The story
The Tempest is a play by Shakespeare, first recorded in performance before King James I at Whitehall on 1 November 1611. Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, has been cast adrift with his daughter Miranda and now rules a remote island with the help of the spirit Ariel and the enslaved Caliban. When his enemies are shipwrecked by a storm he has conjured, he arranges their trials, the love of Miranda for the king's son Ferdinand, and finally his own forgiveness and renunciation of magic.
Several sources lie behind it. In 1609 the ship Sea Venture, bound for the new Jamestown colony, was wrecked on Bermuda, and accounts of the survivors, such as William Strachey's, circulated in London. Gonzalo's speech about an ideal commonwealth closely follows John Florio's English translation of Montaigne's essay 'Of Cannibals'. The play is one of the last Shakespeare wrote on his own, and it is placed first in the 1623 Folio. It also uses the masque, a courtly entertainment with music and spectacle that was popular under James.
In recent generations the play has been read in light of colonialism, with Caliban seen as a colonized subject. Writers such as Aime Cesaire and Marina Warner, and later Margaret Atwood in Hag-Seed (2016), have reworked it. Prospero's farewell has long been heard as a farewell by Shakespeare to the stage, although there is no proof of that.
Why it mattered
- The play became a main text for postcolonial literary criticism, which reads Prospero and Caliban as figures of empire.
- It carries the voice of early Atlantic exploration directly into drama, through the Sea Venture shipwreck and Montaigne's writing on the New World.
- It has inspired operas, ballets, films and novels, and it remains one of the most frequently staged late plays.
Sources
- The Tempest: Dates and Sources Royal Shakespeare Company
- The Tempest: Sources Denver Center for the Performing Arts
Community notes
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