The Tempest: Famous Quotes

The play's first scene is a shipwreck, and its first argument is about rank. The King of Naples and his court have come up on deck in the middle of a storm, and the Boatswain, who has a ship to save, tells them to get below. Gonzalo asks him to be patient; this is the reply. The roarers are the waves, and the point is that a wave does not know who a king is.

It is the play's opening statement on power: authority is a human arrangement, and the sea has not signed up to it. The Boatswain goes on to tell the king's counsellor that if he can command the elements to silence, the crew will gladly stop pulling ropes. Nobody on deck can, so the hierarchy that governs the rest of the play is suspended for one scene – the last time anyone on the island will be free of it. The modern prose keeps the question as a question: "Do these waves care you are a king?"

Miranda's first speech in the play is a plea for strangers. She has watched the ship go down from the shore, and she assumes that everyone on it has drowned. Her father, she suspects, caused it. So the play's first extended speech of feeling comes from the one person on the island who has no reason to care about the people in the water, and cares anyway.

The line is the key to her character. Miranda has met three men in her life, and her compassion is not learnt from society, because she has never had one; it is what she is. The play will later ask, through Caliban, whether nature can be improved by nurture, and Miranda is the quiet counter-case: goodness that needed no teaching. Prospero's answer, that no harm has been done, is the audience's first hint that the storm was a show. The modern verse keeps the suffering-with-sufferers echo: "With those I witnessed suffer on the ship".

Prospero is telling Miranda, for the first time, how they came to the island. Twelve years earlier he was Duke of Milan, and he handed the running of the state to his brother Antonio so that he could study. This is his account of what he wanted instead of power: a room full of books. "Me, poor man" is half self-pity and half self-knowledge.

The line is the play's original sin, and Prospero knows it. A duke who finds his library dukedom enough is a duke who will lose the dukedom, and the speech goes on to admit as much: his neglect awoke in his brother an evil nature. The books that cost him Milan are also the books that give him the island, since his magic comes from them, and the play's ending turns on whether he can put them down. The modern verse keeps the exchange rate exact: "But my library / Was all the dukedom I required".

Ariel is reporting back. Prospero asked for a tempest, and this is what he got: a spirit that boarded the king's ship as fire and ran through it from bow to cabins, splitting into many flames and joining again. The storm the audience watched in the first scene was, it turns out, one performer.

The speech is the first the audience hears from Ariel, and it sets the register: quick, exact, delighted with its own work. William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817), called Ariel "imaginary power, the swiftness of thought personified", and the syntax here is the evidence, one action tumbling into the next. The phenomenon behind it is St Elmo's fire, the glow that sailors saw on masts in storms, which the Bermuda pamphlets of 1610 described; Shakespeare gives it a name and a personality. The modern verse keeps the flame's own account of itself: "I turned to fire, amazing them".

Caliban's first real speech is a claim of title. The island was his mother's and is therefore his; Prospero took it. What follows is the history of how: the newcomer was kind at first, gave him fruit-flavoured water, taught him the names of the sun and moon, and in return Caliban showed him every spring and salt-pit on the island. The last line turns the whole speech on itself. He curses himself for the hospitality.

For most of the play's stage history this was a monster's grumbling. Since the middle of the twentieth century it has been read as the first draft of a colonial encounter – welcome, exchange, dispossession – and the reading holds because Caliban's account is so precise. Prospero's counter-claim comes at once: the kindness ended when Caliban tried to rape Miranda. The play gives both versions and lets neither cancel the other, which is why the argument has lasted four hundred years. The modern verse keeps the legal shape of the claim: "My mother, Sycorax, left me this island".

Miranda (or Prospero, in this edition) has just reminded Caliban that he could only gabble like a brute until he was taught to speak. This is his answer, and it is the most quoted thing he says. Language was the gift; cursing is the profit; the red plague, a sixteenth-century name for a form of plague, is the first curse he spends it on.

Samuel Johnson, in his 1765 notes, disposed of the old idea that Caliban speaks a language of his own: "Caliban had learned to speak of Prospero and his daughter, he had no names for the sun and moon before their arrival". The point matters because it means every word Caliban owns was given to him by the people who own him, and he uses it to refuse them. That is the paradox the line holds, and later writers made it an emblem: the colonised subject who curses in the coloniser's tongue because there is no other. The modern verse keeps the balance-sheet language: "You taught me how to speak; I’ve benefitted / By knowing how to curse".

Ferdinand's first lines. He has crawled ashore believing his father drowned, sat down to weep, and been drawn along the beach by a song he cannot place. Ariel is singing it, invisible, and leading him to Miranda. The question in the first line – is the music in the air or the earth? – is the right one, because on this island it is in neither; it is in Prospero's plan.

The speech is the play's first demonstration of what art does to grief. The music has calmed the sea's fury and his own passion together, as if the two were the same weather, and it has moved him without his consent: he followed it, or rather it drew him. The modern verse keeps the surrender in that last correction, "Or rather, it seduced me", and the play will repeat the pattern with every visitor to the island. Nobody walks anywhere on it; they are led.

Ariel's second song, and the most famous lyric in the play. It tells Ferdinand that his father lies drowned five fathoms down and that the sea has turned him into something else: bones to coral, eyes to pearls, nothing lost but everything changed. "Sea-change", which Shakespeare seems to have coined here, has become an English phrase for any profound transformation.

The song is beautiful and it is a lie. Alonso is alive and on the other side of the island, and the boy weeping on the beach is being told, in exquisite music, that his father is dead. The play never quite apologises for this. Prospero's art works by grief as well as by wonder, and the song's promise, that loss becomes something rich and strange, is the promise the whole play makes and, in the end, keeps. The modern verse holds the rhyme scheme and the pearl-and-coral imagery, and lets the one line that needs no modernising stand: "Into something rich and strange".

Gonzalo, trying to cheer a grieving king, imagines what he would do if the island were his: nothing. No trade, no law, no letters, no wealth or poverty, no work, no weapons, no sovereignty. Sebastian and Antonio heckle him line by line, and Sebastian lands the obvious hit, that a man who abolishes kings would still be king of the place.

The speech is lifted almost phrase for phrase from Montaigne's essay "Of the Cannibals", in John Florio's translation of 1603, where the Brazilian natives are described by what they lack, and the lack is the praise. Gonzalo is the play's kind man, and the vision is a kind one, but the play sets it beside the actual commonwealths on the island, Prospero's and later Stephano's, and lets the heckling stand. The modern verse keeps the negatives stacking up until the sentence runs out: "There’d be no king…".

Antonio is talking Sebastian into murdering his brother, the sleeping King of Naples, a few feet away. The argument runs: Ferdinand is drowned, the king's daughter is in Tunis and too far off to inherit, so the crown of Naples is one sword-stroke from Sebastian. Then the famous phrase. Everything that has happened, the wreck included, was only the prologue; the play proper is theirs to write.

It is the tempter's line, and it works by turning history into theatre. If the past is a prologue, then nobody is responsible for it, and the future is simply the next act, waiting for actors. Antonio has done this once before, when he took Milan, and the speech is a rerun with a new pupil. The phrase now sits on public buildings as an invitation to optimism, which is a fine irony for words designed to justify a murder. The modern verse turns the theatrical metaphor into plain purpose: "our destiny compels us / To make this the beginning, and the future".

Sebastian, half-persuaded, asks the one question that might stop the plot: what about your conscience? Antonio's answer is the play's coldest speech. A conscience is not a chilblain; if it were, he would feel it and put his slippers on. He does not feel it. Twenty of them could stand between him and Milan and they would melt like sugar.

The speech matters because it closes an argument the play has been having about human nature. Caliban, we are told, is a devil on whom nurture will never stick; here is a Milanese duke, brought up in a court, with the same immunity. "Candied" and "melt" are the vocabulary of sweetmeats, and the offhand relish is the point. Antonio never repents, never speaks after Prospero forgives him, and this line explains why. The modern verse keeps the chilblain and the slippers: "If it were a chilblain".

Trinculo, the king's jester, is alone on the beach with a storm coming and nowhere to hide. The only shelter is the cloak of the creature lying on the sand, which he has just spent a speech deciding is a fish, or an islander, or a monster he could exhibit for money in England. He crawls under it. The bedfellow is Caliban.

The line has become a proverb, usually with politics swapped in for misery, and it deserves its afterlife: two lines of prose that explain every alliance in the play. Caliban and the drunkards, Antonio and Sebastian, Prospero and the spirit he keeps threatening to imprison – all are people who would not have chosen each other and are stuck together by circumstance. The modern prose finds an equivalent idiom for the whole clause: "When the chips are down, a man can end up in bed with strange people".

Caliban has tasted Stephano's wine, decided the drunken butler is a god, and sworn to serve him. This is the song he sings on the way out: no more fetching wood, no more washing dishes, a new master and a new man. The drunkard has already commanded him to lead the way.

The joke is that Caliban's freedom is a change of owner, and the song admits it in its own words – "a new master" is the second line, before "Freedom" is the last. The play has been asking since Act 1 what freedom would mean for a creature who has never had it, and this is Caliban's first answer: whoever gives him drink. Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête (1969) ends on Caliban's cry of "FREEDOM HI-DAY!", turning the drunken chorus into a liberation slogan, which is a measure of how far the line can be carried. The modern verse keeps the shouted refrain and the self-defeating logic: "Has a new master, find a new man".

Ferdinand has been set to carrying logs, and Miranda, sent to watch him, proposes instead. She has already given away her name against her father's orders. Now, in the plainest terms the play has, she offers to be his wife, and if he refuses, to die unmarried and serve him anyway.

The speech overturns every rule about courtship the audience of 1611 would have known, and it does so because Miranda does not know the rules; she has never seen a courtship. What comes out is what Prospero's schooling and the island's isolation have made together: a directness that no court could have taught. Ferdinand's answer, that he is hers and will be humble ever, matches her offer of service with his own, and the play's one love story is settled in twelve lines. The modern verse keeps the offer as a condition and the alternative as a vow: "I’ll be your wife, if you will marry me".

Caliban has proposed the murder of Prospero and offered Miranda as the prize. Stephano, a butler who has been on the island for a few hours, accepts and drafts a constitution: he will be king, Miranda queen, Trinculo and Caliban viceroys. The exclamation in the middle is a courtier's reflex, "save our graces", used by a man who has just made himself royal.

The plot is a parody of the one Antonio and Sebastian hatched in the previous act, and of Prospero's own takeover of the island before the play began. Every arrival wants to rule the place. Stephano's version is the funniest because it is the most honest: kingship as a matter of who holds the bottle. The modern prose keeps the pomp and the parenthesis: "will be king and queen – God protect us!"

Ariel, invisible, has been playing a tune, and Stephano and Trinculo are frightened. Caliban reassures them, and the reassurance turns into the most beautiful speech in the play. The island's sounds delight and do not hurt; sometimes they put him to sleep and he dreams of clouds opening to drop riches on him, and when he wakes he cries to dream again.

That the speech belongs to Caliban is the play's boldest decision. The creature everyone else calls a monster is the one who hears the island properly, and the speech gives him a sensibility nobody has taught him. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecturing in 1811–12, made this the heart of his defence: "all the images he uses are drawn from nature, and are highly poetical". The speech also gives Caliban's rebellion a motive that is not just spite. He wants the dream back, and Prospero's rule has made the island a place of pinches and cramps. The modern verse keeps the closing line in its own plainness: "I cried to have the dream again".

A banquet has appeared before the hungry courtiers and vanished as they reached for it, and Ariel, dressed as a harpy, delivers the sentence. Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian are three men of sin; the sea that never gets its fill has spat them onto an island without people because they are unfit to live among any. The mad terror that follows is Ariel's doing too.

This is Prospero's revenge, and the play shows it at full strength before it shows the forgiveness. The harpy is from Virgil, where harpies foul a banquet and prophesy, and Ariel's speech is a prophecy of a kind: it names the crime, the usurpation of Milan, for the first time in the guilty men's hearing, and promises lingering perdition unless they repent. Alonso is broken by it; Antonio and Sebastian draw their swords on the air. The modern verse keeps the judge's voice: "You three are sinners".

The harpy has gone, and Alonso, who has said almost nothing since he lost his son, finds his voice. The sea spoke to him, the winds sang it, the thunder pronounced the name of Prospero like an organ pipe sounding the bass note of his crime. His conclusion is that Ferdinand drowned as punishment, and that he will go and find him on the seabed.

It is the play's clearest picture of conscience at work, and it comes from a man whose crime was twelve years ago and mostly passive: he let Antonio take Milan and took the tribute. Ariel's show has turned the whole island into an accusation, and Alonso hears his guilt in every natural sound. The speech sets him apart from the two men beside him, who hear nothing, and it is the reason Prospero can forgive him without difficulty in Act 5. The modern verse keeps the organ and the bass note: "a bass-note boomed my sins".

The wedding masque has been stopped mid-dance. Prospero has remembered Caliban's plot, dismissed the spirits, and now turns to a shaken Ferdinand to explain what he has just seen. The actors were spirits and have melted into air; so, in time, will towers, palaces, temples, the great globe itself, and everyone in it. We are the stuff dreams are made of, and our lives are ringed round with sleep.

The speech is often quoted as serenity, and it is nothing of the kind. Prospero is vexed, his old brain is troubled, and the vision of universal dissolution is what a frightened man says to calm a younger one. "The great globe" is also the theatre the play was written for, and the line has been read since the nineteenth century as Shakespeare's own farewell, though nobody knows whether he meant it so. The line is usually misquoted as "made of"; the play says "made on". The modern verse keeps the closing image and expands it so the sense is plain: "our lives are bookended / With sleep pre-birth and post-death".

Alone for a moment, having sent Ariel to fetch the trap for the conspirators, Prospero gives his verdict on Caliban. He is a devil by birth; nothing taught him has stuck; the pains taken with him were all lost; and as his body ages his mind rots with it. The nature-and-nurture pairing, which the play seems to have brought into English in this form, is Prospero's, and so is the conclusion.

The verdict is not the play's. The audience has just heard Caliban's speech about the island's noises, and knows that something stuck. What the line records is a teacher's rage at a pupil who learnt everything except obedience, and the anger is the more telling for being spoken to nobody. The play's final scene, in which Caliban resolves to seek grace and Prospero acknowledges him as his own, revisits both halves of the sentence. The modern verse keeps the two words that named the argument: "He is a devil, born and bred, whose nature / Cannot be changed".

Five words that turn the play. Ariel has described the prisoners, Gonzalo weeping into his beard, and told Prospero that if he saw them his affections would become tender. Prospero asks whether the spirit really thinks so. The answer is conditional: Ariel is not human, so cannot feel it, but would if it could.

Everything Prospero says next follows from the rebuke. If a thing of air can imagine pity, a man of their own kind must do better, and the plan of vengeance is abandoned in the next twelve lines. The play never tells us whether Ariel is being sincere or handling a master it wants to be released by; the line works either way. What is certain is that the human decision in The Tempest is prompted by the character who is least human, and the modern verse keeps it to a single breath: "Mine would, if I were human".

Prospero's answer to Ariel, and the play's thesis in six lines. He is struck to the quick by the wrongs done to him, but he sides with his reason against his fury, and the reasoning is a piece of arithmetic: forgiving is rarer than avenging, and therefore better. Since his enemies are penitent, the whole purpose of his plot need not extend one frown further.

The word to watch is "rarer". Prospero does not say that virtue is sweeter or holier than vengeance, only that it is less common, and the play has spent three acts showing how common vengeance is. The line also leaves a loose end that the ending never ties: the enemies are penitent, he says, but Antonio never shows it. The choice is made anyway, which is arguably the point. The modern verse keeps the comparison: "it is rarer behaviour / To act with kindness than revenge".

Prospero has sent Ariel for his ducal clothes with the promise that freedom is minutes away, and the spirit sings while dressing him. The song is a description of the life about to begin: nectar with the bees, a cowslip for a bed, a bat for a horse, following the summer round the world. It is the only song in the play sung for pleasure rather than as part of a plot.

Set against the rest of Ariel's part, the lightness is the point. Every other song has been work: luring Ferdinand, waking Gonzalo, drumming the drunkards through the briars. This one has no listener but Prospero, who answers that he will miss the singer. Ariel's freedom, when it comes, is not a political state but a change of scale, from managing shipwrecks to lying in a flower. The modern verse keeps the tune's shape and leaves the last couplet exactly as it stands: "Merrily, merrily shall I live now / Under the blossom that hangs on the bough".

Prospero has drawn back the curtain on Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess, and the court crowds in. Miranda looks up at the first gathering of people she has ever seen and says this. The men she is admiring include the two who deposed her father and the one who plotted to murder his brother the night before.

Prospero's reply is three words: "'Tis new to thee". The play lets her wonder stand and lets his weariness stand beside it, and the line has carried both senses ever since, which is why Aldous Huxley could borrow it in 1932 as the title of a novel about a world that is neither brave nor new. The modern verse keeps the exclamation and makes plain what "brave" meant in 1611, which was splendid rather than courageous: "How beautiful mankind is! Luscious world".

The conspirators have been driven in, in their stolen finery, and Prospero introduces them to the court. Two of the three, Stephano and Trinculo, belong to Alonso. The third, the demi-devil who plotted his murder, he claims as his own. The sentence is built to hold the claim back until the last two words.

What "acknowledge mine" means is the argument of a century of criticism. At its plainest it is a master owning a servant. It can also be a father owning a son, since Prospero has raised Caliban, or a man owning the darkness in himself, since the plot he is admitting to is one he half-provoked. Paul Brown made the line the title of his 1985 essay on the play and colonial discourse, and it has served ever since as the play's shorthand for the coloniser's entanglement with the colonised. The modern verse keeps the delayed admission: "this thing of darkness, / I must admit is mine".

Caliban's last words. Prospero has offered him a pardon in exchange for tidying the cell, and Caliban accepts, promises to be wise in future and to seek for grace, and turns on himself for having taken a drunkard for a god. It is the only moment in the play he calls himself a fool.

Whether this is conversion or capitulation is one of the play's open questions. "Grace" can mean forgiveness, the master's favour, or something closer to salvation, and the line does not say which. Read one way, nurture has stuck after all and Prospero's verdict in Act 4 was wrong; read another, Caliban has learnt only that Stephano was a worse master than the one he had. What is not in doubt is that his last speech is the one Antonio never makes. The modern verse keeps the resolution and the self-rebuke: "And seek forgiveness".

The play is almost over. Prospero has promised the court calm seas for the voyage home and told them the plan: Naples for the wedding, then Milan for himself, where every third thought will be of dying. It is his last line before the Epilogue, and it is the quietest in the part.

The line undercuts the restoration it announces. He has got his dukedom back and he is describing it as a waiting room. The arithmetic is exact, one thought in three, and it makes the renunciation of magic sound less like a triumph than a settling of accounts with age. Modern productions often play the moment as the real ending, with the Epilogue as an afterword. The modern verse keeps the sense and drops the fraction: "I’ll contemplate my death".

Prospero comes forward alone after the play has ended and asks the audience to let him go. The charms are gone, the strength that is left is his own and faint, and he is now the prisoner: confined on the island by the spectators' spell unless their applause, the gentle breath that fills his sails, releases him. The last couplet turns it into a prayer. Forgive him as you would want to be forgiven.

The Epilogue does in twenty lines what the play did in five acts. A magician who spent the evening holding others captive hands the power to the people watching, and the trick is that the power was always theirs: no applause, no play. The rhymed tetrameter is deliberately smaller than the blank verse of the play, a man speaking without his art. Whether it is also Shakespeare's farewell to the stage is a question the speech invites and does not answer. The modern verse keeps the reversal, the applause, and the closing prayer: "As from your wrongs you’d pardoned be / Now let your kindness set me free".