The Tempest

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tempest opens with a ship shattering apart in a storm, sailors screaming, and a king convinced he is about to drown. Then, in the very next scene, a young woman named Miranda watches from the shore and weeps for the strangers she sees suffering. Her father, Prospero, tells her gently: he arranged the whole thing.

  That tension between power and compassion sits at the heart of what is probably the last play William Shakespeare wrote on his own, composed sometime between late 1610 and mid-1611. It is a play about a magician who can command spirits and bend weather, yet cannot decide whether to forgive the brother who stole his throne. It is a play about an island that may be in the Mediterranean or may be in the Atlantic, and about a servant who might be a monster or might be a dispossessed king. It is short, strange, and almost impossibly rich.

  Over four centuries of performance, readers and audiences have argued about what The Tempest really means: a farewell from Shakespeare himself, an allegory of colonialism, a meditation on magic and science, a study in the limits of forgiveness. This documentary follows each of those threads in turn, beginning with the storm itself.

• 2. Prospero's World

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  Twelve years before the action begins, Prospero held the title of Duke of Milan. His brother Antonio, working with Alonso, King of Naples, usurped him and set him adrift with his infant daughter Miranda. They landed on a remote island, and Prospero has ruled it ever since through the force of his magic.

  The island had exactly one inhabitant before they arrived: Caliban, son of the Algerian witch Sycorax, who had died before Prospero came. Prospero pressed Caliban into service. He also found Ariel, a spirit Sycorax had imprisoned in a cloven pine, freed him, and bound him into servitude in turn. Those two servants could hardly be more different. Ariel represents, in one reading the source text traces, beauty, gratitude, and air. Caliban represents monstrosity, ingratitude, and earth. Between them, Prospero exercises a control that later critics would come to read as something darker than stewardship.

  Miranda, now fifteen at the time the play takes place, has grown up knowing only male company. Prospero tells her she cannot remember life before the island. When she mentions a memory of four or five women who tended to her as a young child, it visibly unsettles him. He prefers to be her sole teacher, the absolute source of her history. That small detail drew the attention of feminist critics who noted that Miranda's only sanctioned role, in her father's eyes, is to remain chaste until a suitable marriage can be arranged.

  Prospero's plan, once a ship carrying Antonio passes nearby, is to conjure a storm through Ariel, wreck the ship, separate the survivors into groups across the island, and use the chaos to reclaim his dukedom and secure Miranda's future by engineering her romance with Ferdinand, Alonso's son and heir to the throne of Naples.

• 3. Sources and Their Shipwrecks

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  William Strachey's eyewitness account of the real-life wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609, off the coast of Bermuda while the ship was sailing toward Virginia, is considered a primary source for the play's opening storm. Strachey's report was not published until 1625, but he had set it down earlier in a private letter dated the 15th of July 1610, addressed to an unnamed woman. Shakespeare, who had personal connections with members of the Virginia Company, is thought to have read this letter sometime during 1610.

  Around the same time, another Sea Venture survivor named Silvester Jourdain published his own account, A Discovery of The Barmudas, otherwise Called the Ile of Divels. The Council of Virginia also released a 1610 pamphlet with a lengthy title defending the colonial enterprise. Scholar Kenneth Muir cautioned, however, against overstating the verbal echoes between these texts and the play. He observed that most shipwreck narratives in history and fiction share the same details regardless of their source.

  For Gonzalo's speech about an ideal society, Shakespeare drew on Michel de Montaigne's essay "Of the Canibales," translated into English by John Florio in a 1603 edition. Prospero's farewell to magic in Act Five lifts its language from an invocation by the sorceress Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses. That borrowing would later become significant: a speech about renouncing magic turns out to be spoken in a witch's words.

  The play's overall structure may owe something to the Italian commedia dell'arte tradition, which sometimes featured a magician and his daughter, supernatural servants, and a pair of comic figures resembling Stephano and Trinculo. A 1594 history of Italy may have contributed some of the characters' names.

• 4. The First Folio's Cleanest Text

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  The Tempest first appeared in print in 1623, in the collection now known as the First Folio. It holds the position of first play in that volume, listed among the comedies, and it is the most carefully printed of the thirty-six plays the collection contains.

  The scrivener Ralph Crane, employed by Shakespeare's company the King's Men, prepared the handwritten manuscript on which the Folio text was based. Crane probably worked from Shakespeare's rough draft and is known to have tidied texts, adjusted act and scene divisions, and added his own touches. He had a fondness for hyphenating words and for contractions such as changing "with the king" to "wi'th' King". The elaborate stage directions in The Tempest are thought to reflect his hand, and they offer scholars clues about how the King's Men actually staged the play.

  The printing was handled by William Jaggard, who was blind by that point in his career. A landmark study by Charlton Hinman in the 1960s used distinctive quirks in the printed letters to identify three separate compositors who worked on The Tempest: Compositor B, C, and F. Compositor B, described as an experienced journeyman who could occasionally be careless, handled the first page and six others. There is also evidence that the press run was stopped at least four times to allow proofreading.

  One mystery that arose from close study of the text concerns a line spoken by Ferdinand after the masque. The word "wise" appears at line 123 of Act 4, but a 1978 suggestion proposed that a piece of the crossbar on the type had broken during printing, and the word was always meant to be "wife." Modern editors have not agreed: the Oxford edition says "wife," the Arden says "wise."

• 5. Magic, Science, and Sycorax

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  Prospero practices what Renaissance thinkers called theurgy: white magic, rooted in neo-Platonic philosophy, as opposed to goety, or black magic. The distinction mattered in Shakespeare's England. King James, in his book Daemonologie, declared all magic punishable by death. Jonson's satire The Alchemist, performed by Shakespeare's own company the King's Men around the same time The Tempest was written, portrayed its central magician as nothing more than a con artist.

  Francis Bacon, who was serving as King James's Attorney-General at the time, had written in his Magnalia Naturae about the possibility of the new philosophy giving humans power over storms, seasons, germination, and harvests. That framing gives Prospero's magic a second reading: not as supernatural witchcraft but as an early image of scientific mastery over nature.

  The contrast with Sycorax sharpens the question of what magic actually is. Sycorax never appears on stage; she died before the play begins. Yet Prospero returns to her repeatedly, insisting his white magic exceeds her black magic, citing the fact that she could not undo Ariel's imprisonment in a cloven pine while he could. Scholar Stephen Orgel concluded that this contrast does not hold as neatly as Prospero claims: there is no evidence that the spirits Sycorax commanded were any different from those Prospero controls, and Ariel served both of them unwillingly.

  The situation is further complicated by Prospero's farewell speech, which many in Shakespeare's audience would have recognized as drawn word for word from Medea's invocation in Ovid. A man renouncing magic speaks in a famous witch's voice. Whether that is irony, homage, or inadvertence remains open.

• 6. Caliban Across Four Centuries

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  Frank Benson, preparing to play Caliban in 1891, went to the zoo to study monkeys and baboons. On stage, one reviewer described him as "half-monkey, half-coconut." He hung upside-down from a tree and gibbered.

  That image captures how Caliban was understood through most of the play's performance history: as a sub-human creature, a missing evolutionary link. Herbert Beerbohm Tree wore fur and seaweed for a 1904 production, with waist-length hair and an apelike bearing. It was not until 1934 that Roger Livesey became the first actor to play the role with black makeup. Canada Lee brought it to the Theatre Guild in New York in 1945, establishing a tradition continued by Earle Hyman in 1960 and James Earl Jones in 1962.

  Beginning around 1950, with the publication of Octave Mannoni's Psychology of Colonization, postcolonial theorists began reading Caliban differently. Caliban's line "This island's mine... which thou tak'st from me" became, in the 1960s and 1970s, a rallying cry for African and Caribbean intellectuals. Aimé Césaire of Martinique wrote his 1969 French-language play Une Tempête, setting the story in a colonial context and portraying Ariel as a mulatto who chooses negotiation over rebellion. Roberto Fernandez Retamar set his version in Cuba. Barbadian poet E. P. Kamau Brathwaite's 1969 poem "Caliban" traced the character's significance from the first voyage of Columbus through to the Cuban Revolution.

  In 1995, Sierra Leonean writer Lemuel Johnson's Highlife for Caliban imagined the character as a king ruling his own kingdom. The RSC's 2019 engagement with the play, through Mohegan writer Madeline Sayet's solo show Where We Belong at Shakespeare's Globe, asked what would happen to Caliban's native language after the European characters sailed away.

• 7. Music, Opera, and the Sonic Island

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  The Tempest contains more music than any other Shakespeare play. Scholar Julie Sanders attributes its appeal to composers to the perceived lyricism and musicality of the text itself.

  Two songs that may have been used in performances during Shakespeare's own lifetime survive in a 1659 collection called Cheerful Ayres or Ballads: "Full Fathom Five" and "Where The Bee Sucks There Suck I," both attributed to Robert Johnson, who regularly composed for the King's Men. Marianne Faithfull recorded a version of "Full Fathom Five" for her 1965 album Come My Way, and Pete Seeger recorded another for his 1966 album Dangerous Songs!?

  Among the composers who wrote incidental music for the play, Arthur Sullivan's contribution stands out for timing: it was his graduation piece, completed in 1861, and his score was still in use half a century later for the Old Vic's 1914 production. Ernest Chausson's 1888 incidental music for a French production is believed to be the first orchestral work to use the celesta. Jean Sibelius wrote his incidental music in 1926 for a production at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, representing Prospero through a combination of harps and percussion that critics praised for capturing the resonant ambiguity of the character.

  At least forty-six operas or semi-operas based on the play exist. Thomas Adès's 2004 opera The Tempest stretches the soprano singing Ariel to the higher end of the register, making the androgyny of the role audible. The RSC's 2016 production, directed by Gregory Doran with Simon Russell Beale as Prospero, projected Ariel in real time as a pixelated humanoid sprite using motion-capture technology, in collaboration with The Imaginarium and Intel.

• 8. Prospero's Forgiveness

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  Prospero's relationship with forgiveness is one of the most technically precise pieces of writing in the play. His stated position through most of the action is rage and vengeance. In the final act, he announces that since his enemies are penitent, his purpose extends not a frown further.

  But scholar Stephen Orgel, in his introduction to the Oxford edition, noted a condition embedded in that speech: Antonio is never given a moment of remorse or contrition. He receives forgiveness without expressing penitence. Prospero's words to Antonio zigzag in a way the source makes vivid: "I do forgive thee," immediately followed by "Unnatural though thou art!", then "At this time I will tell no tales," almost reversed by "Most wicked sir, whom to call brother would even infect my mouth," and finally a confirmation of forgiveness that simultaneously demands the return of the dukedom.

  The spareness of Shakespeare's writing in the last act, as Orgel observed, leaves open whether Prospero always intended to forgive, or whether he is moved by Ariel's counsel to be "tender," or whether the change is forced on him by shame or political necessity. That ambiguity is not a flaw in the script; it is what allows each production to take a different position.

  Thomas Campbell, writing in 1838, was the first critic to suggest that Prospero was meant to partially represent Shakespeare, though Campbell later abandoned the idea. The identification has persisted. Shakespeare's biographer Samuel Schoenbaum pointed to the farewell speech beginning "Ye elves of hills..." as more pertinent to Shakespeare than to Prospero, since there is no dramatic reason for Prospero to claim he has woken sleepers from their graves, while Shakespeare has done exactly that, metaphorically, for countless historical figures. In the epilogue, Prospero steps outside the play entirely to ask the audience to set him free with their applause, an act the scholar Germaine Greer read as both Shakespeare and Prospero not so much bidding farewell to the stage as begging to be released from it.