Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: What Prospero’s magic is, where it came from, how it differs from the witch Sycorax’s, and why the play keeps calling it "art" – the same word it uses for the theatre.
- Key Characters: Prospero, Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand, Miranda, Alonso.
- The Core Tension: Prospero’s art can raise storms, charm swords from hands and open graves, and it cannot make a single person good. The play asks what magic is for, and lets its magician answer by giving it up.
- Key Manifestations: The magic cloak laid down and the story told (A1S2); Ariel’s account of the burning ship and the songs that lead Ferdinand (A1S2); the charmed sleep and the invisible music (A2S1); the vanishing banquet and the harpy (A3S3); the masque and its breaking (A4S1); the Medea speech, the rough magic abjured, the drowned book (A5S1); the Epilogue.
- Famous Quote:
"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) - The Outcome: The staff is broken and the book drowned. Ariel is freed, the ship is whole, and Prospero asks the audience to do with their applause what his spirits can no longer do for him.
Lie There, My Art
The first thing Prospero does on stage is take his magic off. Miranda has begged him to calm the storm; he tells her there is no harm done, asks her to help him out of his cloak, and lays it on the ground before he begins the story of their exile.
Original
'Tis time
I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand,
And pluck my magic garment from me. So:
Lie there, my art.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It’s time
I gave you further details. Help me out,
And take my magic cloak from me. And so:
Lie there, my magic cloak.
"Lie there, my art." The cloak is the art, and it can be put down. That is the play’s first definition of what Prospero’s magic is: not a nature but a garment, worn for a purpose and removed to talk to a daughter. He puts it back on before he calls Ariel. Everything supernatural in the play happens while he is wearing it.
The story he then tells explains where the art came from. He was Duke of Milan, gave up governing for "secret studies", and lost the dukedom to a brother who did the governing instead; Gonzalo packed his books into the boat, and on the island the books became power. Magic in The Tempest is scholarship that has found a place where it works. The theme of power and control and the theme of art are the same story told from two ends.
Come Unto These Yellow Sands
Most of the magic the audience actually sees is music. Ariel leads Ferdinand to Miranda with a song, puts the court to sleep with a tune, wakes Gonzalo with another, and spoils the drunkards’ plot by playing their catch on an invisible pipe. The first song is the model.
Original
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Courtsied when you have and kissed
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there;
And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.
(Ariel, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come onto these yellow sands,
And then hold hands:
When you’ve curtsied and you’ve kissed
The wild waves will desist,
Then tread lightly here and there
And, sweet spirits, the burden bear.
It is an invitation to dance, sung to a prince who thinks his father has drowned, and it works: Ferdinand follows it. The magic here does not compel; it draws. Ferdinand says the music "hath drawn me rather" than that he followed it, and the correction is the play’s account of how Prospero’s art acts on people. It changes what they want to do.
That is also how a play works, and Shakespeare knows it. The audience in the Globe was being drawn by the same music Ferdinand hears, played by the same musicians. The theme of illusion and reality in The Tempest is never far from the theatre, and the songs are where the two magics, Prospero’s and the playwright’s, are hardest to tell apart.
Some Vanity of Mine Art
In Act 4 Prospero stages a show. Ferdinand has passed his trial and been given Miranda, and Prospero calls Ariel to bring the spirits so that he can present the young couple with a masque of goddesses. He describes it, with a magician’s modesty, as a trifle.
Original
I must
Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple
Some vanity of mine art: it is my promise,
And they expect it from me.
(Prospero, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
for I’m obliged
To demonstrate to this young couple’s eyes
The beauty of my magic: it’s my promise
To them and they expect it.
"Some vanity of mine art": a display, a bit of showing off, a promise to be kept. Iris, Ceres and Juno descend and bless the marriage; nymphs and reapers dance; Ferdinand asks to live on the island for ever. Then Prospero remembers Caliban’s plot, and the goddesses vanish with a hollow noise.
The masque was the court entertainment of Shakespeare’s day, staged for James I with machinery and music at enormous cost, and Prospero’s is a masque within a play: art inside art. Its breaking is the play’s most exact statement about what magic can and cannot do. It can conjure goddesses. It cannot stop a man remembering that three drunks are coming to kill him. The theme of nature and nurture enters here too, because the plot that interrupts the vision is Caliban’s, and Caliban is the one creature Prospero’s art has never been able to change.
Rough Magic
Prospero gives up his art in a speech that begins by listing what it can do. The list is borrowed from the witch Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Arthur Golding’s translation, and it does not read like the catalogue of a benevolent sage.
Original
graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure...
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ve ordered graves
To wake their sleeping dead, open and free them
With my effective spells. But all this magic
I now reject...
Waking the dead is a necromancer’s claim, and Prospero makes it a line before he calls the whole thing "rough magic" and renounces it. The word "rough" is doing a great deal of work. For four acts the magic has been "art", a term for skill and learning; now, at the moment of giving it up, it is rough, and the man giving it up seems to know how close his powers have run to the witch’s he despises.
What follows is the breaking of the staff and the drowning of the book, and then the Epilogue, in which Prospero stands with no spirits to enforce and no art to enchant and asks the audience to release him. The theme of imprisonment and freedom closes on the magician. He has spent the play freeing and binding others; at the end the art itself is the thing he is bound to, and he has to break it to go home.
"Art is not only a beneficent magic in contrast to an evil one."
— Frank Kermode, The Tempest (Arden Shakespeare), Introduction, 1954
Key Quotes on Magic and Art
Quote 1
This damned witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Argier,
Thou know'st, was banished...
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Sycorax, that damn witch,
Because of awful things and wretched spells
Too terrible to hear, was, from Algiers,
Banished, you know.
Quote Analysis: Prospero reminding Ariel of the witch he was rescued from. Sycorax was banished from Algiers for sorceries too terrible to be heard, which is the play’s way of saying that there is another magic on the island, older than Prospero’s, and that it was evil. The contrast is set up early and deliberately: her magic imprisoned Ariel in a pine, his released him. What the play does not say, and lets the audience notice, is that the same man who condemns her sorceries will threaten Ariel with an oak in the next twenty lines.
I must obey: his art is of such power,
It would control my dam's god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.
(Caliban, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I must obey him: he has such strong witchcraft,
It would control the god my mother prayed to,
So Setebos would work for him.
Quote Analysis: Caliban, giving up the argument. Prospero’s art is strong enough to make a slave of Setebos, the god his mother worshipped, so there is no point resisting it. The lines are the clearest statement in the play of how magic works as power: it does not need to be understood or agreed with, only recognised. Caliban recognises it, and fetches the wood. He will spend the rest of the play looking for a rival magic, and find it in a bottle.
FERDINAND: This is a most majestic vision, and
Harmoniously charming. May I be bold
To think these spirits?
PROSPERO: Spirits, which by mine art
I have from their confines called to enact
My present fancies.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
FERDINAND: This is a sight fit for a king, and also
Presented charmingly. Can I be bold
Suggesting these are spirits?
PROSPERO: By my magic,
I’ve called them from their dwellings to perform
My tricks for you.
Quote Analysis: Ferdinand asks whether the goddesses of the masque are spirits, and Prospero says they are, called from their confines to enact his present fancies. It is the plainest account the play gives of what the magic is made of: spirits, under command, performing a fancy. A fancy is an idea; enacting it is what a theatre does. Prospero is describing a production, and Ferdinand, who has been enchanted since Act 1, responds by asking to stay in the theatre for ever.
This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of: some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.
(Alonso, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
This is as strange as any man’s encountered
And something’s going on here that’s not normal
Or natural: some prophet or a priest
Must help us understand.
Quote Analysis: Alonso, at the end, still unable to account for what has happened to him. He has been wrecked, bereaved, judged by a harpy, charmed in a grove and restored to his son, and he asks for an oracle to explain it. Prospero, who is the oracle, tells him not to trouble his mind and promises the whole story later. The king never gets an explanation. The play is clear that magic, from the inside, feels like a maze, and that only the man with the book can see the plan.
Key Takeaways
- A Garment, Not a Nature: Prospero takes his art off to talk to his daughter and puts it on to summon Ariel. Magic in the play is worn.
- Music That Draws: Ariel's songs lead, lull and wake. Prospero's art works by changing what people want, which is also how a play works.
- Art Inside Art: The masque is a show within the show, and it breaks when its maker remembers the one creature his art could not change.
- Rough Magic: The Medea speech claims a witch's powers. Prospero calls them rough, renounces them, and drowns the book.
Study Questions and Analysis
What is the difference between Prospero’s magic and Sycorax’s?
The play insists there is one and shows it in a single story. Sycorax, a witch banished from Algiers, had Ariel as her servant; when he refused her commands she shut him in a pine, and died leaving him there. Prospero arrived, heard his groans, and split the tree. The contrast is drawn in the terms of what each magic asked of the spirit:
Thou, my slave,
As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant;
And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorred commands...
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You, my slave,
As you have said yourself, was then her servant;
And as you were too sensitive a spirit
To carry out her evil work on earth...
Her commands were earthy and abhorred; his, the play implies, are not. Sycorax works with toads, beetles and bats; Prospero works with books. She imprisons; he releases. And yet the story is told by Prospero, to a servant he is about to threaten with twelve more years in an oak, and the audience is allowed to hear the resemblance as well as the difference.
Frank Kermode’s Arden edition (1954) built its reading of the play on the distinction, placing Prospero’s Art in the Renaissance tradition of learned, disciplined magic and Sycorax’s in the tradition of witchcraft, and arguing that the difference is one of ends as well as means. Stephen Orgel’s "Prospero’s Wife" (1984) noticed that Sycorax exists only in Prospero’s account of her, and read her as the dark double he needs in order to define himself: "the witch Sycorax and her monster child, Caliban" are, on Orgel’s reading, the ghostly family Prospero creates to fill the place of the wife and mother the play never mentions. The two readings can both be true. The play draws the line between white and black magic clearly, and then gives its white magician a speech borrowed from Medea.
Is Prospero’s magic good or evil?
The play spends four acts saying good and one speech saying it is not so simple. The good is visible: the tempest harms no one, the ship is preserved, the enemies are brought to repentance and the lovers to marriage. The complication comes when Prospero describes his art in his own words, in the speech that renounces it:
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt...
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ve given lightning, splitting Jove’s thick tree
With his own lightning bolt.
Splitting an oak with Jove’s own thunderbolt is not white magic; it is the boast of a sorceress, and Shakespeare took it, with the rest of the speech, from Medea. The audience that knew Ovid, which was most of the educated audience, would have heard the borrowing. Prospero claims the powers of a witch at the exact moment he gives them up.
Frank Kermode (1954) treated the Medea speech as a difficulty for his reading and resolved it by the ends the magic serves: what makes Prospero’s art good is what he does with it, not what it is. G. Wilson Knight’s The Crown of Life (1947) was untroubled, reading the magic as the creative power of the dramatist and its renunciation as Shakespeare’s farewell. Stephen Orgel’s Oxford edition (1987) placed Prospero’s power beside the royal magic that James I claimed, a monarch’s command over nature and subjects together, and noted how uneasy the play is about it. The safest answer is the play’s own: the magic is good for as long as it is being used well, and it is given up before it can be used otherwise.
Why is The Tempest so full of music?
Because music is what the magic sounds like. Every enchantment in the play is accompanied: Ariel sings Ferdinand to Miranda, plays the court to sleep, wakes Gonzalo with a song in his ear, leads the drunkards with a tabor, and the banquet, the harpy and the masque all arrive to solemn or soft music. Even Caliban, who hates the magic, loves its sound:
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again...
(Caliban, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Sometimes a thousand plucking instruments
Will hum around my ears, and sometimes voices
That, if I’d woken from a slumberous sleep,
Would put me back to sleep again.
The play calls for more music than almost any other by Shakespeare, and two of the song settings, by the King’s Men’s lutenist Robert Johnson, survive. The songs are not decoration. They are the mechanism by which Prospero’s will is done on people who cannot see the hand doing it.
Samuel Johnson (1765) thought the songs showed what tradition had always given to fairies, "a humorous and frolick controlment of nature, well expressed by the Songs of Ariel", and the phrase catches their lightness: Ariel’s magic is airy, quick and pleasant, even when it is a trap. William Hazlitt (1817) called Ariel "imaginary power, the swiftness of thought personified", which is a description of music as much as of a spirit. The theme of illusion and reality in this play is mostly heard rather than seen, and the audience, who hear the same songs as the characters, are enchanted along with them.
What is the masque in Act 4, and why does Prospero break it off?
A masque was the most expensive entertainment of the Jacobean court: goddesses descending on machinery, music, dancing, and a compliment to the monarch. Prospero stages one for Ferdinand and Miranda to bless their betrothal. Iris summons Ceres, Juno descends, the two sing blessings, nymphs and reapers dance, and then Prospero starts, and the vision collapses:
I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life...
(Prospero, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I did forget about that evil plan
That Caliban, the monster, and his friends
Intend to kill me...
The masque breaks because its maker forgot something. That is a strange thing for the play to show, since Prospero has forgotten nothing else, and it has been read as the moment his control slips: the one part of the island he cannot enchant, Caliban, has interrupted the one part of his art that was pure celebration.
Stephen Orgel, in his Oxford edition (1987), placed the masque in its Jacobean context, where such shows were statements of royal power, and read its collapse as the play’s admission that power staged is power interrupted. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (1985) made the interruption the centre of their reading: Prospero’s overreaction to a drunken plot he has known about all along betrays an anxiety about his rule that the masque was meant to cover. The speech that follows, about revels ending and cloud-capped towers dissolving, is the play’s most famous, and it is spoken by a man calming a frightened son-in-law while he calms himself.
Is the play about Shakespeare’s own art?
It is the oldest reading and the most tempting. A magician stages illusions for an audience, controls every entrance and exit, and at the end gives up his art and asks to be released. The Tempest was probably Shakespeare’s last play written alone, and the Epilogue sounds like a man talking about his trade:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please.
(Prospero, Epilogue)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Blow gentle winds upon my sails
To fill them, else my project fails,
Which was to please you.
A project whose purpose was to please, and which fails without the audience’s breath: that is a description of a play. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1818 notes, called Prospero "the very Shakspere himself, as it were, of the tempest", and G. Wilson Knight’s The Crown of Life (1947) made the reading systematic, with Ariel, Caliban and Miranda as aspects of the dramatist’s imagination and the drowned book as the pen laid down.
The objections are practical. Shakespeare went on writing after The Tempest, with Fletcher, so the farewell was not final; nothing in the text calls Prospero a playwright; and the reading flatters him, turning his cruelty into an artist’s privilege. Jan Kott (1964) preferred to see Prospero as a ruler whose experiment fails, and the magic as power rather than poetry. W. H. Auden split the difference in The Sea and the Mirror (1944), a poem that starts after the play ends and treats every character as a comment on what art can and cannot do. The play does not need to be about Shakespeare to be about art. It is about a man who makes things happen by staging them, and that is enough.
What does "the baseless fabric of this vision" mean?
Prospero has just dismissed the masque, and Ferdinand is alarmed. Prospero explains that the actors were spirits and have melted into air, and then the explanation widens into the most famous speech in the play:
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...
(Prospero, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
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...
"Fabric" means a building; "baseless" means without foundation. The vision was a structure with nothing under it, and Prospero says that towers, palaces, temples and the globe itself are the same. The globe is the world and also the Globe, the theatre the audience were sitting in, and the speech lets both meanings dissolve together. We are such stuff as dreams are made on; the play we are watching and the lives we are living are the same kind of thing.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge described The Tempest in his 1818 notes 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. G. Wilson Knight (1947) heard in it Shakespeare’s sense that his made worlds and the real one were of one substance. What students should notice is the context. Prospero is upset, and says so a moment later: he has just remembered that three men are coming to kill him. The speech about everything dissolving is spoken by a man whose vision has just been dissolved by a plot, and its calm is hard won.
Why does Prospero need his books?
Because the magic is in them, and everyone on the island knows it. Prospero says that Gonzalo’s gift of the books from his library was worth more than his dukedom; Caliban tells Stephano three times to seize and burn the books before killing him, since without them Prospero is a sot like himself with not one spirit to command. Prospero himself, after the log scene, goes straight back to them:
I'll to my book,
For yet ere supper-time must I perform
Much business appertaining.
(Prospero, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now, to my magic,
For I’ve some work to do prior to supper
About the love between them.
The book is the source, the staff the instrument, and the cloak the sign. When Prospero renounces his art he breaks the staff and drowns the book, and the cloak is the last thing he takes off, to present himself as he was sometime Milan.
The books mark Prospero’s magic as learned rather than inherited. Frank Kermode (1954) placed it in the Renaissance tradition of the magus, the scholar whose study of nature gives him power over it, and set it against the witchcraft of Sycorax, which needs no library. G. Wilson Knight (1947) read the books more simply as the play’s figure for art, and their drowning as the artist’s retirement. Either way the books explain the plot. Prospero lost Milan because he preferred them to governing, and he regains it because, on the island, they turned out to be a better instrument of government than anything Antonio had. The theme of power and control runs through the library.
