Greenblatt, S.

(2008) Introduction to The Tempest

in Greenblatt, S. (ed.) (2008)
The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition, Second Edition
New York: W.W. Norton
(pp. 3055-3062)
The Tempest
Near the close of King Lear, the ruined old king, stripped of the last vestiges of his power,
dreams of being locked away happily in prison with his beloved Cordelia. Father and daughter
have a more tragic fate in store for the, but Shakespeare returned to the dream in The Tempest.
The play opens on a remote island of exile where Prospero, deposed from power and thrust out
of Milan by his wicked brother, has found shelter with his only daughter, Miranda. Unlike many
of Shakespeares plays, The Tempest does not appear to have a single dominant source for its
plot, but it is a kind of echo chamber of Shakespearean motifs. Its story of loss and recovery
and its air of wonder link it closely to the group of late plays that modern editors generally call
romances (Pericles, The Winters Tale, Cymbeline), but it resonates as well with issues that
haunted Shakespeares imagination throughout his career: the painful necessity for a father to
let his daughter go (Othello, King Lear); the treacherous betrayal of a legitimate ruler (Richard
II, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth); the murderous hatred of one brother for another (Richard
III, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear); the passage from court society to the wilderness and the
promise of return (A Midsummer Nights Dream, As You Like It); the young heiress, torn from
her place in the social hierarchy (Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Winters Tale); the dream of
manipulating others by means of art, especially by staging miniature plays within plays (1
Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet); the threat of a radical loss of identity (The Comedy
of Errors, Richard II, King Lear); the relationship between nature and nurture (Pericles, The
Winters Tale); the harnessing of magical powers (The First Part of the Contention [2 Henry VI],
A Midsummer Nights Dream, Macbeth).
Though it is the first play printed in the First Folio (1623), The Tempest is probably one
of the last that Shakespeare wrote. It can be dated fairly precisely: it uses material that was not
available until late 1610, and there is a record of a performance before the king on Hallowmas
Night, 1611. Since Shakespeare retired soon after to Stratford, The Tempest has seemed to
many to be his valedictory to the theatre. In this view, Prosperos strangely anxious and
moving epilogueNow my charms are all oerthrown, / And what strength I haves my own
is the expression of Shakespeares own professional leave-taking. There are reasons to be
sceptical: after finishing The Tempest, he collaborated on at least two other plays, All Is True
(Henry VIII) and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and it is perilous to identify Shakespeare too closely
with any of his characters, let alone an exiled, embittered, manipulative princely wizard. Yet
the echo-chamber effect is striking, and when Prospero and others speak of his powerful art, it
is difficult not to associates the skill of the great magician with the skill of the great playwright.
Neat the end of the play, the association is made explicit when Prospero uses his magic powers
to produce what he terms some vanity of mine art (4.1.41), a betrothal masque performed by
spirits whom he calls forth to enact / My present fancies (4.1.121-122). The masque, typically
a lavish courtly performance with music and dancing, may have seemed particularly

appropriate on the occasion of another early performance: The Tempest was one of fourteen
plays provided as part of the elaborate festivities in honour of the betrothal and marriage of
King Jamess daughter, Elizabeth to Frederick, the elector palatine. As Prosperos gift of the
beautiful spectacle displays his magnificence and authority, so The Tempest and the other plays
commanded by the king for his daughters wedding would have enhanced his own prestige.
The Tempest opens with a spectacular storm that recalls King Lear not only in its
violence but in its indifference to the rulers authority: What cares these roarers for the name
of king? (1.1.15-16), shouts the exasperated Boatswain at the aristocrats who are standing in
his way. The Boatswains outburst seems unanswerable: like the implacable thunder in King
Lear, the tempest marks the point at which exalted titles are reveals to be absurd pretensions,
substanceless in the face of the elemental forces of nature and the desperate struggle for
survival. But we soon learn that this tempest is not in fact natural and that it emphatically does
hear and respond to human power, a power that is terrifying but, at least by its own account,
benign: The direful spectacle of the wreck, Prospero tells his daughter, I have with such
provision in mine art / So safely ordered (1.2.26, 28-29) that no one on board has been
harmed.
Shakespeares contemporaries were fascinated by the figure of the magus, the great
magician who by dint of deep learning, ascetic discipline, and patient skill could command the
secret forces of the natural and supernatural world. Distinct from the village witch and
cunning man, figures engaged in local acts of healing and malice, and distinct, too, from
alchemical experimenters bent on turning base metal into gold, the magus, cloaked in a robe
covered with mysterious symbols, pronounced his occult charms, called forth spirits, and
ranged in his imagination through the heavens and the earth, conjoining contemplative
wisdom with virtuous action in order to confer great benefits upon his age. But there was a
shiver of fear mingled with the popular admiration: when the person in Shakespeares time
most widely identified as a magus, John Dee, was away from his house, his library, one of the
greatest private collections of books in England, was set on fire and burned to the ground.
Book, costume, powerful language, the ability to enact the fancies of the brain: these are
key elements of both magic and theatre. I have bedimmed / The noontide sun, Prospero
declares (5.1.41-42), beginning an enumeration of extraordinary accomplishments that
culminates with the revelation that
graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let em forth
By my so potent art.
(5.1.48-50)
For the playwright who conjured up the ghosts of Caesar and old Hamlet, the claim foes not
seem extravagant, but for a magician it amounts to an extremely dangerous confession.
Necromancycommuning with the spirits of the deadwas the very essence of black magic,
the hated practice from which Prospero is careful to distinguish himself throughout the play.
Before his exile, the island had been the realm of the damned witch Sycroax, who banished
there for mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible (1.2.265-266). The legitimacy of Prosperos
power, including power over his slave Caliban, Sycoraxs son, depends on his claims to moral

authority, but for one disturbing moment it is difficult to see the difference between foul witch
and princely magician. Small wonder that as soon as he has disclosed that he has trafficked
with the dead, Prospero declares that he abjures his rough magic (5.1.50).
Prospero does not give an explicit reason for this abjuration, but it appears to be a key
stage in the complex process that has led, before the time of the play, to his overthrow and will
lead, after the plays events are over, to his return to power. This process in its entirety
requires years to unfold, but the play depicts only a small, though crucially important, fragment
of it. Together with his early Comedy of Errors, The Tempest is unusual among Shakespeares
plays in observing what literary critics of the age called the unities of time and pace; unlike
Antony and Cleopatra, for example, which ranges over a huge territory, or The Winters Tale,
which covers a huge span of time, the actions of The Tempest all take place in a single locale, the
island, during the course of a single day. In a long scene of exposition just after the spectacular
opening storm, Prospero tells Miranda that he is at a critical moment; everything depends on
his seizing the opportunity that fortune has granted him. The whole play, then, is the spectacle
of his timing, timing that might be cynically termed political opportunism or theatrical cunning
but that Prospero himself associates with the working out of providence divine (1.2.160). The
opportunity he seizes has its tangled roots in what he calls the dark backward and abyss of
time (1.2.50). Many years before, when he was Duke of Milan, Prosperos preoccupation with
secret studies gave his ambitious and unscrupulous brother Antonio the opportunity to topple
him from power. Now those same studies, perfected during his long exile, have enabled
Prospero to cause Antonio and his shipmates, sailing back to Italy from Tunis, to be
shipwrecked on his island, where they have fallen unwittingly under his control. His magic
makes it possible not only to wrest back his dukedom but to avenge himself for the terrible
wrong that his brother and his brothers principal ally, Alonso, the King of Naples, have done
him: They are now in my power (3.3.90). Audiences in Shakespeares time would have had an
all too clear image of how horrendous the vengeance of enraged princes usually was. That
Prospero restrains himself from the full exercise of his power to harm his enemies, that he
breaks his magic staff and drowns his book, is his highest moral achievement, a triumphant
display of self-mastery: The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance (5.1.27-28).
All of those who are shipwrecked on the island undergo the same shock of terror and
unexpected survival, but their experiences, as they cross the yellow sands and make their way
toward the interior of the island, differ markedly. The least affected are the mariners, including
the feisty Boatswain; after their exhausting labours in the storm, they have sunk into a strange,
uneasy sleep, only to be awakened in time to sail the miraculously restored ship back to Italy.
The others are put through more complex trials; exposed to varying degrees of anxiety,
temptation, grief, fear, and penitence, they are in effect subjects in a psychological experiment
carefully conducted by Prospero, who attempts to instil in them moral self-control and workdiscipline. The most generously treated in Ferdinand, the only son of the King of Naples, whom
Prospero, in what is essentially a carefully planned dynastic alliance, has secretly chosen to be
his son-in-law. As Ferdinand bewails what he assumes is his fathers death by drowning, he
hears strange, haunting music, including remarkable song of death and metamorphosis, Full
fathom five they father lies (1.2.400). Ferdinand is the only one of the shipwrecked company,
until the plays final scene, to encounter Prospero directly; the magician makes the experience

menacing, humiliating, and frustrating, but this is the modest, salutary price the young man
must pay to win the hand of the beautiful Miranda, who seems to him a goddess and who, for
her part, has fallen in love with him at first sight.
Prospero directs the experience of the rest as well, but not in person; instead they
principally encounter his diligent servant, Ariel. Ariel is not human, although at a crucial
moment he is able to imagine what he would feel were I human (5.1.20). He is, as the cast of
characters describes him, an airy spirit, capable of moving at immense speed, altering the
weather, and producing vivid illusions. We learn that Ariel possesses an inherent moral
delicacy, a delicacy that in the past (that is, before the time depicted in the play) has brought
him pain. For, as Prospero reminds him, he had been Sycoraxs servant and was, for refusing to
act her earthy and abhorred commands (1.2.275), imprisoned by the witch for many years in a
cloven pine. Prospero freed him from confinement and now demands in return a fixed term of
service, which Ariel provides with a mixture of brilliant alacrity and grumbling. Prospero
responds in turn with mingled affection and anger, alternating warm praises and dire threats.
Although Prosperos art, through which he commands Ariel and the lesser spirits, seems to
foresee and control everything, this control is purchased by constant discipline.
And, for all his godlike powers, there are limits to what Prospero can do. He can make
the loathed Antonio and the others know something of the bitterness of loss and isolation; he
can produce in them irresistible drowsiness and startled awakenings; he can command Ariel to
lay before them a splendid banquet and then make it suddenly vanish; he can drive them to
desperation and madness. But in the case of his own brother and Alonsos similarly wicked
brother Sebastian, Prospero cannot reshape their inner lives and effect a moral transformation.
The most he can do with these men without conscience is to limit through continual vigilance
any further harm they might do and to take back what is rightfully his. When, with an obvious
effort, Prospero declares that he forgives his brothers rankest fault (5.1.134), Antonio is
conspicuously silent.
But the higher moral purpose of Prosperos art is not all a failure. With Alonso, the
project of provoking repentance by generating intense grief and fear succeeds admirably:
Alonso not only gives up power over the dukedom of Milan but begs Prosperos pardon for the
wrong he committed in conspiring to overthrow him. (Both rulers, Alonso and Prospero, can
look forward to a unification of their states in the next generation, through the marriage of
Fernando and Miranda.) Moreover, Prosperos carefully contrived scenarios succeed in
confirming the decency, loyalty, and goodness of Alonsos counsellor, Gonzalo, who had years
before provided the exiled Duke and his daughter with the means necessary for their survival.
It is Gonzalos goodness that at the end of the play enables him to grasp the dynastic
providence in the bewildering tangle of eventsWas Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue /
Should become kings of Naples? (5.1.208-209)and that earlier inspires him to sense the
miraculous nature of their survival. Indifferent to the contemptuous mockery of the cynical
Antonio and Sebastian, Gonzalo responds to shipwreck on the strange island by speculating on
how he would govern it were he responsible for its plantation;
Ith commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things. For no king of traffic

Would I admit, no name of magistrate;

Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation, all men idle, all.
(2.1.147-154)
Shakespeare adapted Gonzalos utopian speculations from a passage in Of Cannibals (1580), a
remarkably free-spirited essay by the French humanist Michel de Montaigne. The Brazilian
Indians, Montaigne admiringly writes (in John Florios 1603 translation), have no kind of
traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate nor of
political superiority, no use of service, of riches or of poverty, no contracts, no successions ... no
occupation but idle, no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no manuring of
lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. For Montaigne, the European adventurers and colonists,
confident in their cultural superiority, are the real barbarians, while the American natives, with
their cannibalism and free love, live in accordance with nature.
The issues raised by Montaigne, and more generally by New World voyages, may have
been particularly interesting to The Tempests early audiences as news reached London of the
extraordinary adventures of the Virginia Companys colony at Jamestown. Shakespeare seems
to have read a detailed account of these adventures in a letter written by the colonys secretary,
William Strachey; although the letter was not printed until 1625, it was evidently circulating in
manuscript in 1610. In 1609, a fleet carrying more than four hundred persons sent out to
reinforce the colony was struck by a hurricane near the Virginia coast. Two of the vessels
reached their destination, but the third, the ship carrying the governor, Sir Thomas Gates, ran
aground on an uninhabited island in the Bermudas. Remarkably enough, all of the passengers
and crew survived; but their tribulations were not over. By forcing everyone to labour side by
side in order to survive, the violence of the storm had weakened the governors authority, and
both the natural abundance and the isolation of the island where they were shipwrecked
weakened it further. Gates ordered the company to build new ships in order to sail to
Jamestown, but his command met with ominous grumblings and threats of mutiny. According
to Stracheys letter, the main troublemaker directly challenged Gatess authority: therefore let
the Governor (said he) kiss, etc. In response, Gates had the troublemaker shot to death. New
ships were built, and in an impressive feat of navigation, the entire company reached
Jamestown. The group found the settlement deeply demoralised: illness was rampant, food was
scarce, and relations with the neighbouring Indians, once amicable, had completely broken
down. Only harsh military discipline kept the English colony from falling apart.
With the possible exception of some phrases from Stracheys description of the storm
and a few scattered details, The Tempest does not directly use any of this vivid narrative.
Prosperos island is evidently in the Mediterranean, and the New World is only mentioned as a
far-off place, the still-vexed Bermudas (1.2.230), where the swift Ariel flies to fetch dew. Yet
Shakespeares play seems constantly to echo precisely the issues raised by the Bermuda
shipwreck and its aftermath. What does it take to survive? How do men of different classes and

moral character react during a state of emergency? What is the proper relation between
theoretical understanding and practical experience or between knowledge and power? Is
obedience to authority willing or forced? How can those in power protect themselves from the
conspiracies of malcontents? Is it possible to detect a providential design in what looks at first
like a succession of accidents? If there are natives to contend with, how should colonists
establish friendly and profitable relations with them? What is to be done if relations turn sour?
How can those who rule prevent an alliance between hostile natives and the poorer colonists,
often disgruntled and themselves exploited? AndMontaignes more radical questionswhat
is the justification of one persons rule over another? Who is the civilised man, and who is the
barbarian?
The unregenerate nastiness of Antonio and Sebastian, conjoined with the goodness of
Gonzalo, might seem indirectly to endorse Montaignes critique of the Europeans and his praise
of the cannibals, were it not for the disturbing presence in The Tempest of the character whose
name is almost an anagram of cannibal, Caliban. Caliban, whose god, Setebos is mentioned in
accounts of Magellans voyages as a Patagonian deity, is anything but a noble savage.
Shakespeare does not shrink from the darkest European fantasies about the Wild Man. Indeed,
he exaggerates them: Caliban is deformed, lecherous, evil-smelling, treacherous, naive,
drunken, lazy, rebellious, violent, and devil-worshipping. According to Prospero, he is not even
human: A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick (4.1.188-189). When
he first came to the island, Prospero recalls, he treated Caliban with human care (1.2.349),
lodging him in his own cell until the savage tried to rape Miranda. The arrival of the other
Europeans bring out still worse qualities. Encountering the basest of the company, Alonzos
jester, Trinculo, and drunken butler, Stefano, Caliban falls at their feet in brutish worship and
then devises a conspiracy to murder Prospero in his sleep. Were the conspiracy to succeed,
Caliban would get neither the girl for whom he lusts nor the freedom for which he shoutshe
would become King Stefanos foot-licker (4.1.218)but he would satisfy the enormous
hatred he feels for Prospero.
Prosperos power, Caliban reasons, derives from his superior knowledge. Remember /
First to possess his books, he urges the louts, for without them / Hes but a sot as I am ... Burn
his books (3.2.86-90). The strategy is a canny one, in recognising an underlying link between
literacy and authority, but the problem is not only that Stefano and Trinculo are hopeless fools
but also that Prospero, like all Renaissance princes, has a diligent spy network the invisible
Ariel overhears the conspirators and warns his master of the approaching danger. Prosperos
sudden recollection of the warning leads him to break off the betrothal masque with one of the
most famous speeches in all of Shakespeare, Our revels now are ended (4.1.148ff.). This
brooding meditation on the theatrical insubstantiality of the entire world and the dreamlike
nature of human existence has seemed to many the pinnacle of the plays visionary wisdom.
But it does not subsume in its rich cadences the other voices of The Tempest; specifically, it
does not silence the surprising power of Calibans voice.
That voice has been amplified in the centuries that followed the first performance of
The Tempest, as European colonialism saw its grand political, moral, and economic claims
disputed and, after violent struggles, dismantled. During these struggles, many anti-colonial
writers and critics rewrote Shakespeares play, casting Prospero as a smugly racists, sexist

oppressor, Ariel as a native co-opted and corrupted by his colonial master, and Caliban as a
victimised hero. Prospero invaded the islands, declared the Cuban writer Roberto Fernandez
Retamar, killed out ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself
understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same languagetoday he has no otherto
curse him, to wish that the red plague would fall on him?
Shakespeare, who wrote when the colonialist project was still in its early stages, could
not have anticipated this afterlife, and some scholars have argued that the relevance to The
Tempest of the New World voyages has been greatly exaggerated. But as the Barbadian writer
George Lamming puts it, Caliban keeps answering back. Caliban enters the play cursing,
grumbling, and, above all, disputing Prosperos authority: This islands mine, by Sycorax my
mother, / Which thou takst from me (1.2.334-335). By the close, his attempt to kill Prospero
foiled and his body wracked with cramps and bruises, Caliban declares that he will be wise
hereafter, / And seek for grace (5.1.298-299). Yet it is not his mumbled reformation but his
vehement protests that leave an indelible mark on The Tempest. The play may depict Caliban,
in Prosperos ugly term, as filth, but it gives him a remarkable, unforgettable eloquence. To
Mirandas taunting reminder that she taught him to speak, Caliban retorts, You taught me
language, and my profit ont / Is I know how to curse (1.2.366-367). It is not only in cursing,
however, that Caliban is gifted: in richly sensuous poetry, he speaks of the islands natural
resources and of his dreams. Caliban can be beaten into submission, but the master cannot
eradicate his slaves desires, his pleasures, and his inconsolable pain. And across the vast gulf
that divides the triumphant prince and the defeated savage, there is a momentary, enigmatic
glimpse of a hidden bond: This thing of darkness, Prospero says of Caliban, I / Acknowledge
mine (5.1.278-279). The words need only be a claim of ownership, but they seem to hint at a
deeper, more disturbing link between father and monster, legitimate ruler and savage, judge
and criminal. Perhaps the link is only an illusion, a trick of the imagination on a strange island,
but as Prospero leaves the island, it is he who begs for pardon.
Stephen Greenblatt