Home → Plays → The Tempest → Characters
The Tempest: Characters
The Tempest character analysis for all 9 main characters – Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand, Alonso, Antonio, Gonzalo, and Stephano and Trinculo. Each profile explores the character's psychology, motivation, and structural role within the play, supported throughout by a modern verse translation and key quotes.
A complete character study guide and revision resource for GCSE, A-Level, AP English, IB, and undergraduate Shakespeare – equally useful to teachers and actors. Select a character below to begin.
Stephano and Trinculo
The drunken butler and the jester who plot with Caliban to rule the island.
Supporting Cast
Beyond the nine figures who carry the main action, The Tempest has one of Shakespeare's smallest casts – a court, a ship's crew, the spirits Prospero commands, and the women and gods who are talked about but never seen. The wider cast is grouped below by where it belongs.
The Court of Naples
Sebastian
Alonso's brother, and Antonio's echo. For most of A2S1 he does nothing but share the jokes at Gonzalo's expense and tell the grieving king that the loss of Ferdinand is his own fault. Then Antonio shows him a crown, and the idle man learns quickly: he draws his sword over his sleeping brother and is stopped only by Ariel. He is not forgiven in Act 5, merely warned, and his one response to Prospero is that the devil speaks in him.
Adrian
A young lord of the court, the first to try to say something cheerful about the island in A2S1 – its subtle, tender and delicate temperance – and the first to be mocked for it. He is the one who corrects Gonzalo about Dido: she was of Carthage, not of Tunis. In A3S3 he is sent with Francisco to follow the three men of sin and stop them harming themselves.
Francisco
A lord who speaks twice and matters once. In A2S1 he tells Alonso that he saw Ferdinand swimming strongly for the shore and has no doubt he came alive to land. It is true, and the king refuses to believe it. Francisco's report is the one piece of hope the court is given, and it is thrown away.
The Ship's Company
The Master
The captain of the king's ship, who opens the play by shouting for the boatswain, tells him to get the sailors working, and leaves the deck to him. He reappears in A5S1, brought by Ariel, and the Boatswain describes him capering with joy at the sight of the ship whole and rigged. He never speaks to the king.
The Boatswain
The most competent man in the first scene and the only one doing his job. He tells the king and his lords to keep below, asks what the roaring waves care for the name of king, and is called a dog and a noisemaker for it. Gonzalo decides he has a gallows face and cannot drown; he does not, and in A5S1 he brings the news that the ship is as sound as when she first put out to sea.
The Mariners
The crew, who cry that all is lost and go to their prayers as the ship breaks up. Ariel stows them under hatches with a charm added to their exhaustion, and they sleep through the whole play. The Boatswain's account in A5S1 of waking to strange noises, roaring, shrieking and jingling chains, is the crew's only report of the island, and they never set foot on it.
The Spirits of the Island
Iris
The rainbow, messenger of Juno, who opens the wedding masque in A4S1 by summoning Ceres to the grassy plot. Her speech is a catalogue of the countryside – wheat and rye, turfy mountains, nibbling sheep, pruned vineyards, the sterile sea-shore – and it is the play's most sustained picture of a tended, fruitful land. She also calls up the nymphs and the sunburnt reapers for the dance.
Ceres
Goddess of harvest, who comes at Iris's call and asks first whether Venus and Cupid are present; she has sworn off their company since they helped Pluto carry off her daughter. Told that they have been kept away, she blesses the couple with earth's increase, barns and garners never empty, and spring arriving at the very end of harvest. Ariel says afterwards that he presented her.
Juno
Queen of the gods, who descends last and sings the blessing on the marriage: honour, riches, marriage-blessing, long continuance and increasing. Her presence turns the masque from a pastoral into a sanction from heaven. When Prospero remembers Caliban's plot she vanishes with the rest, heavily, to a strange, hollow and confused noise.
The Nymphs and Reapers
The dancers of the masque: cool Naiads of the winding brooks, and sunburnt sicklemen weary from August, who put on their rye-straw hats and dance a country footing together. They are Prospero's spirits in borrowed shapes, and the dance is the moment the masque is broken off. The stage direction says they heavily vanish.
The Shapes and the Hounds
The island's other spirits, seen but not named. Strange Shapes carry in the banquet in A3S3, dance about it with gentle actions of salutation and invite the king to eat, then carry the table out with mocks and mows. In A4S1 spirits in the shape of dogs – Prospero and Ariel call them Mountain, Silver, Fury and Tyrant – hunt Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo off the stage.
The Absent and the Dead
Sycorax
Caliban's mother, dead before the play begins and never seen. A witch from Algiers, banished for sorceries too terrible to hear and spared execution only because she was pregnant, she was left on the island by sailors and ruled it with her spells. She imprisoned Ariel in a cloven pine for refusing her commands, and died leaving him there. Prospero calls her a blue-eyed hag and a foul witch; Caliban calls her his mother and the island's rightful owner.
Claribel
Alonso's daughter, married to the King of Tunis in the wedding from which the court is sailing home. She never appears, but she is the reason the ship is at sea, the wound Alonso is nursing in A2S1, and the piece of arithmetic on which Antonio's plot depends: with Ferdinand drowned she is the heir of Naples, and she is ten leagues beyond man's life. Sebastian says she was torn between loathing and obedience to the match.
Prospero's Wife
Mentioned once and never named. Asked by Miranda whether he is her father, Prospero answers that her mother was a piece of virtue and said that Miranda was his daughter. That is all. The play has no living mother in it, and the absence has been much discussed: Prospero is father, mother and schoolmaster to Miranda, and no one is left to speak for her.
Setebos
The god of Sycorax, whom Caliban invokes twice: in A1S2, when he says Prospero's art could control even his dam's god and make a vassal of him, and in A5S1, when he sees the court in its finery and takes them for brave spirits. Shakespeare found the name in accounts of Magellan's voyage, where it is the god of the Patagonians – one of the play's few direct traces of the New World.
Frequently asked questions about the characters in The Tempest
Who are the main characters in The Tempest?
The play has nine featured figures. Prospero is the deposed Duke of Milan, a magician who raises the storm and controls everything that follows. Miranda is his daughter, raised on the island from the age of three, who falls in love with the third man she has ever seen. Ariel is the spirit of the air who does the magic's work and waits to be set free. Caliban is the island's native, son of the witch Sycorax, enslaved by Prospero and plotting his death. Ferdinand is the Prince of Naples, led by music to Miranda and set to carrying logs to win her.
Alonso is the King of Naples, who helped depose Prospero, believes his son drowned, and is the one enemy who repents. Antonio is Prospero's brother, the usurper, who plots a second coup on the island and never says he is sorry. Gonzalo is the honest old counsellor who saved Prospero's books and dreams of an ideal commonwealth. Stephano and Trinculo are the king's drunken butler and jester, who take Caliban for a subject and themselves for kings.
Around them is one of Shakespeare's smallest casts – Sebastian and the lords, the ship's crew, the goddesses of the masque, and the women who are talked about but never seen – grouped in the Supporting Cast section above.
Is Prospero the hero or the villain of The Tempest?
Prospero is the play's hero by structure and its tyrant by manner, and the good essays hold both in view. The shape of the story is a wronged man given absolute power over his enemies who chooses, when they are helpless before him, to forgive them: "the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance". Then he gives the power up, breaks his staff and drowns his book, and steps forward in the Epilogue to ask the audience to set him free.
But the man who makes that choice has spent the play threatening everyone he rules. He promises Ariel an oak to howl in if he asks for his liberty again, torments Caliban with cramps and pinches, manacles Ferdinand and feeds him on roots, and puts his own daughter to sleep when he wants privacy. He is never seen persuading anyone. The forgiveness in Act 5 is real, and so is the coldness with which he delivers it to Antonio.
For most of the play's history Prospero was read as a sage, and often as Shakespeare himself saying farewell to the stage. Since the 1980s he has more often been read as a coloniser, and the play has been searched for what it says about his title to the island. Paul Brown, in 1985, argued that Prospero needs Caliban to be a monster so that his own rule looks like civilisation. The play gives evidence for every reading and settles none of them.
See Prospero for the full analysis.
How are Ariel and Caliban connected, and why are they so different?
They are the island's two natives, its two servants and its two prisoners, and Shakespeare built them as opposites. Ariel is air; Caliban is earth. Ariel sings; Caliban curses. Both belonged to the witch Sycorax before Prospero came: Ariel refused her commands and was shut in a cloven pine for twelve years, and Caliban is her son. Prospero freed the one and enslaved the other, and both are still in his service when the play begins.
The difference is in how they were treated as much as in what they are. Ariel is promised freedom and gets it in the last lines of the play; Caliban is promised nothing, and ends it tidying Prospero's cell. Ariel is threatened but never pinched; Caliban is pinched every night. And yet it is Caliban who speaks the play's most beautiful verse, in the speech that begins "the isle is full of noises", and Ariel, who cannot feel pity, who teaches Prospero to: "Mine would, sir, were I human".
Ariel's freedom is the one promise in the play that is kept exactly. Caliban's fate is left open. Prospero calls him "this thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine", and the line has been read as grace, as ownership, and as a confession. Whether he is left on the island or taken to Milan, the play does not say.
Who are Miranda and Ferdinand, and why does their love matter?
Miranda is Prospero's daughter, fifteen years old, who has seen two men in her life, her father and Caliban, until Ferdinand, the Prince of Naples, is led to her by Ariel's music. They fall in love within twenty lines. Prospero has planned the meeting, and then makes it difficult on purpose, calling Ferdinand a spy and setting him to carry logs so that the prize will not seem cheap.
What the lovers do with the arrangement is their own. Miranda offers to carry the logs herself, tells Ferdinand her name against her father's orders, and proposes to him: "I am your wife, if you will marry me". Ferdinand, a prince who thinks he has just inherited Naples, says he would give it up to be a log-man with a wife. In Act 5 Prospero reveals them playing chess, and Miranda, seeing the court of Naples for the first time, greets it as "O brave new world, That has such people in't" – a line her father answers in three words: it is new to her.
The marriage matters because it is how the play's politics are settled. Naples and Milan, enemies at the start, are joined in the next generation; Alonso, who helped depose Prospero, now shares a child with him. The old men forgive each other in the last act. The young couple at the chessboard are what makes the forgiveness last.
Who are the three men of sin – Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian?
They are the men the harpy names in A3S3, when Ariel makes the banquet vanish and tells them, "You are three men of sin", that Destiny has cast them up on the island for what they did to Prospero twelve years ago. Antonio is Prospero's brother, who took Milan with an army borrowed from Naples. Alonso is the King of Naples, who lent the army in return for Milan's homage. Sebastian is Alonso's brother, who had no part in the original coup but is talked by Antonio into attempting a second one, against the sleeping king, in A2S1.
The play gives them three different endings. Alonso, who has lost his son, hears his crime in the thunder – "O, it is monstrous, monstrous" – and goes to drown himself; when Prospero reveals himself, Alonso gives back the dukedom before he is sure the man is real: "Thy dukedom I resign". Antonio, forgiven in the coldest terms in the play, says nothing at all; his only line in Act 5 is a joke about selling Caliban. Sebastian is not forgiven, only warned that Prospero could expose him and has chosen not to.
The contrast is the play's argument about conscience. Antonio has told Sebastian in Act 2 that he does not feel one – "I feel not This deity in my bosom" – and nothing on the island changes that. Alonso, the least guilty of the three and the most powerful, is the one who kneels.
What is Gonzalo's role in The Tempest?
Gonzalo is the honest counsellor of Naples, and the one man on the island whose goodness needs no magic to explain it. Twelve years before the play he was put in charge of setting Prospero and the infant Miranda adrift, and he quietly gave them food, water, clothes, and the books from Prospero's library that made everything that follows possible. Prospero calls him his true preserver, and he is the only person in the play who is thanked for anything.
On the island he is the court's optimist and the target of every joke. He tells the king to be glad they are alive, insists the grass is green when Antonio can see it is brown, and describes the commonwealth he would found if he were king of the place – no trade, no law, no letters, no sovereignty, and nature feeding an innocent people: "I would with such perfection govern, sir, To excel the golden age". Antonio and Sebastian mock every line of it, and spot the flaw: he would be king of a place with no kings. Shakespeare took the speech almost word for word from Montaigne's essay on the cannibals of Brazil, in Florio's translation of 1603.
Gonzalo is also the man Ariel wakes to save the king from the swords, and the one who explains what the harpy has done to the three men of sin: their guilt is a slow poison, only now beginning to bite. His last speech counts everyone as restored. He does not mention Antonio, who is standing beside him.
See Gonzalo for the full analysis.
Who are Stephano and Trinculo, and what is the comic subplot?
Stephano and Trinculo are Alonso's drunken butler and his jester, washed ashore separately and reunited under Caliban's cloak in A2S2, where Trinculo has hidden from the storm beside what he takes to be a dead fish: "misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows". Stephano arrives singing with a bottle, pours wine into the creature, and finds himself worshipped as a god. Caliban swears loyalty by kissing the bottle, and proposes that Stephano kill Prospero in his afternoon sleep, take his books, and marry Miranda.
The plot is a coup in miniature, and it mirrors the one Antonio and Sebastian are hatching in the other half of the island: a sleeping ruler, a borrowed accomplice, a man deciding that the island is his by default. The difference is that the lords are sober. Ariel spoils the conspiracy by ventriloquism, leads the three of them through briars into a stinking pool, distracts the two clowns with a line of glittering clothes, and finally hunts them off with spirit hounds.
The clowns are not only relief. They are what the play's politics look like without the poetry, and they raise a question the play does not answer: Stephano wanted to be king and was chased by dogs; Antonio was king and is forgiven.
See Stephano and Trinculo for the full analysis.
Who is Sycorax, and why does she matter if she never appears?
Sycorax is Caliban's mother, a witch from Algiers, dead before the play begins. Everything we know about her comes from Prospero, who tells the story to Ariel in A1S2 as a monthly reminder of what Ariel was rescued from: banished for sorceries too terrible to hear, spared execution because she was pregnant – "This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child" – and left on the island by sailors, where she imprisoned Ariel in a pine for refusing her commands and died leaving him there.
She matters because she is Prospero's mirror. She ruled the island by magic before he did; she had a servant in Ariel before he did; and when Prospero lists his own powers in Act 5 – darkening the sun, raising storms, opening graves – he is describing exactly the kind of art he condemns in her. Caliban's claim to the island rests on her: "This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother". And she is one of the play's three missing women, with Claribel and Prospero's unnamed wife, around whose absence the men arrange themselves.
Whether she was as evil as Prospero says is one of the play's open questions. Only he describes her, and he has every reason to.