Prospero
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: The rightful Duke of Milan, deposed by his brother Antonio twelve years before the play begins and marooned on an island with his daughter Miranda. Now a magician who commands spirits, he raises the storm that brings his enemies to shore.
- Key Traits: Learned, controlling and quick to anger. A loving father who is also a hard master. Capable, at the last, of choosing mercy over revenge.
- The Core Conflict: Prospero has spent twelve years preparing to punish the men who wronged him. Once they are in his power, he has to decide what that power is for.
- Key Actions: Raises the tempest and wrecks the king’s ship without harming a soul (A1S1, A1S2). Tells Miranda the story of their exile. Bullies Ariel into obedience and torments Caliban with cramps. Tests Ferdinand with hard labour before giving him Miranda. Stages a masque for the lovers, then breaks it off when he remembers Caliban’s plot (A4S1). Renounces his magic, forgives his enemies and reclaims his dukedom (A5S1). Asks the audience to set him free (Epilogue).
- Famous Quote:
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
(Act 4, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Restored as Duke of Milan, with Miranda betrothed to the heir of Naples. He frees Ariel, acknowledges Caliban as his own, and goes home to think about his grave.
The Story of the Sea-Sorrow
The play opens with a storm, but Prospero’s real first scene is a story. Once the wreck is over he sits Miranda down, takes off his magic cloak and tells her who she is. It is the longest piece of exposition in Shakespeare, and it is built to be interrupted: three times he stops to ask whether she is listening, and three times she says she is.
Original
Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough...
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But my library
Was all the dukedom I required...
This is the confession at the heart of the story. Prospero lost Milan because he preferred his books to his duties, handed the government to Antonio, and did not notice what his brother was becoming. He tells the tale as a wrong done to him, and it was; but he also tells us, without quite meaning to, that he made it easy.
The tone of the speech matters as much as the facts. Prospero is still angry after twelve years. He cannot say his brother’s name without a curse attached, and he interrupts himself to make sure Miranda is properly outraged. The man who will forgive everyone in Act 5 is not, in Act 1, a forgiving man. The play makes us watch him get there.
A Hard Master
Prospero has two servants on the island, and he rules them both by threat. Ariel has served him faithfully and asks, politely, for the freedom that was promised. Prospero’s answer is to call him a liar, remind him of the torment he was rescued from, and describe what will happen if he complains again.
Original
If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak
And peg thee in his knotty entrails till
Thou hast howled away twelve winters.
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If you complain again, I’ll find an oak tree
And tie you up within its knotty branches
Until you’ve yelped for twelve years.
It is an ugly moment, and the play does not soften it. Ariel was imprisoned in a pine by the witch Sycorax for twelve years; Prospero freed him and threatens to put him in an oak for twelve more. The rescuer and the jailer use the same tool. With Caliban the treatment is cruder still: cramps, pinches, aches in every bone. The theme of masters and servants runs through every scene Prospero is in, and he is never the servant.
What makes this bearable is that Prospero’s power has a deadline. He promises Ariel freedom within two days, and he keeps the promise. The tempest, the trials, the masque and the judgement are all crammed into a single afternoon, because the magic is about to end. His harshness is the harshness of a man running out of time.
The Rarer Action
The turning point of the play is not a battle or a discovery but a conversation. Ariel reports that the king and his lords are broken with grief, and adds that if Prospero saw them his heart would soften. Prospero asks whether Ariel really thinks so. Ariel says his own would, if he were human.
Original
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance...
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But, with my better judgement, not through anger,
I will engage: it is rarer behaviour
To act with kindness than revenge.
Shakespeare gives Prospero the whole play to reach this decision and then lets him make it in six lines. Everything he has done since the storm was aimed at getting his enemies helpless in front of him. Now they are, and the only question left is what a man does with an enemy who cannot fight back. Prospero answers that virtue is rarer than vengeance, and chooses the rarer thing. The theme of revenge and forgiveness turns on this speech.
It is worth noticing what prompts him. Not conscience, not religion, not Gonzalo’s tears, though he mentions those. It is a spirit made of air telling him what a human being ought to feel. Prospero has spent twelve years among books and spirits, and it takes a spirit to remind him he is a man.
Drowning the Book
Having decided to forgive, Prospero does something stranger: he gives up the power that made forgiveness possible. In a speech borrowed from the witch Medea he lists what his magic has done – darkened the sun, raised the winds, split oaks with lightning, opened graves – and then renounces all of it.
Original
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.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But all this magic
I now reject, and when I get to hear
Some heavenly music, like I’m starting to now,
To work my plan upon the senses of those
For whom my magic is, I’ll break my wand,
And bury it deep down within the earth,
And deeper than an anchor ever dropped to,
I’ll throw my book of spells.
He calls it "rough magic", which is an odd word from a man who has spent the play calling it "art". The list that precedes the renunciation is not the list of a benevolent wizard; waking the dead is Sycorax’s kind of work. Prospero seems to understand, at the moment of giving it up, how close his power has been to hers. The theme of magic and art is never simply good against evil in this play, and Prospero’s farewell admits it.
The book is drowned and the staff broken, but the play is not over. In the Epilogue Prospero comes forward without his spirits and asks the audience to release him with their applause. It is a joke and a plea at once. The most powerful man on the stage ends by asking for help, and the theme of imprisonment and freedom closes on the one character who never seemed to be a prisoner.
"Prospero, who controls this comprehensive Shakespearian world, automatically reflects Shakespeare himself."
— G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life, 1947
Key Quotes
Quote 1
Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known.
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Obscene slave,
No act of kindness will rub off on you,
For all you do is hurt! I pitied you,
Worked hard to help you speak, taught you for hours
On many topics. When you didn’t know, brute,
How to express yourself, but gabbled on like
A violent thug, I taught you self-expression
With words one could decipher.
Quote Analysis: Prospero’s account of how he taught Caliban to speak. He describes the lessons as pity and pains, and the pupil as a thing that gabbled like a brute until words were given to it. Caliban’s reply, that the only profit of language is knowing how to curse, is the most famous line in the exchange, but Prospero’s side deserves attention too. He believes he did Caliban a kindness, and he believes the kindness failed because of Caliban’s "vile race". The colonial reading of the play begins here, in the teacher’s certainty that the lesson could not have been the problem.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Our celebrations are complete. These actors,
As I have told you, were all spirits and
Have simply disappeared into thin air.
And, like the lack of substance in that show,
The towers in the clouds, the palaces,
The solemn temples, and the world itself,
Yes, everything we own, will disappear,
And, as the memories of our story fade,
We’ll leave nothing behind.
Quote Analysis: The most famous speech in the play, and it is spoken to calm a frightened son-in-law. Prospero has just broken off the wedding masque, and Ferdinand has never seen him angry. So Prospero explains that the spirits were only spirits and have melted into air, and then the explanation runs away with him: towers, palaces, temples, the globe itself will dissolve in the same way. It is a speech about the end of a play that becomes a speech about the end of everything, and Prospero has to stop himself and apologise for his old brain.
I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ve darkened
The midday sun, called up the stormy winds,
And made the line between the sea and sky
Fight in a fierce battle. To the thunder,
I’ve given lightning, splitting Jove’s thick tree
With his own lightning bolt. The rocky headland
I’ve made to shake and by the roots I’ve plucked
The pine and cedar trees. I’ve ordered graves
To wake their sleeping dead, open and free them
With my effective spells.
Quote Analysis: The list of Prospero’s powers, delivered just before he renounces them. Shakespeare took most of it from Ovid’s Medea, in Golding’s translation, and the borrowing is not hidden. Medea is a witch; her invocation is the model for a sorceress, not a sage. When Prospero claims to have opened graves and let out the dead, he is claiming exactly the kind of power he condemned in Sycorax. The speech is a boast, and a confession dressed as a boast.
this thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
this thing of darkness,
I must admit is mine.
Quote Analysis: Prospero presents the three conspirators to the court. Stephano and Trinculo belong to the king; Caliban, he says, belongs to him. The line has been read as a moment of grace, in which Prospero accepts responsibility for what he has made; and as a claim of ownership, in which he says the monster is his property; and as a slip, in which he admits that the darkness is in himself. The play gives us the words and not the tone. On stage the actor has to choose, and no two choices are alike.
Key Takeaways
- A Deposed Duke: Prospero lost Milan by neglecting it. He tells the story as a wrong done to him, and it was, but he also let it happen.
- Power with a Deadline: He rules Ariel and Caliban by threat, but his magic ends the day the play ends. Everything he does is done against the clock.
- Virtue over Vengeance: Once his enemies are helpless, he chooses to forgive them. It is Ariel, a spirit, who reminds him what a human being should feel.
- The Book Drowned: He gives up his magic before he has to, breaks his staff, and asks the audience to set him free.
Study Questions and Analysis
Is Prospero a hero or a tyrant?
Both readings have strong support in the text, and the interesting essays refuse to settle for one. The case for the hero is the shape of the play: a wronged man, given absolute power over his enemies, chooses to forgive them and gives the power up. The case for the tyrant is the way he treats everyone he rules. His first exchange with Caliban is a threat of torture:
For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins
Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,
All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinched
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made 'em.
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For saying this, tonight you’ll suffer cramp,
And stitches that will stop you breathing; urchins
Will work on you throughout the drawn-out night,
And exercise on you, so you’ll be stung
Like bees in honeycomb, each sting more painful
Than actual bee stings.
He speaks to Ariel in the same register, and even Ferdinand, whom he has already chosen as a son-in-law, is manacled and fed on roots until he has proved himself. Prospero is never seen persuading anyone. He commands, and when he is disobeyed he inflicts pain.
For most of the play’s history the hero reading held the field. Frank Kermode’s Arden edition (1954) made Prospero the representative of Art, set against the Nature of Caliban, and read his severity as the discipline a good magician needs. The tyrant reading belongs to the 1980s. Paul Brown, in "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" (1985), argued that the play is "not simply a reflection of colonialist practices but an intervention in an ambivalent and even contradictory discourse": Prospero needs Caliban to be a monster so that his own rule looks like civilisation. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, in "Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish" (1985), pointed to his overreaction when he remembers Caliban’s plot in the middle of the masque, and read it as the anxiety of a ruler who knows his title to the island is not clean. The best answer is probably that Shakespeare wrote a good man with a tyrant’s habits, and let the audience decide how much the ending redeems.
Why does Prospero give up his magic?
The play offers three answers, and they do not quite agree. The first is practical: the magic has done its work. Prospero raised the storm to bring his enemies within reach, and once they are forgiven and the dukedom restored there is nothing left for it to do. The second is moral. The speech in which he renounces his "rough magic" is modelled on Medea’s invocation in Ovid, and the powers he lists – raising storms, splitting oaks, waking the dead – are a witch’s powers. A man who has just chosen virtue over vengeance cannot go home to Milan with Sycorax’s toolkit.
The third answer comes in the Epilogue, when Prospero steps forward without his spirits and admits how little is left:
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you...
(Epilogue)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My magic powers are on the shelf,
And all my strength I make myself,
And I’m not strong. So now it’s true,
I must be locked up here by you...
Here the loss of magic is a loss of strength, and Prospero is suddenly an old man asking a crowd to be kind. G. Wilson Knight’s The Crown of Life (1947) read the renunciation as Shakespeare’s own farewell to the theatre, with the magic standing for the dramatist’s art. W. H. Auden took the same idea into poetry in The Sea and the Mirror (1944), which opens with Prospero saying goodbye to Ariel after the performance is over. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), was less consoled: on his reading the island has been a laboratory for an experiment in ideal rule, and Prospero breaks his staff because the experiment has failed. All three agree on one thing. The magic is given up freely, and the giving up costs him.
Does Prospero really forgive his enemies?
He says he does, and the words are unconditional. But the tone is another matter, and students who read the forgiveness scene closely usually notice that it is not warm. Alonso, who repents, is embraced. Gonzalo, who did nothing wrong, is praised. Antonio, who did everything wrong, gets this:
For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault...
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And you, most wicked man, whom calling brother
Would make me sick, I do forgive all of
The awful things you’ve done...
Forgiveness and disgust in the same breath, followed at once by a demand for the dukedom back. Antonio never answers. He does not apologise, does not thank his brother, and speaks only once more in the play, to make a joke about selling Caliban. Sebastian is not forgiven at all; Prospero simply tells the two of them that he could expose their plot against the king and chooses, for now, not to.
E. M. W. Tillyard, in Shakespeare’s Last Plays (1938), saw the ending as the completion of a pattern that runs through all the late plays: prosperity, destruction, and regeneration, with the destruction here compressed into Prospero’s narrative and the regeneration spread across the final act. On that reading the coldness does not matter; what matters is that the cycle closes. Stephen Orgel, in his Oxford edition (1987), was more sceptical, noting that the reconciliation restores Prospero to exactly the political position he lost and does not require his brother to change. The play seems to know the difference between forgiving a man and being reconciled with him. Prospero manages the first. Whether he manages the second is left to the audience, and to Antonio’s silence.
Is Prospero meant to be Shakespeare?
It is the oldest reading of the play and the hardest to kill. The Tempest was probably Shakespeare’s last play written alone, its hero is an artist who stages illusions for an audience, and at the end he gives up his art and goes home. The temptation to read Prospero’s farewell as the playwright’s is obvious, and the play’s final lines encourage it:
And thence retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And then I will retire back to Milan, where
I’ll contemplate my death.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his notes on the play from the 1818 lectures, called Prospero "the very Shakspere himself, as it were, of the tempest", and the phrase has been quoted ever since. G. Wilson Knight’s The Crown of Life (1947) made the case at full length: "Prospero, who controls this comprehensive Shakespearian world, automatically reflects Shakespeare himself." For Knight the whole play was a summing-up, with Ariel, Caliban and Miranda as aspects of the dramatist’s imagination.
The objections are practical. Shakespeare went on to write, or co-write, at least two more plays after The Tempest, so the farewell was not final. Nothing in the text identifies Prospero as a playwright rather than a magician. And the reading tends to flatter him: if Prospero is Shakespeare, his cruelty to Caliban and Ariel becomes an artist’s privilege. Anne Barton, in her New Penguin introduction (1968), called The Tempest "an extraordinarily obliging work of art" that "will lend itself to almost any interpretation", and the Shakespeare-as-Prospero reading may be the clearest example. It is not wrong. It is just not the only thing the play is doing.
How does Prospero treat Miranda?
With love, and as property. Both are true, and the play does not ask us to choose. He calls her a third of his own life, the thing he lives for; he has spent twelve years as her schoolmaster; and when he hands her to Ferdinand he does it with a warning that would not be out of place in a legal contract:
If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be ministered,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow...
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If you take her virginity before
All of our solemn ceremonies have been
Presided over in a holy ritual,
The heavens will not shower you in blessings
To make your marriage flourish...
Miranda has no say in any of this. She falls in love on cue, because Prospero has arranged for her to; she is put to sleep when he wants to talk to Ariel; and her one act of rebellion, telling Ferdinand her name against her father’s orders, is overheard by the father, who is delighted. Even her most famous line, "O brave new world", is answered by Prospero with a correction: it is new to her.
Stephen Orgel’s essay "Prospero’s Wife" (1984) started from the fact that Miranda’s mother is mentioned once and never named, and argued that the play is built around absent women: the wife, Sycorax, Claribel married off to Tunis. On this reading Prospero’s control of Miranda is the control of a man who has arranged the world so that no woman in it can answer back. Lorie Jerrell Leininger’s "The Miranda Trap" (1980) put it more bluntly, arguing that Prospero needs Miranda both as the bait that catches Ferdinand and as the innocent who must be protected from Caliban, and that the two roles together leave her nothing of her own. Ania Loomba, in Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (1989), connected the two halves of the play’s politics, reading Prospero’s rule as "both racial plunder and a transfer to patriarchy". None of this means Prospero does not love his daughter. It means the play is honest about what a father’s love looked like in a world where daughters were given away.
What does "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" mean?
On the surface, that human beings are as insubstantial as the spirits who have just vanished. Prospero has broken off the masque, Ferdinand is alarmed, and Prospero reassures him that the actors were only spirits and have melted into thin air. Then the thought widens. If a vision made of spirits can dissolve without trace, so can towers, palaces, temples, the globe itself, and everyone who lives on it. We are the same stuff as the vision. Our lives are a short waking between two sleeps.
The lines are often quoted as consolation, but in context they are the opposite. Prospero is upset, and says so immediately afterwards; he has remembered that three men are on their way to murder him, and the speech about the dissolving world is what the memory shakes loose. It is a speech about mortality made by a man who has just been reminded of his own.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1818 notes on the play, described The Tempest as "a birth of the imagination" that "owes no allegiance to time or space", and the revels speech is where the play says so about itself. The masque was a play within a play; the Globe was the theatre the audience was sitting in; and "the great globe itself" carries both meanings at once. G. Wilson Knight’s The Crown of Life (1947) heard in the speech Shakespeare’s own sense that his created worlds and the real one were made of the same material. Students should also notice the small word "on". Dreams are made on us, as a play is made on a stage: we are the platform, not the dreamer.
Is Prospero a coloniser?
The question would have puzzled audiences for three hundred years and has dominated criticism for the last fifty. The facts in the text are these. Prospero arrived on an island that was already inhabited. He was welcomed by its one native, who showed him where the fresh water was. He then enslaved that native, confined him to a rock, and justified it by an attempted rape. Caliban’s own account is the play’s first political speech:
This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou takest from me.
(Caliban, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My mother, Sycorax, left me this island
Which you have taken from me.
The play was written in 1610 or 1611, when the news from Virginia was full of shipwreck, mutiny and the problem of the native population, and Shakespeare read at least one of the Bermuda pamphlets. Stephen Greenblatt’s "Learning to Curse" (1976) made Caliban’s retort about language the centre of the colonial reading, arguing that his reply has a "devastating justness" and amounts to a moral victory over the man who taught him. Paul Brown (1985) read the whole play as a "limit text" in which the workings of colonial discourse can be seen: Prospero produces Caliban as a savage in order to be a civiliser. Outside the academy the reading came earlier and from the colonised side. Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969) rewrote the play with Caliban as a black slave who tells Prospero to call him X, "a man whose name has been stolen"; Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essay "Calibán" (1971) claimed the monster as the symbol of Latin America.
The counter-argument is Meredith Anne Skura’s "Discourse and the Individual" (1989), which accepted that the New World material is there but warned that reading the play only as colonial allegory flattens it: the island is in the Mediterranean, Prospero is a Milanese duke, and his relationship with Caliban is as much a failed adoption as a conquest. Both sides are right about something. Prospero is not a coloniser in the way a Virginia Company governor was. But he behaves like one, and the play lets Caliban say so. The theme of colonialism and empire in The Tempest is, in the end, a question about Prospero, and he never answers it.
