The Work
The Tempest was written approximately 1610-11 and is generally regarded as Shakespeare's last play written without a collaborator. It was first performed at court on November 1, 1611. It appeared first in the First Folio (1623), where it is athe first play - a position that some scholars read as indicating the compilers' sense that it was a summary or culmination of the Shakespeare canon. The play is approximately 2,000 lines, making it one of Shakespeare's shorter plays, and it is unusual in that it observes the classical unities of time and place.
The play has generated more critical and theological commentary per page than almost any other Shakespeare play. Its themes of magic, power, forgiveness, and renewal, and its setting on an enchanted island, have made it a perennial object of theological, psychoanalytic, colonial, and aesthetic interpretation. Many scholars since the Romantic era have read it as Shakespeare's farewell to his art - Prospero's renunciation of his magic a figure for the playwright's retirement from the theater.
Biblical Engagement
Jonah 1:4 (the storm that strikes Jonah's ship: 'But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken') and Acts 27:14-44 (Paul's shipwreck) provide the storm narrative precedents. The opening tempest, raised by Prospero's art, places the play in the tradition of storm narratives that in Scripture are signs of divine action - judgment, purging, and ultimately salvation through the chaos of the sea.
2 Corinthians 5:17 - 'Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new' - resonates with Gonzalo's 'new creation' speech when the survivors come ashore: 'O rejoice / Beyond a common joy, and set it down / With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage / Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis, / And Ferdinand her brother found a wife / Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom / In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves / When no man was his own.' The shipwreck has become a new beginning - a new creation out of the chaos of the sea.
Luke 23:34 - 'Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do' - is the model for Prospero's decision to forgive his enemies rather than exact revenge. Ariel's speech ('Your charm so strongly works 'em / That if you now beheld them, your affections / Would become tender... Mine would, sir, were I human... And mine shall. / Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling / Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, / One of their kind, that relish all as sharply / Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?') precipitates Prospero's decision to forgive. The divine forgiveness of Luke 23:34 is mediated through a spirit's appeal to human feeling.
Genesis 1-3 is the structural backdrop for the play's island setting. The island is a kind of Eden - unspoiled, provisioned, capable of sustaining life - and Caliban is its original inhabitant, now enslaved. Whether Caliban represents pre-Fallen humanity (innocent and wrongly enslaved), Fallen humanity (monstrous and appropriately controlled), or colonized indigenous humanity (wrongly displaced) has been the defining question of the play's colonial interpretation. The Edenic resonances are reinforced by Miranda's naming ('she who must be wondered at') and Prospero's role as the cultivating authority - both the gardener and, potentially, the tyrant of his paradise.
Ecclesiastes 1:2 ('Vanity of vanities, all is vanity') provides the philosophical register of Prospero's great speech on the insubstantiality of the world: 'We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.' This Preacher-like sense of the transitoriness of all human achievement - art, power, civilization itself ('the great globe itself... shall dissolve') - gives Prospero's renunciation of magic its philosophical depth.
Genesis 49:1-28 (Jacob's blessing of his children before his death) provides a model for reading Prospero's final addresses - his blessing of Miranda and Ferdinand, his dismissal of Ariel, his acknowledgment of Caliban - as a patriarchal valediction, a final distribution of destiny before retirement from active life.
Author and Context
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote The Tempest in 1610-11, when he was forty-six or forty-seven and had been the leading playwright of the English theater for over twenty years. He retired to Stratford shortly after, suggesting that The Tempest was indeed a kind of farewell.
The immediate context included the Virginia Company's account of the 1609 shipwreck of the Sea Venture off the Bermudas - a published narrative that provided local color for the island setting. The colonial context - European encounters with indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere - gives the Caliban-Prospero relationship a resonance that was probably already present for Shakespeare's contemporaries.
The play was performed at court during the wedding festivities of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in February 1613 - a performance context that gives the play's themes of marriage, inheritance, and new beginnings additional significance.
Summary
Prospero, the legitimate Duke of Milan, has been deposed by his brother Antonio with the support of King Alonso of Naples and lives in exile on a remote island with his daughter Miranda and his two servants - the spirit Ariel and the monster Caliban. He raises a tempest to wreck his enemies' ship and bring them to the island, where he orchestrates a complex sequence of encounters that leads to his restoration as Duke, Miranda's betrothal to Ferdinand (Alonso's son), and his renunciation of magic.
The play's action is essentially a twelve-year arc of moral testing compressed into three hours: Prospero tests everyone - his enemies to determine if they are capable of remorse, Ferdinand to determine if he is worthy of Miranda, Caliban and the drunken servants to demonstrate the persistence of evil. The play ends with Prospero's decision to forgive rather than punish.
Prospero's Renunciation
'But this rough magic / I here abjure; and when I have required / Some heavenly music - which even now I do - / To work mine end upon their senses that / This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I'll drown my book.' (5.1.50-57)
This renunciation of magic - of the power to control events and persons by arcane art - has been read as the playwright's renunciation of theatrical art, the Christian renunciation of manipulation in favor of divine providence, and the postcolonial renunciation of dominating power. All three readings have validity and are not mutually exclusive.
Critical Reception and Legacy
The play has been read allegorically in almost every period of its reception history. The Romantics read Prospero as the Artist, Caliban as the natural world that art seeks to control, Ariel as the aesthetic spirit. Colonial and postcolonial critics read Prospero as the European colonizer, Caliban as the displaced indigenous person (Aime Cesaire's Une Tempete (1969) rewrites the play from Caliban's perspective). Psychoanalytic critics read Prospero as the overcontrolling father who must learn to release his daughter. Theological critics read Prospero as a figure of divine providence, Ariel as the Holy Spirit, and the island as a place of purgatorial testing.
Theological Significance
The play's theological significance lies in its dramatization of forgiveness as the hardest - and most specifically human - act. Ariel (a spirit) can understand the afflictions of Prospero's enemies; Prospero (a human) must choose to translate that understanding into forgiveness rather than revenge. This is the specifically Christian moment of the play: not the magic, not the masque, but the decision to forgive. The play argues, as the Gospel of Matthew does, that the quality of mercy - freely given, not coerced - is the highest expression of what it means to be human.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Luke 23:32-34 (forgiveness from the cross), Matthew 18:21-35 (how many times must I forgive?), 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 (new creation and the ministry of reconciliation), Ecclesiastes 1:2 and 12:8-14 (the vanity of human striving and the fear of God), and Genesis 1-3 (the Edenic setting and its disruption).
Further Reading
- Stephen Orgel, ed., The Tempest (Oxford, 1987) - the best annotated scholarly edition, with a superb introduction on the play's contexts. - Aimé Césaire, A Tempest (1969; English tr. 1992) - the most important postcolonial rewriting, which illuminates Shakespeare's play by inverting its power relations. - Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (1976) - includes a chapter on the late romances that provides helpful theological context.