Gonzalo
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: An old and honest counsellor to Alonso, King of Naples. Twelve years ago he was put in charge of setting Prospero and Miranda adrift, and secretly gave them food, water, clothes and Prospero’s books. On the island he is the court’s optimist, its talker, and the target of every joke.
- Key Traits: Kind, garrulous and hopeful. Easy to laugh at and impossible to dislike. The one man on the island whose goodness needs no magic to explain it.
- The Core Conflict: Gonzalo tries to comfort a king who will not be comforted, in the company of two lords who mock everything he says. His decency is the play’s standard; the play keeps testing whether anyone else can meet it.
- Key Actions: Predicts in the storm that the boatswain was born to be hanged and so cannot drown (A1S1). Urges Alonso to be glad of their escape and describes the commonwealth he would found on the island (A2S1). Is woken by Ariel in time to save the king from Antonio and Sebastian. Can walk no further and asks to rest (A3S3). Diagnoses the guilt of the three men of sin. Is embraced by Prospero as his true preserver, and sums up the play’s ending in a blessing (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age."
(Act 2, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Welcomed home by the duke he saved and promised repayment in word and deed. He gets the last big speech before the Epilogue, and it is a prayer of thanks.
The Man Born to Be Hanged
Gonzalo’s first speech is a joke made in the middle of a shipwreck, and it tells us most of what we need to know about him. The boatswain has just told the king and his court that the roaring waves do not care about the name of king. The lords are furious. Gonzalo looks at the sailor and finds a reason for hope.
Original
I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I have great confidence in this chap: I think he doesn’t look like a man who might drown; he looks more like someone who’d be hanged.
A man with a hanging face cannot drown; therefore, as long as the boatswain is aboard, the ship is safe. It is nonsense, and Gonzalo half knows it, and he says it anyway because a frightened company needs something to hold on to. The proverb comes true, which in this play is what happens to Gonzalo’s nonsense: the boatswain survives, and in Act 5 Gonzalo greets him with a reminder of the prophecy.
What the speech also shows is a man who talks. Gonzalo speaks more than anyone in the first scene except the boatswain, and he will speak more than anyone in Act 2 except Antonio and Sebastian, who are speaking about him. He is the play’s counsellor, and counsellors in Shakespeare are always at risk of becoming Polonius. Gonzalo escapes it because his talk is kind, and because he knows the lords are laughing and does not mind.
The Commonwealth
Gonzalo’s great set piece is a description of the state he would found if he were king of the island. It is offered as a distraction for the grieving king, and it is interrupted at every line by Antonio and Sebastian, and it is, whatever they say, the most serious political thought in the play.
Original
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Our Mother Nature will produce the produce
Without us working for it; treason, crime,
Swords, spears, knives, guns or any kind of weapon
I’d not allow; but nature will produce,
All by itself, a rich and bumper harvest,
To feed my innocent people.
No trade, no law, no letters, no wealth or poverty, no work, no weapons, no sovereignty; and nature producing everything of its own accord to feed an innocent people. Shakespeare took the list almost word for word from Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals of Brazil, in Florio’s translation of 1603, and Gonzalo’s commonwealth is the New World as Montaigne imagined it: a golden age that Europe had lost and the savages still had.
The two lords spot the flaw at once. Gonzalo would be king of a place with no kings; the latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. It is a fair hit, and Gonzalo takes it, admitting that he only spoke to give them something to laugh at. But the speech has done its work. It puts into the play, in its first hour, the idea of an island where nobody rules anybody, and then the rest of the play shows us Prospero ruling everybody. The theme of colonialism and empire in The Tempest begins here, with an old man’s dream of a plantation with no planter.
Holy Gonzalo, Honourable Man
The audience learns Gonzalo’s secret before Gonzalo appears on the island. In Act 1 Prospero tells Miranda how they survived being put to sea: not by luck, and not entirely by Providence, but because the Neapolitan lord in charge of the business disobeyed his orders.
Original
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, being then appointed
Master of this design, did give us, with
Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much...
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
A nobleman from Naples, called Gonzalo,
Who, through his decency – it was his job
To send us on our way – had given us
Fine clothes and sheets and stuff that we might need,
All things we’ve made good use of...
And more than clothes and food: knowing that Prospero loved his books, Gonzalo packed the volumes from his library that he prized above his dukedom. It is the single act of kindness on which the whole play depends. Without the books there is no magic; without the magic there is no tempest, no reunion, no forgiveness. Gonzalo, twelve years earlier, made the play possible, and he does not know it.
Prospero knows it, and when the court stands charmed before him in Act 5 the first person he addresses is Gonzalo: holy Gonzalo, honourable man, my true preserver. His eyes, he says, drop tears in sympathy with the old man’s. It is the only moment in the play when Prospero weeps, and it is not for his daughter or his brother but for the counsellor who once packed a boat. The theme of revenge and forgiveness in The Tempest is usually discussed as forgiveness; Gonzalo is the reminder that it also involves gratitude.
Set It Down With Gold on Lasting Pillars
Gonzalo gets the last summing-up before the Epilogue. Ferdinand and Miranda have been revealed at chess, Alonso has asked his child’s forgiveness, and the old counsellor, who says he has been weeping inwardly, asks the gods to bless the couple and then counts up what the voyage has produced.
Original
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.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
In this journey,
In Tunis, Claribel courted a husband;
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he was shipwrecked; Prospero got his dukedom
Upon a desert isle, and all of us found
Ourselves when we were mesmerised.
It is the play’s plot in five lines, and it is the most generous reading of it anyone offers. Claribel found a husband, Ferdinand a wife, Prospero his dukedom, and all of them found themselves when no man was his own. The last phrase is the key. Everyone came to the island out of his own control, enchanted, grieving, or mad, and everyone leaves it restored. Gonzalo does not mention Antonio, who is standing beside him and has found nothing.
Whether the speech is true is the question the play leaves open. Gonzalo believes it, and Gonzalo has been right before against the odds: the boatswain did not drown. But he is also the man who thought the grass was lush and green when Antonio could see it was brown, and the audience has watched enough of the island to know that the joy he asks to be set down in gold has at least two men in it who are not rejoicing. The theme of illusion and reality in The Tempest is not only Prospero’s magic. It is also the way a good man sees a happy ending where a sharp one sees a truce.
"It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space, and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and geography — no mortal sins in any species — are venial faults, and count for nothing."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes on The Tempest, 1818
Key Quotes
Quote 1
Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any thing. The wills above be done! But I would fain die a dry death.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’d give fifteen thousand square miles of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heathered moor, brown shrubbery, anything but this. The will of God must be done! But I would rather die a dry death.
Quote Analysis: The last words of the storm scene, spoken as the ship goes down. Gonzalo has heard the mariners cry that all is lost and the passengers cry farewell to their wives, and his response is a wish for an acre of barren ground: heath, gorse, anything dry. Then a prayer, and then the joke that closes the scene. It is the line of a man who can be frightened and still see the comedy of his own fear, and it sets the tone for everything Gonzalo does afterwards. He would fain die a dry death. He gets one, twelve years late, in Naples.
Beseech you, sir, be merry; you have cause,
So have we all, of joy; for our escape
Is much beyond our loss.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I urge you, sir, be happy; you have reason,
As we all have, for happiness. Surviving
Is better than what we have lost.
Quote Analysis: The opening of Act 2, and the first of Gonzalo’s attempts to cheer the king. The argument is sound: they are alive when they had every reason to be dead, and grief for a drowned sailor is common while their preservation is a miracle. Alonso asks him to be quiet. Sebastian says he receives comfort like cold porridge. Gonzalo goes on anyway, and the scene establishes the pattern of the whole act: good sense offered, refused, and mocked, by a man who will not stop offering it.
All three of them are desperate: their great guilt,
Like poison given to work a great time after,
Now 'gins to bite the spirits.
(Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
All three of them are desperate: their guilt,
Has, like a poison taking time to work,
Begins to gnaw their conscience.
Quote Analysis: The harpy has spoken, Alonso has gone to drown himself, and Antonio and Sebastian have run off to fight legions of fiends. Gonzalo, who heard the harpy but was not addressed by it, explains what he has just seen. Their guilt is a slow poison, given long ago and only now beginning to work. It is the best account of conscience in the play, and it is offered by the one man present who has nothing on his. Gonzalo does not know what the three men did; he knows what guilt looks like when it finally arrives, and he sends the younger lords after them to prevent the worst.
I have inly wept,
Or should have spoke ere this. Look down, you god,
And on this couple drop a blessed crown!
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ve cried inside,
Or should have spoken up before now. Look, god,
Down on this couple, and give them your blessing!
Quote Analysis: Gonzalo’s response to the reunion of Alonso and Ferdinand, and to the news that Miranda is Prospero’s daughter. He has, he says, been weeping inwardly, or should have spoken sooner; now he asks the gods to crown the couple. The word "chalked" that follows, in the next line, is his image for Providence: the gods have chalked the way that brought them here, like a path marked on a floor. Gonzalo believes in a plan, and he is right, though the planner was standing a few feet away in a magic robe. The speech turns the whole action into an act of grace, and it is the reading of the play that most audiences take home.
Key Takeaways
- Born to Be Hanged: His joke about the boatswain's gallows face is nonsense that comes true. That is how Gonzalo's nonsense usually works.
- The Commonwealth: His utopia, lifted from Montaigne, imagines an island with no rulers. Antonio's answer is that he would be king of it.
- The Books: Twelve years ago he packed Prospero's library into the boat. Without that kindness there is no magic and no play.
- Gold on Lasting Pillars: His final speech counts everyone as restored. He does not mention Antonio, who is standing beside him.
Study Questions and Analysis
Is Gonzalo a fool or a wise man?
Both, and the play needs him to be both. He is the man who thinks the grass is green when it is brown, who insists that Tunis was Carthage, who believes that a man with a gallows face cannot drown; and he is also the man who saved Prospero, who alone keeps the king alive on the island, and who understands guilt better than the guilty. His credulity is real. When the spirits bring in the banquet, he is the first to believe in them:
Faith, sir, you need not fear. When we were boys,
Who would believe that there were mountaineers
Dew-lapped like bulls...
(Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
There’s no need to be scared. When we were boys,
Who’d have believed that there were mountain men
With bull-like pouches hanging round their necks...
Men with dewlaps like bulls, men with heads in their chests: the travellers’ tales of the age, and Gonzalo takes them all as proved. But notice what he does with the belief. He uses it to persuade the king to eat, because the king is starving and needs to. Gonzalo’s credulity is always in the service of somebody else’s comfort, and that is not foolishness in any sense that matters.
Frank Kermode (1954) treated Gonzalo as the play’s honest man, the standard of natural goodness against which the courtiers are measured, and his commonwealth speech as a serious statement of the ideal that Antonio and Sebastian cannot see. Jan Kott (1964) had less patience, reading the utopia as a dream that the island immediately disproves, and Gonzalo as its amiable dupe. W. H. Auden, in The Sea and the Mirror (1944), gave Gonzalo a poem of his own, and made it a confession that his optimism had been a way of not looking too hard. All three readings notice the same thing: that Gonzalo is wrong about facts and right about people. The play, which is not much interested in facts, sides with him.
Where does Gonzalo’s commonwealth speech come from?
From Michel de Montaigne’s essay "Of the Cannibals", in John Florio’s English translation of 1603. Montaigne, writing about the Tupinamba people of Brazil, listed everything their society lacked, no trade, no letters, no magistrates, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no inheritance, and argued that the lack made them happier and more virtuous than Europeans. Shakespeare turned the list into verse and gave it to Gonzalo almost unaltered:
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none...
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
There’d be no books; no riches, poverty
Or servants; contracts, nor inheritance,
No boundaries, rights to land, no farms nor vineyards...
The borrowing was identified in the eighteenth century and is the clearest evidence of what Shakespeare was reading when he wrote the play. It matters because it tells us that the New World was on his mind. The island of The Tempest is in the Mediterranean, between Tunis and Naples, but its inhabitant is called a name that scrambles "cannibal", and the old man who dreams of governing it dreams in the words of a Frenchman describing Brazil.
Frank Kermode’s Arden edition (1954) set out the Montaigne parallel in full and read the speech as the play’s statement of the nature side of its Art and Nature debate: an innocent world without the disciplines of civilisation, which Antonio’s mockery and Caliban’s conduct both undercut. Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) placed the speech beside the Virginia pamphlets and the arguments over how the colony should be governed, and read the play as a whole as unable to decide whether the New World was a golden age or a problem of discipline. Gonzalo is on one side of that argument. Prospero, with his cramps and his pinches, is on the other, and the play gives Prospero the island.
How does Gonzalo save the king’s life?
By waking up. Antonio and Sebastian have drawn their swords over the sleeping Alonso, and Gonzalo, who is to be the second victim, is asleep beside him. Ariel, sent by Prospero, sings in Gonzalo’s ear that open-eyed conspiracy is taking its time. Gonzalo wakes with a prayer:
Now, good angels
Preserve the king.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now, good angels,
Protect the king!
The king wakes, the swords are explained away as a defence against roaring lions, and the plot is postponed. Gonzalo did not stop the murder; Ariel did. But Ariel chose Gonzalo as the man to wake, and the choice tells us how the play regards him. He is the one person in the court whose first thought on waking is for someone else.
It is the second time he has saved a ruler’s life without being able to fight for it. Twelve years earlier he saved Prospero by packing a boat; now he saves Alonso by shouting. Neither act is heroic in the usual sense, and the play is clear that Gonzalo is old, tired and unarmed. Jan Kott (1964) read the island as a place where the strong repeat the crimes of the past and the weak can only witness them, and Gonzalo fits the pattern; but the pattern breaks at exactly this point, because the witness wakes and the crime does not happen. The theme of power and control in The Tempest is mostly about who can compel whom. Gonzalo compels nobody, and is the reason two rulers are alive.
Why did Gonzalo help Prospero twelve years ago?
The play calls it charity, and gives no other motive. Gonzalo was appointed master of the design, the man in charge of putting Prospero and the infant Miranda to sea, and he carried out his orders while quietly defeating their purpose. He gave them food and water, fine clothes and linen, and something nobody had asked him to give:
Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For he knew I loved books, he gave to me
From my own library many books that I
Value above my dukedom.
This is the decisive act of the play, and it happens before the play begins. Gonzalo could not save Prospero’s dukedom, but he could save the thing Prospero valued more, and he did it knowing that the books were the source of the studies that had cost the duke his throne. He was not sending Prospero into exile with a comfort. He was sending him with a weapon, and he probably did not know it.
G. Wilson Knight, in The Crown of Life (1947), read Prospero’s books as the play’s figure for art itself, the power that creates the island’s world; on that account Gonzalo is the man who preserved the art. Frank Kermode (1954) saw the same thing in his terms: the books are Prospero’s Art, the discipline that separates his magic from Sycorax’s, and Gonzalo’s gift is what makes the magician a philosopher rather than a witch. Both readings make Gonzalo the play’s hidden cause, and Prospero agrees with them. When he stands before the charmed court in Act 5, he calls Gonzalo his true preserver and promises to pay his graces home in word and deed. Nobody else in the play is thanked for anything.
What does Gonzalo’s final speech mean?
It is the play’s own summary of itself, delivered by the character best placed to see it as a happy ending. Ferdinand has been found, Alonso has repented, Prospero has his dukedom, and Gonzalo asks for the whole business to be recorded:
O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars...
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh, joy,
Let’s celebrate this happy time and write it
In gold on marble pillars.
The list that follows, Claribel a husband, Ferdinand a wife, Prospero a dukedom, and all of them themselves "when no man was his own", is the shape of a romance: loss, wandering, and recovery. Gonzalo reads the voyage as Providence, and asks for it to be written in gold on pillars, as the Romans recorded victories. It is the kind of thing a good old man says at a wedding, and it is also, if you count, incomplete. Antonio found nothing. Sebastian found nothing. The Boatswain, arriving a moment later, has found only that the ship is sound.
E. M. W. Tillyard (1938) would have recognised in the speech the pattern of all the late plays, prosperity lost and regained with something added, and Gonzalo is its spokesman. Northrop Frye, in his introduction of 1959, read the comic ending as the emergence of a renewed society, and Gonzalo’s "all of us ourselves" is that society naming itself. Anne Barton (1968) was more cautious, noting how much the play declines to resolve and how quickly it hurries past the unresolved. Gonzalo’s speech is where the hurrying is done. He sets down in gold the part of the story that ended well, and the play, which knows better, lets him.
Is Gonzalo’s optimism justified by the play?
More often than the mockers expect. His first prophecy, that the boatswain has a gallows face and cannot drown, is treated by Antonio and Sebastian as an old man’s babble; it comes true, and Gonzalo says so:
I prophesied, if a gallows were on land,
This fellow could not drown.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I said if there were gallows fit for hanging,
This fellow couldn’t drown.
His second, that the island has everything advantageous to life, is mocked as well, and the play proves him right about that too: nobody starves, the clothes stay fresh, the air is sweet. His third, that Ferdinand is surely on the island, is correct. Gonzalo is wrong about the colour of the grass and the location of Carthage, and right about every question that matters.
The play seems to be making a point about how goodness sees. Frank Kermode (1954) read Gonzalo as the character through whom nature’s benevolence is expressed, the man who trusts the island and is rewarded for it, against the lords who distrust it and try to commit murder on it. Jan Kott (1964) took the opposite line: Gonzalo’s hopefulness is what makes him useless, the good man who sleeps through the coup. Both are describing the same evidence. What the evidence shows is that on Prospero’s island, where everything is arranged, the optimist is the one whose expectations match the arrangement. Gonzalo expects the story to end well because he cannot imagine it ending otherwise, and Prospero, who has spent twelve years planning it, has decided that it will.
Why does Gonzalo insist that Tunis was Carthage?
Because he is a little wrong, and the play enjoys it. Adrian remarks that Tunis has never had such a queen as Claribel; Gonzalo says not since widow Dido’s time; and when Adrian objects that Dido was queen of Carthage, not Tunis, Gonzalo does not give an inch:
GONZALO: This Tunis, sir, was Carthage.
ADRIAN: Carthage?
GONZALO: I assure you, Carthage.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
GONZALO: Tunis and Carthage are the same place.
ADRIAN: Carthage is Tunis?
GONZALO: I assure you, Carthage is Tunis.
Carthage was near modern Tunis, so Gonzalo is not exactly wrong; but he is not exactly right, and Dido was not a widow in the sense Antonio pretends to hear, and the whole exchange is a chance for the two lords to show off. Sebastian says that Gonzalo’s word is more than Amphion’s harp, which raised the walls of Thebes: he has rebuilt Carthage by saying so.
The joke has a second layer that scholars have been drawing out since the eighteenth century. Dido and Aeneas are the great Mediterranean story of a voyage from Carthage to Italy, and the court of Naples is sailing the same route; the play’s island, its storm, its banquet and its harpy all have parallels in Virgil, and editors since Frank Kermode’s Arden of 1954 have traced them. Gonzalo, in his muddled way, is the one character who notices that they are inside an old story. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his notes of 1818, dismissed the play’s "errors of chronology and geography" as "venial faults" in a drama that "owes no allegiance to time or space", and Gonzalo would have agreed. He assures the company that Carthage is Tunis, and in a play where an island can be anywhere, he is as right as anyone.
