The Tempest has eight major themes, and they all pass through one man and one island. power and control follows a magician who commands the weather, the spirits and everyone's sleep, and gives it all up. magic and art asks what Prospero's art is, how it differs from the witch Sycorax's, and why the play keeps calling it by the theatre's own name. revenge and forgiveness is the shape of the plot: twelve years of waiting, every enemy at his mercy, and the choice of "the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance". masters and servants is every relationship on the island, from Ariel's bond and Caliban's rock to a prince who calls himself a slave for love. illusion vs reality runs from a storm that harms no one to a speech in which the audience is told that it too is made of dreams. nature vs nurture is the argument Prospero has with Caliban and loses to his own brother. imprisonment vs freedom is who holds the keys, and who asks, at the end, to be let go. And colonialism and empire is the theme the twentieth century found in the play: a European on an inhabited island, and the native who says "This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother".

The eight guides below share a spine: a Theme Profile, four close-read sections each anchored by a verse pair from the play file with its modern verse translation, a critic's pull-quote, four Key Quotes with analysis, Key Takeaways, and seven study questions with verified critic citations.

As something that belongs to whoever controls the conditions. The play opens with a king and a duke being told to get below by a sailor who asks "What cares these roarers for the name of king", and the next scene reveals that the waves were Ariel, acting on Prospero's orders. From then on every act of power on the island is Prospero's, exercised through a spirit: the charmed sleep, the vanishing banquet, the masque, the hounds. He rules Caliban by cramps, Ariel by the threat of an oak, and Ferdinand by a charm that drops his sword. He is never once seen persuading anyone.

Under his rule the play runs the same coup three times: Antonio's seizure of Milan twelve years ago, his attempt on the sleeping Alonso in A2S1, and Stephano's drunken plan to inherit the island in A3S2. Each one has a ruler asleep, an accomplice who needs persuading, and a man who has decided the place is his because he is standing in it. Each one fails, because the man who seized the island first foresees them all. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), read the repetition as the play's thesis: the island is a stage on which history rehearses the same scene at every level of society.

The theme ends with the most powerful man on the stage unable to leave it. Having got Milan back and married his daughter to Naples, Prospero drowns his book and stands in the Epilogue asking the audience to release him. See Power and Control for the full analysis.

Magic in the play is a garment. Prospero's first act on stage is to take off his cloak and say "Lie there, my art" before he tells Miranda the story of their exile; he puts it back on to summon Ariel, and everything supernatural that follows happens while he wears it. The art came from books: Prospero lost Milan because he preferred them to governing, and on the island they became the instrument of a better government than Antonio's. Most of what the audience actually sees of the magic is music, the songs by which Ariel leads, lulls and wakes.

The play draws a line between Prospero's art and the witchcraft of Sycorax, who imprisoned Ariel in a pine and whom Prospero condemns for sorceries too terrible to hear. Then it gives him, in Act 5, a speech borrowed line for line from the witch Medea, in which he claims to have darkened the sun and opened graves, calls the whole thing "But this rough magic I here abjure" and renounces it: "I'll drown my book". Frank Kermode's Arden edition (1954) placed Prospero's Art in the Renaissance tradition of learned magic and argued that what makes it good is the ends it serves; the Medea speech is where the play admits the means are the same.

The masque in A4S1, goddesses staged for the lovers, is art inside art, and it breaks when its maker remembers Caliban's plot. The speech that follows, "Our revels now are ended", is where the play says of itself that it is made of the same stuff as its illusions. See Magic and Art for the full analysis.

By giving its hero a perfect revenge and having him decline it. Prospero was put to sea in a rotten boat with a three-year-old child, and has had twelve years to think about it; the tempest brings every man responsible to his shore, and by the end of Act 3 they are helpless. The judgement is delivered by Ariel as a harpy, naming the three men of sin and their crime, and it divides them: Alonso, who has lost his son, hears it as true and goes to drown himself; Antonio and Sebastian draw their swords on the air.

The turn comes in A5S1, when Ariel remarks that if Prospero saw the prisoners his feelings would soften, and adds that his own would, "Mine would, sir, were I human". Prospero answers that a man must feel more than a spirit, and chooses: "the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance". The forgiveness that follows is real and not warm. Alonso, who repents, is embraced and given back his son; Antonio, who never says he is sorry, is forgiven in the breath that says naming him brother would infect Prospero's mouth, and answers with silence.

The play knows the difference between forgiving a man and being reconciled with him, and it gives Prospero the first without the second. In the Epilogue he turns the theme on the audience, asking to be pardoned as they would be: "Let your indulgence set me free". See Revenge and Forgiveness for the full analysis.

Every relationship on the island is one of service, and the play's first master-and-servant scene is a wage dispute. Ariel has performed the tempest to the letter and asks for the freedom he was promised, "My liberty", and Prospero answers by reminding him of the pine he was rescued from and threatening him with an oak. Service on the island is founded on debt. Caliban, the second servant, was welcomed and taught and then confined to a rock after the attempt on Miranda, and is kept because he makes the fire and fetches the wood; his service was not agreed but imposed.

Between them the play sets a servant who chooses. Ferdinand is put to carrying logs as a test and calls himself Miranda's slave as the highest thing he can say; she offers to carry them for him and to be his servant whether he will or no. It is the only bargain in the play that both parties make gladly. The comic plot turns the theme into farce, with Caliban kneeling to a butler's bottle and singing that he "Has a new master: get a new man": freedom, for him, is a change of lord.

The ending frees one servant and not the other. Ariel is released in the last lines, "Be free, and fare thou well", and Prospero says he will miss him; Caliban is sent to tidy the cell with pardon still to be earned. See Masters and Servants for the full analysis.

The first scene is a shipwreck and the second scene tells us it was not: not a hair perished, and the passengers came out of the sea with their clothes fresher than before. From then on nothing on the island is what it seems. Ferdinand believes his father drowned because a song told him so; Miranda takes a prince for a spirit; the court is fed a banquet that vanishes and accused by a harpy that is a servant in costume; the conspirators are distracted from murder by a line of glittering clothes.

The illusions tell the truth. The harpy's accusation is exact, and the lie about Ferdinand's death produces Alonso's real repentance. Prospero deceives in order to reveal, and the play admits that the theatre does the same: in the revels speech he tells Ferdinand that towers, palaces and the great globe itself will dissolve like the masque, and "We are such stuff As dreams are made on". The globe was the theatre the audience were sitting in.

The cost is paid by the deceived. Alonso, shown his living son, asks whether this is another vision of the island; the Boatswain is not sure he is awake; and Prospero, who promised to explain everything, never does. See Illusion vs Reality for the full analysis.

It runs the experiment three times and gets three answers. Caliban was taught and, on Prospero's account, stayed "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick". Antonio was raised at court by a brother who loved him and became a usurper. Miranda was raised alone by one teacher and became the play's kindest person, and it is she who states the theme, correcting her father before he has finished: "Good wombs have borne bad sons".

The argument over Caliban is the one the play cares about. Prospero says he treated him "with human care" until the attempt on Miranda, and that his vile race had something in it no teaching could reach; Caliban answers that the lesson took, "You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse", and that what he learned was the language of a master. Frank Kermode (1954) read the whole play as an opposition between Prospero's Art and Caliban's Nature, with Art meaning the disciplined cultivation of what nature provides. The play gives Caliban the most beautiful verse in it, which complicates the verdict.

Gonzalo's commonwealth, borrowed from Montaigne, is the nature side made into a constitution, an island where nobody governs that would "To excel the golden age"; Antonio points out that Gonzalo would be king of it. See Nature vs Nurture for the full analysis.

That everyone on the island is held somewhere, and by the same man. Ariel was shut in a pine by Sycorax for twelve years and is now bound to Prospero's service for the debt of his release. Caliban is confined to a rock on an island he once ruled, and can see everything he has lost. Ferdinand is charmed from moving and set to logs, and calls a cell with a daily sight of Miranda space enough. In A5S1 the whole court stands spell-stopped in a grove until their captor chooses to let them go.

The jailer is also the liberator, and also a prisoner. Prospero has been marooned for twelve years, and the tempest is his one chance to get home; when the magic is drowned he stands in the Epilogue with no spirits and no art, asking the audience to release him with their applause. The play ends only when they do.

Its three freedoms are of different kinds. Ariel's is complete, granted in the last lines with a blessing. Prospero's is conditional on the audience. Caliban's is not granted: he is sent indoors to tidy, and the play sails without saying what becomes of him. See Imprisonment vs Freedom for the full analysis.

For three hundred years nobody thought so, and for the last fifty it has been hard to think anything else. The play was written in 1610 or 1611, as the Virginia colony struggled and the wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda was news; Shakespeare read the pamphlets, and the storm that harms no one, the fire on the rigging and the mutinies on the island all come from them. Ariel fetches dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes; Trinculo prices Caliban for an English fair where they will pay to see a dead Indian; Caliban's god Setebos has a Patagonian name.

The colonised speaks first. Caliban tells Prospero that he welcomed him, showed him every spring on the island, and was rewarded with a rock: "This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother". Prospero answers with the attempt on Miranda, which Caliban does not deny. Both are true, and the play does not say which weighs more. Paul Brown, in 1985, argued that the play is not a reflection of colonial practice but an intervention in it: Prospero needs Caliban to be a savage in order to be a civiliser, and the play both performs the trick and shows it being done. The writers of the decolonising world, Aimé Césaire and Roberto Fernández Retamar among them, had already claimed Caliban as their own.

The theme's last word is Prospero's, presenting the conspirators to the court: "this thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine". Own, admit or accept; the text withholds the tone, and the ship sails without freeing the island's native. See Colonialism and Empire for the full analysis.