Themes in The Tempest

Prospero treats Caliban's island as his from the moment he arrives on it. His first words when Caliban appears in Act 1 Scene 2 are: "Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself." Caliban's memory of the same history is different: "This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother." The play does not resolve which of them is right about ownership. It shows two people with completely incompatible accounts of a property dispute, both speaking with total conviction.

The relationship between Prospero and Caliban maps directly onto the history of European colonialism. Prospero arrives on an island, claims it, enslaves its only inhabitant, teaches him language, and when Caliban attempts to assert his original claim, responds with punishment. This was not a metaphor invented by later critics — it is the structure of colonial occupation, written into a play first performed in 1611, when English settlement of Virginia was two years old.

Caliban's most remarkable speech is in Act 3 Scene 2, when he describes the island to Stephano and Trinculo: "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not." The speech is more beautiful than anything Stephano or Trinculo say anywhere in the play. Shakespeare gives his enslaved character the lyric that most makes the audience wish they were on the island. The man Prospero calls a "poisonous slave" turns out to be its best poet.

Miranda's line in Act 5 Scene 1 — "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in't!" — is said with genuine wonder, looking at a group that includes the man who stole Prospero's dukedom and several of his accomplices. Her innocence is charming and terrible at the same moment. Prospero's reply — "'Tis new to thee" — is flat in a way that stops short of cynicism but is far from hope.

The play ends with Prospero restoring himself to his dukedom and leaving the island. Caliban is left there, his "master" gone. He has learned language — and what that language has given him, as he tells Prospero in Act 1 Scene 2, is the ability to curse. The power relationship between them never becomes anything else: Prospero needs total compliance, and every attempt by Caliban to refuse it is read as monstrousness. Whether that makes Prospero a villain is a question every production has to answer differently.

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Prospero's magic is not supernatural in the way fairy power is. His books and staff are studied knowledge — "Art," as he calls it — accumulated over years of reading while he neglected to govern Milan. His mastery of the island's spirits is the result of learning, not a natural gift. When he breaks his staff and drowns his books in Act 5 Scene 1, he is giving up an expertise, not an inheritance.

This connection between magic and art runs through the play's most discussed speech. "Our revels now are ended," Prospero tells Ferdinand in Act 4 Scene 1, after the masque he has staged dissolves. "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." He is describing an entertainment produced using spirits, but the language extends outward to life itself. The play, the performance, the watching — all of it is the same insubstantial material, and none of it lasts.

Ariel is inseparable from Prospero's art. He is the instrument through which Prospero's designs are carried out — storm, music, disappearing banquet, the masque itself. He appears as a harpy, a sea nymph, and three ministers of fate. His performances are the form that Prospero's power takes. When Prospero describes Ariel's work in Act 1 Scene 2 — the tempest executed perfectly, all souls brought safely ashore — he speaks like a director assessing his lead performer. The metaphor is not accidental.

The masque in Act 4 Scene 1 is the play's most elaborate piece of theatrical staging. Goddesses appear, bless Ferdinand and Miranda's betrothal, and summon reapers to dance with nymphs. Then Prospero remembers Caliban's plot, and the masque stops. The spirits vanish mid-dance. Prospero is shaken — Ferdinand notices and asks if he is troubled. The masque cannot coexist with an unresolved real-world threat. Art and power require the same thing: complete control.

The play's epilogue gives this theme its final turn. Prospero, without his books and staff, addresses the audience directly and asks for their applause: "But release me from my bands / With the help of your good hands." This is Shakespeare stepping very close to the boundary of the stage and saying that the magic that powers the play belongs to the audience, not the playwright. Without their willingness to believe what they see, the whole thing collapses. The epilogue is the most honest thing Prospero says.

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Prospero's account of his past in Act 1 Scene 2 takes around 200 lines. By the end of it, the audience knows that his brother Antonio conspired with Alonso of Naples to steal his dukedom and set him adrift with his three-year-old daughter in a leaking boat. He has spent twelve years on an island. He is very angry.

The storm in Act 1 Scene 1 looks like the opening move of a revenge plot. Prospero has arranged it to bring his enemies to the island, and he has the power to do whatever he wants with them. What he does over the following four acts is not straightforward punishment. He separates them, frightens them, drives some of them to the edge of madness through guilt, and then — in Act 5 Scene 1 — stops.

Ariel prompts the change. He describes the state of Alonso and his companions to Prospero: if Prospero could see them now, "your affections / Would become tender." He asks whether Prospero would be moved if he were human. Ariel, who is not human, says yes. This pushes Prospero to one of the play's most debated lines: "Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury / Do I take part." He chooses forgiveness not because he is not angry but because he believes reason is a more honourable guide than rage.

The forgiveness he extends is not warm. Antonio — his brother, the man who actually stole the dukedom — says nothing in Act 5 when Prospero confronts him. He offers no apology. Prospero forgives him anyway, in a speech still taut with contempt: "For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive / Thy rankest fault." The mercy is real. The feeling behind it is not generous.

Caliban is not included in the forgiveness plot. He is left on the island when Prospero departs. Whether Shakespeare intended this as an oversight, a quiet cruelty, or simply as consistent with how Prospero has treated him throughout, the text does not say. Caliban's final lines — "I'll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace" — are addressed to no one in particular. There is no indication that grace is on offer.

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Ariel's first request in Act 1 Scene 2 is the same as his last one in Act 5: he wants to be free. Prospero responds to both with a reminder of what Ariel owes him. He rescued him from Sycorax's imprisonment in a cloven pine tree. For that debt, Ariel owes service. The arrangement is described as temporary, but the play shows how reluctant Prospero is to set a firm date.

The conversation in Act 1 Scene 2 where Prospero reminds Ariel of the pine tree is worth reading slowly. Prospero's anger when Ariel asks about liberty is disproportionate — "Thou liest, malignant thing!" — and he spends several speeches establishing the debt before finally promising that two days more of service will earn freedom. Ariel agrees. The power dynamic is maintained through gratitude, which is one of the most effective forms of control available.

Caliban's position is openly described as slavery. He carries logs, obeys commands under threat of physical punishment, and has no expectation of release. His attempted rebellion in Act 3 Scene 2, recruiting Stephano and Trinculo to kill Prospero while he sleeps, is planned with more strategic intelligence than their drinking scenes suggest. He knows which asset to target first: "First to possess his books." Without the books, Prospero is powerless. Caliban understands exactly where his captor's strength comes from.

Gonzalo gives the play's most extended vision of freedom in Act 2 Scene 1. He imagines a commonwealth with no sovereignty, no commerce, no servants, no contracts: "All things in common nature should produce / Without sweat or endeavour." Sebastian and Antonio mock him throughout the speech. The ideal is undercut immediately by its audience — both of whom are planning to murder Alonso in his sleep later that same scene.

Ferdinand begins the play a shipwrecked prince and ends it engaged to Miranda after a supervised courtship that involved carrying logs under Prospero's watch. Prospero imposed the labour deliberately, as a test of worthiness. Ferdinand accepts it voluntarily, which is presented as proof of love. The play is interested in how willingness changes the meaning of servitude — Ariel serves reluctantly and watches the clock; Ferdinand serves willingly and stops noticing the time. Whether the outcome is different is the question the play leaves open.

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"A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick." Prospero says this about Caliban in Act 4 Scene 1, when Caliban's plot has been uncovered. The argument — that Caliban's character is beyond improvement because he was born what he is — is the play's most explicitly ideological claim, and the one that has generated the most sustained disagreement over four centuries of performance.

Miranda makes the same argument earlier in Act 1 Scene 2: "thy vile race... had that in't which good natures / Could not abide to be with." She and Prospero share the view that what Caliban is cannot be changed by education or circumstance. But the play has already complicated this by putting Caliban's most beautiful speech in Act 3 Scene 2, where he describes the island's sounds and music with a precision that characters like Sebastian and Antonio never approach.

The question the play investigates — which matters more, the nature someone was born with or what they are taught? — was live in 1611. European encounters with indigenous peoples across the Atlantic and beyond were generating exactly this debate. Are people without European learning savage by nature, or shaped by circumstance and contact? Prospero answers firmly: savage by nature. Shakespeare does not appear to agree with him as straightforwardly as Prospero assumes.

Ferdinand and Miranda are Prospero's counter-argument. He raises Miranda in complete isolation and produces a young woman of perfect virtue and radical innocence — she has never seen a man other than her father and Caliban. When she sees the court party in Act 5 Scene 1, she responds with "How beauteous mankind is!" looking directly at men who include a thief and his accomplices. The best possible nurture has made her incapable of reading what is in front of her. This is not quite the argument Prospero intends to illustrate.

Caliban's final words suggest the nature/nurture question has no clean answer. He says he will be wiser and seek for grace — the language of self-improvement, a claim that character can change through intention. Whether Shakespeare means this as a genuine turn or a defeated man making promises he cannot keep is something the text leaves open. What is certain is that Prospero has already decided the answer, and is not listening.

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