Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: Nothing on the island is what it seems. The storm is a spirit, the drowned are alive, the banquet vanishes, the goddesses are actors, and the man who arranged it all tells his audience that they too are made of dreams. The play asks what is left when the illusions are dismissed.
- Key Characters: Prospero, Ariel, Ferdinand, Miranda, Alonso, Gonzalo, Stephano and Trinculo.
- The Core Tension: Prospero’s illusions tell the truth: the harpy’s accusation is accurate, the lie about Ferdinand’s death produces real repentance. The play uses deception to reveal, and then admits that the theatre does the same.
- Key Manifestations: The tempest that harms no one and the garments that stay fresh (A1S1, A1S2); Ferdinand and Miranda taking each other for spirit and goddess (A1S2); the charmed sleep and the invisible voice (A2S1, A3S2); the vanishing banquet and the harpy (A3S3); the masque and "Our revels now are ended" (A4S1); the court’s doubt whether Prospero is real (A5S1); the Epilogue.
- Famous Quote:
"These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air..."
(Act 4, Scene 1) - The Outcome: The charms dissolve, the court comes to its senses, and Prospero promises to explain everything later. He never does. The play ends with a man asking the audience to release him from a spell, which is also a play.
Flamed Amazement
The first scene is a shipwreck and the second scene tells us it was not. Miranda has watched a ship break up and wept for the drowned; Prospero tells her no soul was lost, not so much as a hair; and Ariel, arriving, describes what he actually did on the ship.
Original
Not a hair perished;
On their sustaining garments not a blemish,
But fresher than before...
(Ariel, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Nobody lost a hair;
The clothes they wore not only are unblemished,
But cleaner than before.
The storm was a performance. Ariel burned along the rigging, divided and joined, made the sailors think hell was empty; and the passengers he drove into the sea came out of it with their clothes fresher than before. The audience, which has just watched the wreck, learns that it was watching magic, and every scene that follows is coloured by the knowledge.
The freshness of the garments is the play’s running joke about its own illusions. Gonzalo keeps noticing that their clothes are not stained, and the lords keep mocking him for it, and he is right. The evidence that nothing on the island is what it seems is in plain view from the start, and only the fool believes it. The theme of magic and art is how the illusions are made; this theme is what it is like to live inside them.
Some God o' the Island
The first meeting of the lovers is a double mistake. Ferdinand, led by music, takes Miranda for the goddess the music serves. Miranda, who has seen two men in her life, takes Ferdinand for a spirit. Prospero has to correct her.
Original
MIRANDA: What is't? A spirit?
Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir,
It carries a brave form. But 'tis a spirit.
PROSPERO: No, wench; it eats and sleeps and hath such senses
As we have, such.
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
MIRANDA: Is it a spirit?
It’s looking all around! Believe me, sir,
It looks magnificent. But it’s a spirit.
PROSPERO: No, girl; it eats and sleeps and has the senses
That we all have.
It eats and sleeps and has senses like ours: the plainest definition of a human being in Shakespeare, offered to a girl who has never needed one. The joke is that on this island the mistake is reasonable. Spirits do walk about, and a stranger appearing to music is more likely to be one of them than a prince. Miranda’s error and Ferdinand’s are the same error, and it is the audience’s too: we have just watched Ariel, and we know how the music works.
What the scene shows is that illusion on the island is not only Prospero’s doing. People arrive with their own. Ferdinand believes his father drowned because a song told him so; Miranda believes the world is full of beautiful people because she has met one. The theme of nature and nurture sits underneath this: Miranda’s innocence is an illusion nobody made, and it is the one the play is kindest to.
A Living Drollery
In Act 3 the illusions turn on the court. Shapes bring in a banquet, dance around it, invite the king to eat, and vanish. The lords, who have been mocking Gonzalo for believing in fresh garments, are suddenly ready to believe anything.
Original
A living drollery. Now I will believe
That there are unicorns, that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.
(Sebastian, Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
A puppet show with living puppets. I now
Believe in unicorns, and in Arabia
There is a tree wherein the phoenix roosts,
And it is sat there now.
Sebastian will believe in unicorns; Antonio adds that travellers never lie, though fools at home condemn them. It is a joke about the tall tales that came back from the New World, and it is spoken by two men who have just tried to commit murder and are now watching a puppet show with living puppets. Then the harpy comes, and the show stops being funny.
The banquet is the play’s clearest demonstration of how Prospero’s illusions work as judgement. The food is not real; the accusation the harpy delivers over it is exactly true. Alonso hears his crime in the thunder and goes to drown himself. The theme of revenge and forgiveness is carried out entirely by spectacle, and the spectacle is more effective than any sword would have been, because it makes the guilty condemn themselves.
The Great Globe Itself
The masque in Act 4 is an illusion that Prospero makes for pleasure, and it is the one he breaks himself. Remembering Caliban’s plot, he dismisses the goddesses, and then, to calm Ferdinand, explains what they were and what everything else is.
Original
the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff...
(Prospero, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
and the world itself,
Yes, everything we own, will disappear,
And, as the memories of our story fade,
We’ll leave nothing behind. For we are only...
The masque was a vision without foundation; so is the world. Towers, palaces, temples and the globe will dissolve like the pageant, and "globe" is also the name of the theatre the audience were sitting in. The speech about illusion is spoken in a building that is one, to people who have paid to be deceived for an afternoon, and it tells them that their lives outside are made of the same material.
It is the most famous speech in the play and it is not a consolation. Prospero is upset, and says so a moment later; he has just remembered that three men are on their way to kill him, and the vision of everything dissolving is what the memory shook loose. The theme of imprisonment and freedom is close by. A man who believes the world is a dream is a man who can be released from it, and the Epilogue will ask the audience to do exactly that.
"The Tempest is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the interest is not historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connection of events, — but is a birth of the imagination, and rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements granted to, or assumed by, the poet."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes on The Tempest, 1818
Key Quotes on Illusion vs Reality
Quote 1
Methinks our garments are now as fresh as when we put them on first in Afric, at the marriage of the king's fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis.
(Gonzalo, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I think our clothes are as fresh now as when we first put them on in Africa, at the marriage of the king’s beautiful daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis.
Quote Analysis: Gonzalo, insisting on the evidence. The court’s clothes were soaked in the sea and are now as fresh as at the wedding in Tunis; he says so three times in the scene and is laughed at each time. He is the only lord who notices the miracle and the only one who draws no conclusion from it. The garments are the play’s quiet proof that the island is enchanted, offered to the audience through the character least able to interpret it, and the mockery of Antonio and Sebastian is the mockery of men who cannot see what is in front of them.
If this prove
A vision of the Island, one dear son
Shall I twice lose.
(Alonso, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If this is only
A spell cast on this island, then my dear son
I will have lost twice.
Quote Analysis: Alonso, at the moment Prospero reveals Ferdinand alive at the chessboard. He has been deceived so often in three days that he cannot trust his own son’s face: if this is another vision of the island, he will lose the boy a second time. It is the cost of Prospero’s method, stated by its chief victim. The illusions have worked; Alonso has repented; and the price is that he can no longer tell the real from the conjured, even when the real is what he prayed for.
If I did think, sir, I were well awake,
I'ld strive to tell you. We were dead of sleep...
(Boatswain, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If I believed that I was wide awake,
I’d try to tell you. We were fast asleep...
Quote Analysis: The Boatswain, brought by Ariel to the cell, asked by the king how he came there. He would try to explain if he were sure he was awake. The sailors slept through the whole play under hatches and woke to roaring, shrieking and jingling chains; they were brought to Prospero in a daze, and the Boatswain’s report is the crew’s only account of the island. It is a dream told by a man who does not know it has ended, and it stands for what the whole court has been through.
If these be true spies which I wear in my head, here's a goodly sight.
(Trinculo, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If I can rely on these visions in my head to be real, this here is a lovely sight.
Quote Analysis: Trinculo, drunk and pinched and dressed in stolen clothes, driven in before the court. If his eyes are honest spies, this is a fine sight. It is the clown’s version of Alonso’s doubt, and it makes the same point: nobody on the island can trust what they see. Trinculo, who has spent the play mistaking a monster for a fish and a butler for a king, is the last person to be sure of anything, and the line lets him be funny about it while the lords are being solemn.
Key Takeaways
- The Wreck Was a Show: Not a hair perished and the clothes came out fresher. The audience learns in the second scene that the first was magic.
- Everyone Arrives Deceived: Ferdinand believes a song; Miranda takes a prince for a spirit. Illusion on the island is not only Prospero's doing.
- Spectacle as Judgement: The banquet is false and the harpy's accusation true. The guilty are made to condemn themselves.
- The Globe Is a Globe: Prospero's speech about dissolving towers is spoken in a theatre to an audience paying to be deceived.
Study Questions and Analysis
How does Prospero use illusion to control the other characters?
By staging things. Nothing Prospero does to his enemies is done by force; every one of them is deceived into a state in which force is unnecessary. The court is put to sleep and woken, shown a banquet and robbed of it, accused by a monster and charmed into a grove. The conspirators are led by music into a bog, and then shown this:
Thy shape invisible retain thou still:
The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither,
For stale to catch these thieves.
(Prospero, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Retain your state where you’re invisible:
Go fetch those glitzy clothes from in my house,
To use as bait to catch the thieves.
Glittering clothes on a line, as bait. Stephano and Trinculo forget the murder to argue over a gown, and are hunted off by spirits in the shape of dogs. Prospero never draws a weapon in the play. He arranges what people see, and lets what they see decide what they do.
Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), read the island as a stage and Prospero as its director, rehearsing on his enemies the whole history of usurpation in a compressed afternoon; on that reading the illusions are the experiment, and the men are its subjects. Frank Kermode (1954) saw the same method as the discipline of Art: Prospero’s spectacles are lessons, and the banquet, the harpy and the hounds are the curriculum. Both readings notice that the illusions are meant to change people, and that only some of them are changed. Alonso is; Antonio is not. The method has limits, and the play shows them.
Is the island itself an illusion?
The characters cannot agree on what it looks like, which is the play’s way of asking. When the court first walks on it, the lords describe two different places:
ADRIAN: The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.
SEBASTIAN: As if it had lungs and rotten ones.
ANTONIO: Or as 'twere perfumed by a fen.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
ADRIAN: The gentle wind that blows on us is lovely.
SEBASTIAN: As if it had lungs, although they were rotten.
ANTONIO: Or like it smelled of a boggy marsh.
Sweet air or rotten lungs; lush green grass or tawny ground with an eye of green in it. Gonzalo and Adrian see a paradise; Antonio and Sebastian see a swamp; and the play does not tell us who is right. Later Caliban describes an island full of noises and sweet airs, and Trinculo an island of horse-piss and thunder. The place is what each visitor brings to it.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his notes of 1818, called The Tempest a drama that "owes no allegiance to time or space", and the island is the proof: it is somewhere between Tunis and Naples and also, by way of the Bermuda pamphlets Shakespeare read, somewhere off Virginia, and it makes no attempt to be either. Anne Barton (1968) called the play "an extraordinarily obliging work of art" that "will lend itself to almost any interpretation", and the island is where the obligingness starts. It is not an illusion in the sense that the banquet is. It is a place that reflects, and the play uses it to show the audience the men who look at it.
What does the masque reveal about illusion in the play?
That illusion is fragile, and that its maker knows it. The masque is the one spectacle Prospero stages for pleasure rather than judgement, goddesses blessing a marriage, and while it runs he insists on absolute silence from the lovers:
Sweet, now, silence!
Juno and Ceres whisper seriously;
There's something else to do: hush, and be mute,
Or else our spell is marred.
(Prospero, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My dear, be silent!
Juno and Ceres whisper seriously;
There’s something else they have to do: be quiet
Or else our spell is broken.
A word would break it. In the event it is not a word but a memory: Prospero recalls Caliban’s plot and the vision collapses to a hollow, confused noise. The spell that could bind a king is undone by its maker’s own distraction.
Stephen Orgel, in his Oxford edition (1987), placed the masque beside the court masques of James I, which were statements of royal power staged at vast expense, and read its collapse as the play’s admission that such shows are exactly as strong as the attention of the man who commissions them. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (1985) made the collapse the centre of their reading: the anxiety that breaks the masque is the anxiety of a ruler whose title to the island is not secure. The revels speech that follows is Prospero’s attempt to turn the failure into philosophy, and it is magnificent, and it is spoken by a man who has just been reminded that his art has limits. The theme of magic and art is at its most exposed here, and so is the magician.
Why does Alonso doubt that Prospero is real?
Because everything else he has met on the island has turned out not to be. He has been wrecked by a storm that was a spirit, fed by a banquet that vanished, accused by a harpy that was a servant in costume, and charmed in a grove for hours. When a man in the robes of the Duke of Milan embraces him, his first instinct is to check the pulse. When the Boatswain arrives with news of a whole ship, he says what the whole court is thinking:
These are not natural events; they strengthen
From strange to stranger.
(Alonso, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
This isn’t natural; these things become
More strange.
He asks for an oracle to rectify their knowledge, and Prospero tells him not to trouble his mind: the explanation will keep. It never comes. Alonso goes home with his son, his ally and his enemy, and without any account of what happened to him.
Anne Barton (1968) noticed how much the play refuses to explain and how briskly it moves past the refusal, and Alonso’s unanswered questions are the clearest case. E. M. W. Tillyard (1938) would have read the doubt as part of the late-play pattern, in which the restored are dazed by their restoration and the audience is asked to accept wonder in place of reasons. What the scene shows about the theme is that illusion has a cost even when it works. Alonso has been made good by being deceived, and the deception has left him unable to trust the truth when it is finally put in front of him.
How does The Tempest blur the line between theatre and reality?
By making its magician a director and its island a stage. Prospero’s illusions are all performances: Ariel is congratulated on how bravely the figure of the harpy was performed, the masque is enacted by spirits, the hounds are spirits in shape. And in the Epilogue the actor playing Prospero steps out of the fiction and asks the real audience to end the play:
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands...
(Prospero, Epilogue)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But free me from the ties that be
And with your help, grant liberty.
The bands are the spell and the play at once; the good hands are applause. Prospero cannot leave the island, and the actor cannot leave the stage, until the audience claps. The theatre has been asked to do what Prospero’s spirits did, and the audience becomes the last of his servants.
G. Wilson Knight’s The Crown of Life (1947) took this as the play’s meaning: "Prospero, who controls this comprehensive Shakespearian world, automatically reflects Shakespeare himself", and the drowned book is the pen laid down. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818) had already called Prospero "the very Shakspere himself, as it were, of the tempest". Jan Kott (1964) resisted the autobiography but kept the stage, reading the island as a theatre in which power rehearses its own history. All three agree that the play knows it is a play. What the revels speech adds is the claim that the world outside the theatre is the same kind of thing, and the Epilogue makes the audience act on it.
What is the significance of sleep and dreams in the play?
Sleep is the state in which Prospero’s illusions do their work, and the play is full of it. Miranda is put to sleep so that her father can talk to Ariel; the sailors sleep under hatches through the whole action; the court is charmed to sleep so that the plot against the king can be tried and stopped. The two men left awake notice the strangeness and explain it away:
SEBASTIAN: What a strange drowsiness possesses them!
ANTONIO: It is the quality o' the climate.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
SEBASTIAN: How strange they all fell drowsy at the same time!
ANTONIO: The weather is to blame for that.
The climate is Ariel. Sleep on this island is never natural, and the men who resist it are the ones with something to do in the dark. Caliban, who is never charmed to sleep, dreams anyway, of clouds opening to drop riches on him, and cries to dream again when he wakes.
Northrop Frye, in his introduction of 1959, read the play’s sleeps and wakings as the rhythm of romance, in which a society passes through a dream-like disorder and wakes restored. Frank Kermode (1954) treated the charmed sleeps as the instruments of Art, the means by which Prospero suspends his enemies until he is ready for them. The revels speech makes the largest claim: that our little life is rounded with a sleep, and the waking in between is the dream. The theme of imprisonment and freedom is never far from the theme of sleep. A charmed sleeper is a prisoner who does not know it, and the play has a whole court of them.
Does anyone in the play see through the illusions?
Only the audience, and only because Prospero tells us. Every character on the island is deceived, and the one who comes closest to naming the condition is the one least able to escape it:
All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement
Inhabits here: some heavenly power guide us
Out of this fearful country!
(Gonzalo, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
This place is full of torment, pain, amazement
And wonder: may some god guide us to get
Out of this terrifying land!
Gonzalo does not know what is happening; he knows that everything is happening at once, and asks heaven for a way out. Caliban knows the island better than anyone and still mistakes a butler for a god. Antonio, the coldest mind in the play, believes in a roar of lions that he invented himself. Prospero alone sees the whole design, and the play makes the audience share his view from the second scene.
Jan Kott (1964) read that arrangement as the play’s politics: the man with the book sees everything, and the rest live in his fiction. Anne Barton (1968) was more interested in what the arrangement does to the audience, who are given Prospero’s knowledge and then, in the Epilogue, made responsible for him. Seeing through the illusions turns out to be a burden rather than a freedom. The audience knows the storm was a spirit and the banquet a trick, and is asked at the end to applaud a man who has just confessed that he did it all, so that he can go home.
