The Tempest

The Tempest Review

The Tempest is Shakespeare’s last word — the final play he wrote alone — and it reads like a man settling accounts. Prospero has spent twelve years on an enchanted island, mastering magic, raising his daughter, and waiting for the moment when fate delivers his enemies within reach. When that moment comes, he does not destroy them. He forgives them. The play is about what it costs to do that, and whether the forgiveness is entirely real.

This is a play in which everything is controlled — by Prospero, and through Prospero by Shakespeare. The storm of the opening scene, which appears to be a catastrophe, is a controlled deception; no one actually drowns. Miranda’s love for Ferdinand is engineered: Prospero arranges their meeting and then, for reasons the play makes deliberately opaque, harasses Ferdinand to test him. Ariel executes every plan. Even Caliban’s conspiracy is known and managed. The island is a theatre, and Prospero is its director.

What makes this disturbing rather than merely neat is Caliban. His claim to the island — “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother” — is not refuted, only overridden. Twentieth-century post-colonial criticism found in him a figure of extraordinary contemporary relevance, and the play has been read by writers from Aimé Césaire to Derek Walcott as a template for the colonial relationship. Shakespeare seems to have intuited this ambivalence: Caliban’s language is some of the most beautiful verse in the play, and Prospero cannot quite dismiss him.

The epilogue, in which Prospero steps out of the fiction and asks the audience to release him with their applause, has been read since the Romantic period as Shakespeare’s farewell to his art. Whether that reading is literal or not, it is the right tone on which to close a career.

This Folger Shakespeare Library edition provides a clean text with notes attentive to both the theatrical and the post-colonial dimensions of the play.

Reviewed edition: Folger Shakespeare Library / Simon & Schuster (ISBN 0743482832)

The Classical Unities and What Shakespeare Does with Them

The Tempest is the Shakespeare play that most strictly observes the classical unities of time, place, and action — the dramatic rules derived from Aristotle and promoted by Renaissance theorists. The entire play takes place in less than four hours on a single island, and the action proceeds without subplot to distract from the main story. This compression is not accidental; it gives the play its unusual formal concentration, its quality of a ritual or ceremony completed within a defined and bounded time. Everything that happens does so within the frame Prospero has constructed, and when that frame is lifted, the play ends.

The observation of the unities is itself part of the play’s meaning. Prospero controls the island with total authority, and the play’s formal structure enacts that control: nothing occurs outside what he has arranged. The unities are the dramatic correlative of his power. When he renounces his art — “I’ll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book” — the structural control of the play ends with it. The Epilogue, in which Prospero steps outside the fiction and addresses the audience directly, asking for their release, is the moment at which the unities finally dissolve: the island no longer exists, the control no longer operates, and the playwright stands before his audience asking to be let go.

Ariel, Caliban, and the Colonial Reading

The post-colonial reading of The Tempest — developed by critics including Aimé Césaire, whose 1969 play Une Tempête rewrites the play from Caliban’s perspective, and C.L.R. James, and George Lamming — treats Prospero’s relationship to Caliban as a template for European colonial power over indigenous peoples. Caliban was on the island before Prospero arrived; Prospero enslaved him, taught him language, and uses that language as an instrument of control. Caliban’s famous rebuke — “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse” — has been read since the twentieth century as one of the most precise formulations of the colonial condition in literature.

The post-colonial reading does not require the play to be an allegory — Shakespeare was not writing about colonialism in the way that, say, Heart of Darkness is writing about it — but it does require honesty about what the play contains. Caliban’s claim to the island is not refuted. Prospero’s response is not argument but power. The play registers this without resolving it, which is why it has sustained such different readings across different historical moments.

The Date, Sources, and First Performance

The Tempest was probably written in 1610-1611 and was performed at court in the winter of 1611 as well as at the Globe. Among its sources is a pamphlet account of the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture off the coast of Bermuda — a ship carrying settlers to Virginia — and the survivors’ experience on the island before constructing new vessels and completing their journey. The setting of the play is never specified as Bermuda, and Prospero’s island has been imagined as lying in the Mediterranean by most productions; but the shipwreck pamphlets provided Shakespeare with the texture of island survival that the play draws on.

The play was included in the First Folio (1623) as the first play in the volume, which has led to speculation — probably too much speculation — about its symbolic positioning. Whether or not the placement was deliberate, The Tempest has functioned as a valediction since the Romantic period found in Prospero’s renunciation of magic a figure for Shakespeare’s own retirement from the theatre.

Prospero’s Problem

What makes Prospero a more interesting figure than his total control of the plot might suggest is his relationship to forgiveness. He arrives at forgiveness — he chooses it, in the play’s climactic moment — but the play is careful to show that this choice does not come easily or feel entirely genuine. When Ariel says that if he were human, he would feel compassion for Prospero’s enemies, and Prospero replies that he will be more tender than a spirit, the concession is real but also slightly forced, the decision of reason against feeling rather than the generous impulse of a changed heart. He forgives; he is perhaps not forgiving. This distinction gives the play its moral complexity and its resistance to the consolations that the romance genre, which The Tempest formally resembles, usually delivers.