurpation, is stricken with guilt.
William Hogarth’s slightly biblical version of The Tempest 1.3, 1735–40. Hogarth helped to establish scenes from Shakespeare as an important part of any British painter’s subject matter.
4.1 Prospero, explaining that Ferdinand’s servitude was only a test of his love, blesses his engagement to Miranda, though he warns the Prince severely against premarital sex. To celebrate the occasion, Prospero’s spirits perform a masque in which Iris, at Juno’s behest, summons Ceres (played by Ariel) to help bless the couple, in the welcome absence of Venus and Cupid. During a dance of nymphs and reapers, however, Prospero remembers Caliban’s plot, and hastily terminates the unfinished masque, apologizing to Ferdinand for his distraction but pointing out that all the world is as mortal and fragile as was the spirits’ performance. After the couple have gone, Ariel tells Prospero how he has led Caliban, Stefano, and Trinculo through thorns and a filthy pool on their way to seek him: at Prospero’s bidding he hangs out fancy clothing, and while Stefano and Trinculo are distracted by the task of stealing it—to Caliban’s impatience—Prospero and Ariel drive the three of them away to more torment with spirits in the shapes of hunting dogs.
5.1 Prospero, in his magic robes, listens to Ariel’s compassionate description of the sufferings of Alonso and his party (imprisoned by magic on Prospero’s instructions), and resolves that since they are penitent he will not pursue vengeance against them. While Ariel goes to release them, he draws a circle with his staff, remembering the magnificent achievements of his magic powers but vowing to renounce them. Alonso and his followers are led into the circle by Ariel, still charmed, and Prospero speaks to them. Ariel sings ‘Where the bee sucks’, a song of his imminent freedom, as he dresses Prospero in his former clothes as Duke of Milan. Alonso, Gonzalo, and the others recover their wits and are astonished to be greeted by Prospero. Prospero forgives Antonio, but demands the restoration of his dukedom, pointing out privately that he knows of the earlier assassination attempt against Alonso. When Alonso speaks in grief about the presumed death of Ferdinand, Prospero says he too lost a child in the recent storm, and draws a curtain to reveal Miranda and Ferdinand playing chess together. Alonso and Ferdinand are happily reunited. Miranda is astonished at the beauty of mankind, and Alonso and Gonzalo bless her engagement to Ferdinand. Ariel brings the Master and Boatswain, who are amazed to report that the ship and crew are perfectly intact. Ariel then brings Caliban, Stefano, and Trinculo, whose conspiracy Prospero describes. Caliban, admitting he was foolish to believe his drunken companions gods, is sent to tidy Prospero’s cell while his former confederates return their stolen clothing. Prospero promises he will tell his whole story before they set sail for Italy the following morning, and assures Ariel that he will be free as soon as he has provided a wind which will enable them to catch up with the rest of Alonso’s fleet. Alone, Prospero speaks an epilogue, in rhyme, saying that now that he has no magic powers he needs the audience’s indulgent applause to free him.
Artistic features: As even the above synopsis may suggest, The Tempest works less as a straightforward narrative than as a series of rich but profoundly enigmatic images, often arranged in symmetrical patterns: the parallel servitudes of Caliban and Ariel, Caliban and Ferdinand; the paired younger brothers Antonio and Sebastian; Prospero’s magical control of the sea and of the spectacle; Ariel’s performances as sea-nymph, as harpy, and as Ceres. As such it is closer to lyric, as well as more crammed with lyrics, than any other Shakespeare play, a haunting sea-poem in which celebration over what can be restored and sorrow over what must be lost are inextricably intertwined.
Critical history: The mysterious qualities of The Tempest—the sense that the play reveals only glimpses of its purposes, quite apart from dramatizing only a few hours of its characters’ lives—have given it a richer afterlife in drama, literature, and the other arts than almost any other Shakespeare play, as subsequent writers and artists have sought to explain, supplement, and extend it. Versions of Prospero the master illusionist have haunted the theatre (F. G. Waldron composed the first of several sequels, The Virgin Queen, in 1796) and, especially, film (allusions to The Tempest have, for example, become almost de rigueur in science fiction, from the 1956 outer-space version *Forbidden Planet onwards). The play’s interpreters in other media include *Hogarth, *Fuseli (who based his drawings of Prospero on portraits of Leonardo da Vinci), Iris *Murdoch, Aimé *Césaire (anti-colonialist author of Une tempête), and W. H. *Auden, and very nearly included *Mozart.
From the Restoration onwards the play was regarded as a display of imaginative liberties not possible (or permissible) for lesser writers: *Dryden, for example, cited both Caliban and Ariel as specimens of Shakespeare’s abilities to go beyond nature. His critical observations on the play, though, are perhaps less revealing as comments on it than the adaptation he co-wrote with *Davenant in 1667, The Tempest; or, The Enchanted Island. Davenant, according to Dryden, ‘found that somewhat might be added to the design of Shakespeare…and therefore to put the last hand to it, he designed the counterpart to Shakespeare’s plot, namely that of a man who had never seen a woman’. In the adaptation, which elaborates on the symmetries of Shakespeare’s original, Prospero is also responsible for a naive male ward, Hippolito, doomed to die if he ever meets a woman, and Miranda has a sister, Dorinda: in a coyly Edenic scene Dorinda and Hippolito do meet, despite Prospero’s prohibitions, and when Hippolito (uninstructed in the monogamous codes of civil society) finds himself just as enthusiastic about Miranda as he is about her sister he is killed in a duel by Ferdinand. Meanwhile Caliban, too, has a sister (confusingly, called Sycorax) whom he pairs off with Trinculo (though she is just as keen on Stefano), and the rival attempts by the mutineers to claim the island by marriage displace their attempted coup against Prospero. Prospero’s role, meanwhile, is greatly reduced: he never renounces his magic, which is in the event exceeded by that of Ariel, who is able to provide a magic cure to revive the dead Hippolito and permit a happy ending. Davenant and Dryden make The Tempest more orderly, and a good deal lighter, but their invention of the Hippolito plot makes fully visible the fears of sexuality, women, and death which seem to trouble Prospero in the original.
The identification of Prospero with The Tempest’s author is already visible in the prologue to Davenant and Dryden’s adaptation, and it became a commonplace of 18th-century poetry and prose about Shakespeare (made fully explicit by Thomas Campbell in 1838), which generally regarded the Duke of Milan as a figure of serene wisdom. The 19th century in general maintained this view, seeing the play as an autumnal work about a magician who comes to terms with the renunciation of his powers and the marriage of his only child: according to Victor *Hugo, for whom The Tempest was a powerfully mythic text which completed the Bible, this ‘last creation of Shakespeare’ has ‘the solemn tone of a testament’ and offers ‘the supreme denouement, dreamed by Shakespeare, for the bloody drama of Genesis. It is the expiation of the primordial crime.’ Even Hugo, though, had some misgivings about Prospero (calling him ‘the master of Nature and the despot of destiny’), and in time the univocally pro-Prospero reading of the play came under pressure, especially from commentators who found Caliban as potentially sympathetic as his master. The play had already come to function for some as an allegory about slavery and colonialism by the 1840s, when the Brough brothers’ *burlesque The Enchanted Isle depicted Caliban as a black abolitionist who sings the ‘Marseillaise’, and Charlotte Barnes hybridized the play (in The Forest Princess, 1844) with the story of Pocahontas. During the 20th century this view would be developed by many anti-colonial writers, particularly Octave Mannoni in *East Africa, and would become a commonplace of *cultural materialist and *new historicist criticism from the 1970s onwards. The extent to which the play, though set in the Mediterranean, is in any sense ‘about’ the New World (and a colonial enterprise which in Shakespeare’s time barely existed) has been a contentious question throughout the post-war period (not coincidentally, a period when Shakespeare studies have been increasingly dominated by North American critics). Discussions of the play in recent years have often been dominated by the question of Shakespeare’s level of approval for Prospero and the related question of the nature, black or white, of his magic.
Stage history: After its court performance in November 1611, The Tempest was again played for the royal family in 1613 during the celebrations of *Princess Elizabeth’s wedding. No further performances of the original are recorded until the mid-18th century: from 1667 the play was displaced by Davenant and Dryden’s adaptation (supplied with further *operatic embellishments in 1674, including a masque of Neptune and a girlfriend for Ariel), which became the most popular show of its time (popular enough, for example, to be wickedly parodied by Thomas *Duffett). Regularly revived at Christmas, its cast including an actress as Hippolito, a middle-aged comedian as Sycorax, and Ariel as the perfect good fairy, this play is one of the ancestors of English pantomime. David *Garrick experimented with his own drastically shortened The Tempest: An Opera (1756), but after its failure he instead revived a conservatively abridged text of Shakespeare’s original. To 18th-century audiences, however, Shakespeare’s play lacked ‘business’, and the Dryden–Davenant version returned, first as the puppet play *The Shipwreck (1780). John Philip *Kemble (a righteously authoritarian Prospero) restored Hippolito and Dorinda to the stage proper in 1789, though he gradually included more of Shakespeare’s text over the next decade. Frederick *Reynolds’s musical version in 1821 was again based on the Dryden–Davenant adaptation, and it was not until 1838 that the original play (though supplemented with lavish special effects) was again restored, by W. C. *Macready. Spectacle characterized subsequent revivals by Charles *Kean (1857), whose production employed 140 stagehands, Samuel *Phelps (1871), and Beerbohm *Tree, whose 1904 production centred on Caliban, played by himself, who was left alone to watch the Italians’ ship departing in a wistful final tableau.
In the 20th century the play was revived more frequently, with major Prosperos including Robert *Atkins (1915) and, especially, John *Gielgud, who played Ferdinand in 1926 but had already graduated to a Dantesque Prospero at the *Old Vic in 1930 (with Ralph *Richardson as Caliban). Gielgud repeated the role in 1940, in 1957 (for Peter *Brook at Stratford), and in 1973 (for Peter *Hall at the National), and his intellectual, mellifluous, exquisitely spoken rendering of the part (particularly its rhetorical set pieces) has been immensely influential (and, through *sound recordings and the film Prospero’s Books, is likely to remain so). Even within Gielgud’s performances as Prospero, however, there was an increasing sense that the Duke of Milan could no longer be played as a benign, Father Christmas-like magus: Brook’s production stressed Prospero’s obsessive brooding, while Hall had Gielgud present him as puritanically vengeful, successfully acting out his plan but not with meditative detachment. These directions have been pursued by others, too: Derek *Jacobi was a young and passionate Prospero in 1983, John *Wood an unpredictably irritable one in Nicholas Hytner’s production of 1988, Alec McCowen a frail, patronizing showman finally spat upon by Simon Russell Beale’s freed Ariel in Sam Mendes’s production of 1993. At the same time the play has continued to inspire theatrical adaptations and variations, among them Philip Osment’s This Island’s Mine (Gay Sweatshop, 1987–8). The further opening up of the play’s text to contemporary questions of gender and power visible in recent criticism has continued to expand the theatrical possibilities of this haunting, conflicted, and mysterious play.
Michael Dobson
On the screen: Dallas Bower’s BBC TV production (1939) with Peggy *Ashcroft as Miranda was one of the last Shakespeare broadcasts before the BBC closed its television service for the length of the war. The American Hallmark television series produced a memorable The Tempest (1960) with Maurice *Evans (Prospero), Lee Remick (Miranda), and Richard *Burton (Caliban). Michael *Hordern’s Prospero for BBC TV (1979) was judged dignified but undisturbing, whereas Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1980) aroused fierce critical response since it resonates with an underlying agenda which seeks to subvert heterosexual orthodoxy. Jarman presents a dark view of the relationships in the play, Heathcote Williams’s Prospero crushing Caliban’s fingers underfoot and Toyah Willcox’s Miranda displacing innocent winsomeness with brazen and compulsive sexuality. The priorities in this film are more readily understood when viewed in the context of the whole Jarman œuvre. Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), using highly sophisticated technology, bases a rewriting of the play’s action on the books that Gonzalo packs to accompany Prospero in his exile, John Gielgud taking on the multiple personality of Shakespeare, Greenaway, and Prospero, so that the film is essentially about the process of writing, filming, and experiencing simultaneously. The last of the books is Shakespeare’s First Folio with blank pages waiting for Shakespeare’s The Tempest to cover them. Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2011) starred Helen *Mirren as ‘Prospera’.
Anthony Davies, rev. Will Sharpe