Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: A European arrives on an inhabited island, is welcomed by its native, teaches him his language, and takes the island from him. The play was written as England’s first colonies were being planted, and for the last fifty years it has been read as the first English play about what that meant.
- Key Characters: Prospero, Caliban, Ariel, Miranda, Stephano and Trinculo, Gonzalo, Alonso.
- The Core Tension: Caliban says the island is his and Prospero stole it. Prospero says Caliban tried to rape his daughter and deserved his rock. Both are true, and the play does not say which weighs more.
- Key Manifestations: Ariel fetching dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes (A1S2); "This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother" and "You taught me language" (A1S2); Gonzalo’s plantation and commonwealth (A2S1); Trinculo pricing the monster for an English fair, Stephano’s "men of Ind" (A2S2); the drunken plan to inherit the island (A2S2, A3S2); Claribel married to Tunis (A2S1); "this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou takest from me."
(Act 1, Scene 2) - The Outcome: Prospero acknowledges Caliban as his and sails for Milan. Whether Caliban goes with him or is left on the island he claimed, the play does not say.
The Still-Vexed Bermoothes
The island is in the Mediterranean, between Tunis and Naples, and the play says so. But the New World keeps breaking in. When Ariel reports where he has hidden the king’s ship, he mentions an errand from another ocean.
Original
in the deep nook, where once
Thou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dew
From the still-vexed Bermoothes...
(Ariel, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
in the deep cove, where once
You called me up at midnight to fetch dew
From constantly tempestuous Bermuda.
The Bermudas were news in 1610. The Sea Venture, carrying the new governor of Virginia, had been wrecked there in a hurricane the year before, and every soul had survived; the story reached London in pamphlets by Sylvester Jourdain and William Strachey, and Shakespeare read at least one of them. The storm that harms no one, the fire on the rigging, the mutinies on the island: all of it is in the Bermuda accounts, and all of it is in the play.
The traces are everywhere once you look. Stephano wonders whether devils are putting tricks on him with savages and men of Ind; Trinculo calculates what a strange fish would earn at an English fair, where they will pay to see a dead Indian; Caliban’s god Setebos has a name from the accounts of Magellan’s voyage. The theme of illusion and reality is what the play calls the island. The Virginia Company called it a plantation.
Water With Berries In't
The play’s account of colonisation is given by the colonised, and it comes before the coloniser’s. Caliban tells Prospero how they met.
Original
When thou camest first,
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light...
(Caliban, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
When you first came,
You petted and fussed over me; you’d give me
Water with berries in it, and you’d teach me
The sun’s name...
Kindness, then instruction, then love: Caliban showed his visitor every spring and salt-pit on the island, and was rewarded, by his account, with a rock. It is the story that every colonial encounter told about itself from the other side, and Shakespeare wrote it in 1611, when the only version on record was the coloniser’s.
Prospero’s answer does not dispute the facts. He says that he treated Caliban with human care until the attempt on Miranda, and that a creature on whom nurture cannot stick deserved worse than a prison. The play lets both accounts stand, and it is the standing-together that makes the scene: a title and a crime, a welcome and a rape, and no way to weigh one against the other. The theme of nature and nurture is the argument Prospero wants to have. Caliban keeps changing the subject to the land.
Any Strange Beast There Makes a Man
The clowns see the native as the audience’s London saw him. Trinculo, finding Caliban under a cloak, does not ask what he is; he asks what he is worth.
Original
there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.
(Trinculo, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
in England, this monster would make me a fortune; any strange creature makes a man rich in England, for they won’t give a small Dutch coin to help a lame beggar, but they’ll willingly give ten coins to visit a freak show.
This is not a joke Shakespeare made up. Natives from the New World were brought to London and shown for money, and some of them died there, and the play’s first audiences would have paid to see exactly what Trinculo is describing. The jester’s instinct on meeting the island’s native is to price him, and Stephano’s, a few lines later, is to tame him and sell him to an emperor.
The comic plot then turns the native into a subject. Caliban kneels to Stephano’s bottle, offers him every fertile inch of the island, and proposes a coup in which he will be the new lord’s viceroy. It is the colonial bargain in miniature, and it is played for laughs, and the laughter is the play’s most uncomfortable moment for a modern audience. The theme of masters and servants is what the clowns think they are enacting. What they are enacting is an empire of three.
This Thing of Darkness
The theme’s last word is Prospero’s, and it has been argued over more than any line in the play. Driving in the three conspirators before the court, he assigns them: the butler and the jester belong to Alonso.
Original
Two of these fellows you
Must know and own; this thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine.
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Two of these chaps you must know
For they report to you; this thing of darkness,
I must admit is mine.
"Acknowledge mine": the verb can mean own, as a man owns a slave, or admit, as a man admits a fault, or accept, as a father accepts a child. Actors have played it as contempt, as weary responsibility, and as something close to love. The text gives the words and withholds the tone, and the line ends the play’s colonial argument by refusing to end it.
What follows is an order to tidy the cell and a conditional pardon, and then nothing. Caliban is not freed, not taken to Milan, not left the island; the play sails for Naples without saying. The theme of imprisonment and freedom closes for Ariel in the next twenty lines. For the island’s native it is left open, and the openness is what the post-colonial writers of the twentieth century walked into.
"The Tempest is not simply a reflection of colonialist practices but an intervention in an ambivalent and even contradictory discourse."
— Paul Brown, ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism, in Political Shakespeare, 1985
Key Quotes on Colonialism and Empire
Quote 1
All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king...
(Caliban, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The spells
Of Sycorax – toads, beetles, bats – be on you!
For I’m the only person that you rule,
Where I ruled first...
Quote Analysis: Caliban’s summary of the island’s constitution. Prospero is a king whose only subject was once the king, and Caliban says so with a curse from his mother’s magic attached. The lines are the plainest political statement in the play, and they are made by the character with least power in it. Everything the colonial reading of The Tempest rests on is here: a prior claim, a dispossession, and a language learned from the dispossessor in which to describe it.
If I can recover him and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he's a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat's leather.
(Stephano, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If I can make him better and tame him and get him to Naples with me, he’s a fine present for any emperor that has ever worn leather shoes.
Quote Analysis: Stephano, sober enough to see a business opportunity. Tame the monster, get him to Naples, and he is a present for an emperor. It is the language of the trade in exotic captives, and the butler speaks it fluently; he has heard it at court. Within the scene he will have Caliban kneeling to him, and within two more he will be planning to own the island. The play gives the coloniser’s first thought to a drunk, and the drunk’s first thought is export.
That would not bless our Europe with your daughter,
But rather lose her to an African...
(Sebastian, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Holding your daughter from a European,
Wedding her to an African instead...
Quote Analysis: Sebastian to Alonso, blaming the king for the wreck. Claribel should have been married in Europe and was lost to an African; the whole voyage, and the drowning of the prince, is the price. The line is the play’s racial politics spoken aloud, by a man who is about to try to murder his brother. Tunis was a real power and the marriage a real alliance, and Sebastian’s contempt for it is the court’s. The play does not endorse him. It lets him say it, and then lets Gonzalo tell him the truth he speaks lacks gentleness.
Hag-seed, hence!
Fetch us in fuel; and be quick, thou'rt best,
To answer other business.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Get out, witch-spawn!
Fetch us some firewood. Be quick. You have
More work.
Quote Analysis: Prospero dismissing Caliban after the exchange about language. Hag-seed: the son of a witch, named by his birth. Fetch fuel, be quick, there is other work. It is the voice of a master to a labourer, and it comes a line after Caliban has told him that the only profit of language is knowing how to curse. Prospero does not answer the curse. He gives an order, and the order is obeyed, because, as Caliban says, his art could make a vassal of Setebos.
Key Takeaways
- The New World Breaks In: The island is Mediterranean and the storm is Bermudan. Shakespeare read the Sea Venture pamphlets, and the play keeps their details.
- The Colonised Speaks First: Caliban tells the story of welcome, instruction and dispossession before Prospero can tell his. Both are true.
- Priced at the Fair: Trinculo's first thought is what the monster would earn in England. Stephano's is to sell him to an emperor.
- Acknowledged, Not Freed: Prospero calls Caliban his and sends him to tidy the cell. The play sails without saying what becomes of the island's native.
Study Questions and Analysis
Is The Tempest about colonialism?
For three hundred years nobody thought so, and for the last fifty it has been hard to think anything else. The facts in the text are these. The play was written in 1610 or 1611, as the Virginia colony was struggling and the Bermuda wreck was news. Its magician arrives on an island that already has an inhabitant, and describes what he found there:
Then was this island –
Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp hag-born – not honoured with
A human shape.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
This island
Back then – except her son delivered here,
A freckled wolf cub of a child – was not blessed
With humans.
An island not honoured with a human shape: the native does not count as a person. Prospero then teaches him language, enslaves him after the attempt on Miranda, and confines him to a rock; Caliban says the island is his by inheritance and was taken from him. Whatever else it is, the play is a story about a European ruling a native on the native’s own land.
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 produces Caliban as a savage in order to be a civiliser, and the play both performs the trick and shows it being done. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, in the same year, argued that English colonialism provides the play’s "dominant discursive con-texts". Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) read it beside the Virginia governors’ reports on discipline and desertion. The reaction came from Meredith Anne Skura, whose "Discourse and the Individual" (1989) accepted the New World material and warned that reading the play only as colonial allegory flattened it: the island is in the Mediterranean, Prospero is a duke, and Caliban is a witch’s son, not a tribe. The honest answer is that The Tempest is about colonialism the way Hamlet is about revenge: the subject is in it, and the play is larger than the subject.
What sources connect The Tempest to the New World?
Three pamphlets and a handful of names. In July 1609 the Sea Venture, carrying Sir Thomas Gates to Virginia, was wrecked on Bermuda in a hurricane; everyone survived, the castaways built two boats and reached Jamestown the next spring, and the story came to London in Sylvester Jourdain’s Discovery of the Barmudas, printed in October 1610, and William Strachey’s True Reportory, a letter dated July 1610 that circulated in manuscript and was not printed until 1625. Shakespeare had read Strachey: the fire on the rigging, the preservation of every soul, the mutinies on the island are all in the letter. The play’s clowns add the popular version:
Do you put tricks upon's with savages and men of Ind, ha?
(Stephano, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What’s the matter? Are there devils here? Are you trying to curse me with spells from savages and men from India?
Savages and men of Ind, tricks and devils: that is what the New World meant to a butler. Trinculo’s dead Indian at the fair is the same knowledge from the showman’s side. And Caliban’s god Setebos comes from Richard Eden’s 1555 account of Magellan’s voyage, where it is the name of the Patagonians’ god.
Frank Kermode’s Arden edition (1954) set out the Bermuda parallels in detail and then argued that they did not make the play American: the island is Mediterranean, its sources are Virgil and Ovid and Montaigne, and the New World supplies colour rather than subject. Stephen Greenblatt (1988) drew the opposite conclusion from the same material, reading the play as a meditation on how authority is produced in a colony, with Strachey’s account of martial law at Jamestown as its shadow. The sources are not in dispute. What they mean is the whole argument.
How does Caliban represent the colonised?
In everything he says about the island and in the way he says it. He was there first. He welcomed the newcomer and showed him the country:
And showed thee all the qualities o' the isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile...
(Caliban, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And showed you all the best parts of the island:
Fresh water springs, saltwater pits, the best spots.
He was taught the newcomer’s language and now uses it to curse. He was confined to a corner of his own land. And when a second set of Europeans arrives, he kneels to them, offers them the island, and proposes a coup against the first. The pattern is recognisable from every colonial history written since, and Shakespeare wrote it before any of them.
Stephen Greenblatt’s essay "Learning to Curse" (1976) made Caliban’s retort about language the centre of the reading: the colonised subject uses the master’s tongue to name what was done to him, and the retort has, in Greenblatt’s phrase, a "devastating justness". The writers of the decolonising world had already claimed him. Roberto Fernández Retamar’s "Calibán" (1971) declared that Latin America’s symbol was "not Ariel, as Rodó thought, but rather Caliban"; 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". Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Shakespeare’s Caliban (1991) traced the figure through four centuries of production and found that he has been a fish, a missing link, an Indian and an African as each age required. What the text gives all of them is a native with a prior claim, a grievance stated in verse, and no ending.
Is Prospero a coloniser or a victim of usurpation?
Both, and the play makes him say so in a single sentence. Revealing himself to the court in Act 5, he gives his history in the order it happened:
That I am Prospero and that very duke
Which was thrust forth of Milan, who most strangely
Upon this shore, where you were wrecked, was landed,
To be the lord on't. No more yet of this...
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
That I am Prospero, that self-same duke
Who was expelled from Milan, and who strangely
Arrived upon this shore, where you were shipwrecked,
To be the lord of it. Enough of that, though...
Thrust out of Milan, landed on the shore, and lord of it. The usurped duke became the island’s ruler by the same act of arrival, and the two facts sit in one breath. Prospero is the wronged party in Milan and the wronging party on the island, and the play does not choose between the roles; it makes him play both.
Paul Brown (1985) noticed that Antonio’s coup and Prospero’s seizure of the island are structurally the same act, and that the play forgives one and calls the other government. Meredith Anne Skura (1989) resisted the symmetry, arguing that Prospero’s relationship with Caliban is as much a failed adoption as a conquest, a foster-father who took a child into his home and could not make him good. Stephen Orgel’s Oxford edition (1987) set both readings beside the political facts of 1611, when a king was claiming power over a colony and a nature at once. The play’s treatment of power and control depends on the double role. Prospero knows what it is to be dispossessed, and the knowledge does not stop him dispossessing.
What is the significance of Claribel’s marriage to the King of Tunis?
It is the reason the court is at sea, and it is the play’s other colonial frontier. Alonso has married his daughter to an African king against, it seems, everyone’s advice; Sebastian blames him for it; and Antonio uses the distance to argue that Naples is now Sebastian’s for the taking:
She that is queen of Tunis; she that dwells
Ten leagues beyond man's life...
(Antonio, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
That’s her, the queen of Tunis; her that lives
More than a lifetime’s walk away...
Tunis is beyond the reach of a lifetime, and so, Antonio reasons, is Claribel’s claim. The Mediterranean has its own map of empire in this play: Milan and Naples, Carthage and Tunis, and a daughter sent across the water as the price of an alliance. She never appears.
Ania Loomba, in Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (1989), read Sebastian’s objection to "an African" as the play’s racial politics spoken aloud, the court’s counterpart to Prospero’s contempt for Caliban, and connected the two: the play treats both the black king of Tunis and the island’s native as what a European takes or gives to. Stephen Orgel’s "Prospero’s Wife" (1984) placed Claribel with Sycorax and Prospero’s unnamed wife as the absent women around whom the men arrange their claims. The colonial reading of the play usually looks west, to Virginia. Claribel is the reminder that it should also look south, to a marriage the play treats as a loss and the play’s villain treats as an opportunity.
How have post-colonial writers responded to The Tempest?
By taking Caliban’s side, and by taking his line about language as the play’s truest:
The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
(Caliban, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
May plague destroy you
For teaching me your language!
The writers of Africa and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s recognised the situation before the critics did. Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969), written for a black theatre, gives Caliban as "a black slave" and Ariel as "a mulatto slave", has Caliban enter shouting "Uhuru!", the Swahili for freedom, and ends with his cry of "FREEDOM HI-DAY!" ringing over an aged Prospero who cannot leave. Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essay "Calibán" (1971) claimed the monster for Latin America: "Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same language–today he has no other–to curse him".
Academic criticism followed in the 1980s, with Paul Brown, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme reading the play as an intervention in colonial discourse, and Stephen Greenblatt setting it beside the Virginia records. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Shakespeare’s Caliban (1991) recorded the whole history, from the fish of the Restoration stage to the freedom fighter of the 1970s, and concluded that Caliban has always been the age’s image of what it feared or hoped from the people it ruled. The theme of colonialism and empire is the newest of the play’s themes and now the first that most students meet. The play, which gave Caliban his curse and his poetry, seems to have been waiting for it.
What does "this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" mean for the theme?
It is the play’s last word on the colonial relationship, and it is deliberately unreadable. Prospero assigns the conspirators to their owners: the butler and jester are Alonso’s, and the thing of darkness is his. Caliban’s own last words follow soon after:
What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god
And worship this dull fool!
(Caliban, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What a stupid ass
Was I to think this drunkard was a god
And worship this dull fool!
An ass for having taken a drunkard for a god: Caliban repents of his choice of master, not of wanting one. He promises to be wise hereafter and seek for grace, and goes indoors to tidy. The acknowledgement and the promise are the play’s ending for its native, and neither of them says whether he will ever be free.
Paul Brown (1985) took his essay’s title from the line and read it as the coloniser’s admission that the savage is his own creation, the darkness Prospero needed in order to be light. Stephen Orgel’s Oxford edition (1987) heard something closer to paternity, a father acknowledging a child he cannot make good, and noticed that the play restores every order but the island’s. Meredith Anne Skura (1989) read the acknowledgement as personal before it is political: a man recognising in the creature he despises something of himself. The three readings are not exclusive, and an actor can play all of them in one line. What the play refuses is the fourth reading, in which Prospero sets Caliban free. The theme of revenge and forgiveness ends with everyone forgiven. The theme of empire ends with the native acknowledged, and the ship sailing.
