Title: The Tempest Author: William Shakespeare Creation Date: c. 1611 Location: England Collection: Empire and Its Shadows
Brief
The Tempest was first performed at the court of King James I in November 1611 and printed in the First Folio of 1623 as the collection's opening play. Shakespeare drew on multiple sources — Virgil's Aeneid, Montaigne's "Of Cannibals," reports of the 1609 shipwreck of the Sea Venture off Bermuda — and produced a work whose thematic core is mastery and its discontents: the relationship between knowledge, power, and the right to rule.
Prospero, deposed Duke of Milan, has spent twelve years on an island whose only prior inhabitants were Caliban, the son of the witch Sycorax, and Ariel, the spirit Sycorax imprisoned in a tree. Prospero freed Ariel and enslaved both. The play stages his effort to recover his dukedom through the management of a shipwreck he engineers, and closes with his famous renunciation of magic.
What makes The Tempest central to the postcolonial canon is Caliban's speech: "This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak'st from me." And: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse." These lines have made Caliban the most politically generative character in Shakespeare — appropriated by Caribbean independence movements, African liberation theorists, Latin American intellectuals, and feminist revisionists with equal conviction. Aimé Césaire rewrote the play as Une Tempête (1969). Roberto Fernández Retamar claimed Caliban as the emblem of Latin American identity. The play does not endorse Caliban's claim; it does not deny it either. It stages the confrontation and leaves both parties in the room.
The Imperial Machine
The play was first performed at the precise moment when England's Atlantic colonial enterprise was moving from speculation to practice. The Virginia Company had established Jamestown in 1607. The Sea Venture had wrecked off Bermuda in 1609, and reports of the wreck circulated in London. The Bermuda Company would receive its charter in 1615; the Pilgrims would sail for Plymouth in 1620. The play arrived as England's colonial project was becoming real.
Prospero's island is the enterprise in miniature: a space with prior inhabitants, seized by a newcomer with superior technology — his books, his art, knowledge functioning as power — and reorganised according to his purposes. He finds Caliban already there, and Ariel imprisoned. He frees Ariel and binds him to service. He educates Caliban and enslaves him. The pattern is the colonial encounter's foundational grammar: arrive, sort the local population into useful and dangerous, deploy the useful and suppress the dangerous.
Prospero's authority rests on three pillars: knowledge (his books and magic), capacity for violence (the cramps and pinches he threatens), and moral superiority (Caliban attempted to rape Miranda; therefore Caliban deserves subjection). These are every colonial regime's pillars: technological advantage, military force, and the moral justification that makes force legitimate. The rape accusation is the charge colonial regimes have brought against colonised men most consistently — sexualising the racial boundary, making its enforcement a matter of protecting women rather than maintaining power.
The Subjected People
Caliban and Ariel represent two modes of colonial subjection. Ariel is the useful native — his abilities are needed, his compliance secured through a promise of future freedom that is perpetually deferred. Each time he asks whether freedom is approaching, Prospero extends the service. The structure is indentured labour: terms set by the master, completion always receding. Ariel does not rebel; he performs, expressing his desire for freedom as requests rather than demands, which is exactly the mode the colonial system prefers.
Caliban is the resistant native — the one who showed Prospero the island's resources and was rewarded with enslavement. He speaks the play's most beautiful language: "The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not." He speaks it from total dispossession. His response to his colonial education is the famous line: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse." The colonised receives the coloniser's language and uses it to name the coloniser's crime, and the naming is both triumph and defeat — eloquent, unanswerable, spoken in the master's tongue.
Miranda is subjected too — educated by Prospero in everything except what he does not want her to know, her marriage to Ferdinand arranged for dynastic purposes, her "O brave new world" the speech of managed ignorance.
The Reckoning
The reckoning is Prospero's acknowledgment of Caliban — "This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine" — and the question the play leaves permanently open is what kind of reckoning this is. If "acknowledge mine" means ownership, it is the coloniser's final assertion of property. If it means responsibility — this darkness is my doing — it approaches guilt. If it means recognition — Caliban is my shadow, the part of myself the colonial encounter required me to project onto the colonised — it is the most psychologically penetrating reading. The play does not choose.
This permanent irresolution is why four centuries of writers have returned to the play and found it inexhaustible. Césaire gave Caliban the consciousness of a liberation fighter who chooses "X" as his name. Retamar claimed Caliban as Latin American identity itself. George Lamming read the play from the colonised perspective. Each insists the reckoning is incomplete — Prospero's acknowledgment is not enough, because the island is Caliban's and Prospero sails away.
The implied reader is James I's court. For that audience the colonial dimension was present but not dominant; the play was also about usurpation, forgiveness, the relationship between art and power. The colonial reading was imposed by four centuries of practice that made the play's questions about mastery impossible to ignore. The play did not cause colonialism. But it staged the coloniser's compact with knowledge, violence, and unfree labour at the exact moment England was beginning to practise it, in the form England's greatest writer could give it.
The Reading
The Storm
Prospero causes the storm. This is the first thing established after the tempest itself: the shipwreck that opens the action is engineered, the terrified sailors and the foundering vessel are under control, what looks like chaos is managed. Miranda, watching from the shore, suffers for the drowning men, and is told not to worry — they are safe, no one is hurt. The tempest is theatre, the first of many productions. The master is already directing before the audience knows there is a director.
He has been on this island for twelve years, since his brother Antonio, conspiring with Alonso the King of Naples, usurped his dukedom and set him adrift with the infant Miranda in a rotting boat. Gonzalo, the kindly old counsellor, smuggled provisions and books into the boat — the books that became Prospero's library and his source of power. The island was not empty when they arrived. Sycorax, a witch from Algiers, had been there before them, and had imprisoned the spirit Ariel in a cloven pine for refusing to execute her commands. She had died, leaving behind Caliban, her son. Prospero freed Ariel and bound him to service. He educated Caliban and enslaved him. The pattern is the colonial encounter's foundational grammar: arrive, sort the local population into useful and dangerous, deploy the useful and suppress the dangerous.
The ship carries Alonso, King of Naples, his son Ferdinand, his brother Sebastian, Antonio the usurper, and various courtiers including the elderly Gonzalo. They are returning from Tunis, where Alonso's daughter has been married to an African king — itself a dynastic transaction across racial boundaries that is mentioned but not explored. Prospero separates them by the storm onto different parts of the island and runs three plots simultaneously through Ariel: the Ferdinand-Miranda romance, necessary to his dynastic plans; the conspiracy of Antonio and Sebastian against Alonso, which he allows to develop and then interrupts with supernatural intervention; and the Caliban-Stefano-Trinculo plot, which he monitors with contempt. All under his control. He is both author and director of everything that happens. The island is his theatre, the shipwrecked are his cast, and the performance he stages is the recovery of a dukedom through the deployment of art — which is to say through the deployment of knowledge that functions as power.
The Spirits
Ariel serves Prospero in exchange for the freedom promised when the service is complete. Each time Ariel asks "is it yet to come?" Prospero says "yes, but first this service," and the structure of colonial indenture performs itself: the freedom deferred, the service extended, the good faith of the master never quite tested because the moment of freedom never quite arrives. Ariel's abilities are extraordinary — he can become invisible, assume any shape, create storms and banquets and vanishing tables, lead men through bogs with music — and Prospero needs every one of them. What Ariel is without Prospero's direction — whether the spirit has purposes of his own, whether the freedom he desires is the freedom to do something or merely the freedom to be nothing in particular — remains unasked, because Prospero has never been curious about what Ariel wants except insofar as wanting it makes him tractable.
When Ariel is finally freed in the last act, it is with the abruptness of someone who has been waiting a very long time and receives the grant without ceremony. "Then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well." Ariel says nothing. He is simply gone. The freedom, when it comes, is not dramatised as triumph or joy; it is the cessation of a relationship, and the cessation leaves no residue.
The Curse
Caliban enters cursing, and Prospero responds with the comprehensive dismissal of someone who has decided that a creature capable of attempted rape is beyond the reach of better treatment: "I have used thee, / Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodged thee / In mine own cell." Caliban's counter is devastatingly precise: "This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak'st from me." And then the line that has echoed through four centuries of colonial encounter: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!"
The exchange maps the colonial encounter in its essential structure: the exchange of knowledge for dispossession, the gift of language that enables the recipient to name the theft, the curse that is both triumph and defeat because it is spoken in the master's tongue. Prospero's response is not an argument; it is a reassertion of power. He will have Caliban racked with cramps and side-stitches if he does not move wood quickly enough. This is what mastery looks like from the mastering end.
And yet Caliban is also comic, drunk, gullible, wrong about everything practical. When Stefano and Trinculo — the drunken butler and the jester from the shipwrecked party — wash up on his shore, Caliban mistakes Stefano for a god because of the liquor he carries, and proposes a conspiracy: kill Prospero in his sleep, seize his books — for without the books he is merely a man — and Stefano will be king of the island with Miranda as his queen. The conspiracy is doomed from the first moment because Prospero knows about it through Ariel. It is comic because the conspirators are incompetent — distracted by a clothesline of gaudy garments hung as bait, they fall to squabbling over finery while the chance to strike passes. Caliban's willingness to exchange one master for another suggests his objection is personal rather than structural. But in a world where every powerful figure is a potential master, the colonised subject chooses not between freedom and servitude but between masters, and the choice is degraded by the fact that it is the only choice on offer.
The beauty and the failure inhabit the same figure. "The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. / Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices / That, if I then had waked after long sleep, / Will make me sleep again." This is the most purely beautiful language anyone speaks here, and it sits in the mouth of a character the plot renders pathetic and whom Prospero would describe as unredeemable. He is eloquent and he is defeated. He is the island's rightful inhabitant and he is drunk on another man's wine, proposing murder for a crown he cannot hold. Neither the beauty nor the failure cancels the other.
The Romance and the Reckoning
Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda at their first meeting, which Prospero arranges from concealment. He is transparently delighted and then immediately imposes conditions: Ferdinand must prove himself by carrying logs — the physical labour that Caliban does, now assigned to the prince as a test of worth. The prince does the slave's work, willingly, for love, and the arrangement is charming to everyone except perhaps those who notice that the charm rests on a prince's ability to choose a labour that a slave has no ability to refuse.
Miranda, who has never seen a young man other than her father and Caliban, and who has been educated in everything except the things Prospero does not want her to know, falls in love with the same completeness. Her speech — "O brave new world, / That has such people in't" — is spoken in genuine wonder at the sight of the court party. Prospero's reply — "'Tis new to thee" — contains the whole distance between innocence and experience, between the managed world and the world that manages. The dynastic transaction — Prospero recovering his Milan through his daughter's body, binding Naples to Milan through marriage — is dressed in the aesthetics of romance. Miranda is subjected too: her future arranged for political purposes, her wonder the product of managed ignorance encountering a world prepared for her arrival.
Gonzalo, in his happiness at the island's lushness, proposes a commonwealth without work, without law, without hierarchy, without kings — a golden age settlement drawn directly from Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals." Antonio and Sebastian mock him with the observation that he would be king of this kingless commonwealth, and the contradiction is real: even the utopian imagination cannot escape the structures of authority it claims to reject. Gonzalo's commonwealth is the unreachable alternative, existing only in the speech of an old man who does not know where he is, dismissed by cynics, impossible in Prospero's world.
The banquet scene: Ariel, in the shape of a harpy, descends upon a feast laid before the guilty courtiers and snatches it away with a speech denouncing their crimes. The vanishing banquet is the colonial promise made visible: the abundance offered and withdrawn, the plenty that was never meant to be consumed, the display of power that consists in the ability to offer and then refuse.
The final act is reconciliation — or the performance of reconciliation, which may not be the same thing. Prospero draws his magic circle, summons the court party within it, and reveals himself. Alonso, who has been grieving Ferdinand's supposed death, is reunited with his son. Sebastian and Antonio, whose conspiracy Prospero interrupted through Ariel's intervention, are exposed but not punished — Prospero merely notes, in a private aside to them, that he knows what they attempted, and could reveal it, and chooses not to. The threat is the mercy: they are forgiven on the condition that they know they are known, and the knowledge is the leash.
Why does Antonio, who usurped the dukedom and tried to murder a king, receive no punishment except a claim on his future conscience? Antonio says nothing in response to the forgiveness. His silence is one of the most troubling moments in the entire sequence: either he is beyond the reach of what is being offered, or the forgiveness is not requiring anything of him, which means it is not forgiveness at all but the final exercise of the power to define the terms. Prospero's magnanimity may be genuine; it may also be the grandest production of all — the spectacle of the wronged man who rises above his wrong, which requires the wrongdoer to remain below.
Prospero frees Ariel. He acknowledges Caliban: "this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine." Whether this acknowledgment is ownership, responsibility, or recognition — Caliban is my shadow, the part of myself the colonial encounter required me to project onto the colonised — remains permanently open.
He renounces his art. The great speech — "Our revels now are ended," the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, all dissolving and leaving not a rack behind — is spoken by a man who has just been reminded that his control of the island is not total, that the creature he thought he had managed is still planning against him, that his art has limits. The insubstantial pageant has faded, and what is left is the awareness that even the master's mastery is temporary. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
The Language
Three registers speak across this island, and each carries its own relationship to power. Prospero's speech is formal, controlled, the language of a man accustomed to command; his sentences are long and architecturally precise, each clause subordinated to a purpose the speaker has determined in advance. When he narrates the story of his exile to Miranda, the telling itself is an exercise of authority — he interrupts himself to ask "Dost thou attend me?" not because he doubts her attention but because the question keeps her positioned as listener, as student, as the one who receives the narrative rather than shapes it.
Caliban's language erupts — shorter bursts, cruder vocabulary, the cursing that is his declared profit from the education he received. But also, in the "isle is full of noises" speech, a lyricism that exceeds anything Prospero produces. The master who taught language is surpassed in that language by the creature he taught, and the surpassing changes nothing about the distribution of power. Caliban can make language sing. He cannot make it set him free. His curses are precise, his descriptions of the island's beauty are unmatched, and neither the precision nor the beauty alters his condition by a single degree.
Ariel's language is another thing entirely — airy, musical, composed of song and the dissolution of solid meaning into sound. "Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes." The speech exists at the boundary between matter and spirit, and enacts that boundary in its rhythm and imagery. Ariel does not argue or curse or command. He transforms — making death into coral, bones into pearls, terror into music — and the transformation is both beautiful and evasive, because a spirit who can make anything into anything else has no fixed position from which to resist.
The three registers — authority, eruption, music — are three models of what language does under conditions of power, and each contains its own limitation: authority cannot produce beauty, eruption cannot produce order, and music dissolves the moment it is heard.
He sails back to Milan, intending to retire where "every third thought shall be my grave." The island is empty behind him, or almost empty — Caliban is left there, with his freedom and his island that was his mother's and is now his again, and no one tells us what he does with it.
The epilogue asks the audience for applause — "release me from my bands" — which makes the audience Prospero's final master, and Prospero the final suppliant, and the power relations reverse one last time before the silence falls. The island remains. Caliban remains. What they do with their freedom will not be said here, because Prospero is leaving, and the story that begins after the coloniser's departure is not this story. It will take four centuries of other writers — Césaire, Retamar, Lamming, Walcott, Brathwaite — to write what begins where this ends.
This post is part of Empire and Its Shadows, a series on colonialism, power, and the books that answer empire back. See the full collection →
The Folger Shakespeare Library edition is the most widely used student and general-reader text — modernised spelling, facing-page notes, accessible introductions. The Arden Shakespeare (Third Series) is the scholarly standard, with a full critical apparatus and extensive commentary. Both are excellent; the Folger is easier to read, the Arden rewards study.
The Folger edition. Clean text, accessible notes, widely available.
The Arden Third Series. The scholarly edition with full critical apparatus.
Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.