William Shakespeare · c. 1611
Shakespeare's The Tempest is the last play he is believed to have written alone, performed at court in 1611 and published posthumously in the 1623 First Folio as the opening play of the collection. It is short, formally tight (almost unique in Shakespeare for observing the classical unities of time and place), and built around an exiled magician's revenge that turns, in the play's central pivot, into forgiveness. The play has been read as a fairy-tale comedy, as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage, and — in the last fifty years — as a meditation on colonialism that Shakespeare may not have intended but did write.
Twelve years before the play's action, Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, was deposed by his brother Antonio with the help of King Alonso of Naples. Prospero and his infant daughter Miranda were set adrift in a boat; they washed ashore on a remote island, where Prospero has lived since, mastering magical arts. The play opens with Prospero summoning a storm to wreck the ship carrying Antonio, Alonso, and their courtiers past the island. The court party struggles ashore; over the course of a single afternoon, Prospero engineers their education and his reconciliation.
The play's classical unities matter: events take place in roughly the same time as the performance (four hours), on one island. The compression gives the play a fairy-tale clarity.
The island has three inhabitants before the shipwreck:
The relationships among these four — the colonial hierarchy, the parent-child bond, the master-servant exchange — are what the play examines.
Since the 1960s, the most influential reading of The Tempest has emphasised its colonial dimension. Prospero arrives at an inhabited island, dispossesses its native inhabitant, teaches him the colonisers' language, exploits his labour, calls him "thing of darkness," imprisons him in a rock. Caliban's resistance — including the plot with Stephano and Trinculo to overthrow Prospero — is the colonised's resistance.
This reading is anachronistic in the strict sense — the play was not written as a colonial allegory in the modern sense — but Shakespeare drew on the available reports of New World colonisation (the 1609 Bermuda shipwreck of the Sea Venture; Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals," which Shakespeare clearly knew). The colonial elements are in the text, regardless of authorial intent.
Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête (1969) rewrites the play with Caliban as the protagonist, an explicit postcolonial revision. The colonial reading is now unavoidable.
The autobiographical reading — Prospero as Shakespeare, the island as the stage, Prospero's renunciation of magic at the end as Shakespeare's farewell to playwriting — has been the dominant reading for centuries. Prospero's famous "Our revels now are ended" speech (Act 4) is read as Shakespeare's own statement on art:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The reading is biographically uncertain (Shakespeare went on to collaborate on at least two more plays after The Tempest) but emotionally persuasive. The play's farewell register is unmistakable; the reader can either accept the biographical frame or take the farewell as the play's own internal claim.
The play's fourth act contains a wedding masque — a performance Prospero stages for Miranda and Ferdinand. The masque is an early-17th-century courtly art form combining allegorical figures, music, and elaborate stage machinery. Shakespeare's choice to embed one in The Tempest is deliberate: the masque is a play-within-the-play, a mise en abyme that reflects the larger play's interest in performance, illusion, and the magic that produces both.
The masque is interrupted by Prospero's sudden remembering of Caliban's conspiracy. The interruption is what produces the famous "revels" speech. The interruption itself is the play's argument: even the most beautiful illusion has the world's demands waiting just outside it.
The play's deepest moral move is in Act 5. Prospero, having the conspirators completely in his power, chooses forgiveness over revenge. Ariel reports that the courtiers are weeping in their distress, and Prospero says:
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance.
The reversal is one of the most quiet and least theatrical turning points in Shakespeare. Most tragedies and revenge plays escalate; this play steps off the escalator. The "rarer action" is the new principle. Whether Prospero genuinely achieves it (he still says "this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" about Caliban — acknowledgment but not full release) is another of the play's open questions.
The play ends with Prospero stepping forward to address the audience directly. His final speech asks for the audience's applause as the release that will let him sail back to Milan. The convention of the epilogue is being used to make the audience complicit: we cannot complete the play without releasing the magician. The fourth wall, never very solid in Shakespeare, is here explicitly dismantled. We are in the play; the play has been about us.
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