Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: Every relationship on the island is one of service. Prospero has two servants, a spirit and a monster; his enemies were once his subjects; his daughter’s lover volunteers to be her slave; and a butler acquires a worshipper. The play asks what service is owed, what it costs, and when it ends.
- Key Characters: Prospero, Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand, Miranda, Stephano and Trinculo, Antonio.
- The Core Tension: Prospero’s servants owe him their lives and their language, and he rules them by threat. The play cannot decide whether the debt justifies the threat, and it lets the servants say so.
- Key Manifestations: The Boatswain tells the king’s court to keep below (A1S1); Ariel asks for his liberty and is threatened with an oak (A1S2); Caliban’s curses and the story of the rock (A1S2); Ferdinand’s logs and Miranda’s proposal (A3S1); Caliban kneels to Stephano’s bottle (A2S2, A3S2); Antonio’s fellows become his men (A2S1); Ariel freed and Caliban sent to trim the cell (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"'Ban, 'Ban, Cacaliban
Has a new master: get a new man."
(Act 2, Scene 2) - The Outcome: Ariel is freed in the last lines. Caliban is sent indoors with a promise of pardon if he tidies well. Ferdinand, who called himself a slave, is heir to two states. The play ends service for the spirit and leaves it open for the man.
Ariel and All His Quality
The play’s first master-and-servant scene is a wage dispute. Ariel has just performed the tempest to the letter and been praised for it. Prospero says there is more work. Ariel, very politely, raises the terms of his contract.
Original
I prithee,
Remember I have done thee worthy service;
Told thee no lies, made thee no mistakings, served
Without or grudge or grumblings: thou didst promise
To bate me a full year.
(Ariel, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I beg you,
Remember that I’ve served you very well;
I’ve told no lies, made no mistakes, and served you
Without a grudge or grumble. And you promised
To give me back a year.
It is the speech of a good employee: no lies, no mistakes, no grumbling, and a promise from the employer that has not been kept. Prospero’s answer is out of all proportion. He calls Ariel a liar and a malignant thing, makes him recite the story of the witch Sycorax and the pine, and threatens him with twelve winters in an oak. Ariel apologises and promises to do his spiriting gently.
What the scene establishes is that service on the island is founded on a debt. Ariel owes Prospero his release from the tree, and Prospero has turned the debt into a term of years that only he can end. The servant is free in every way except the one that matters. The theme of imprisonment and freedom and the theme of service are, for Ariel, the same theme, and the play lets him ask for his liberty in his first scene so that the audience will be counting the hours with him.
Thou Earth, Thou
The second servant is summoned with an insult. Miranda does not like to look at Caliban; Prospero agrees that he is a villain, and explains why they keep him anyway.
Original
But, as 'tis,
We cannot miss him: he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood and serves in offices
That profit us.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Even so,
We cannot do without him; he builds fires,
Collects our wood and does odd jobs for us
That help us out.
Fire, wood and odd jobs: that is the whole account of what Caliban is for. He is a servant in the plainest economic sense, kept because he is useful, and the scene that follows shows what keeping him costs. He curses, Prospero promises cramps, he curses again. Neither of them pretends the arrangement is anything but force.
And yet the play gives Caliban the history that Ariel is not allowed. He was on the island first; he was welcomed and taught and then confined; he was, in his own phrase, his own king. The theme of colonialism and empire enters the play through this servant, because his service was not agreed but imposed, and because the master’s justification, the attempt on Miranda, is true and does not answer the claim of title. Prospero keeps two servants. One was rescued into service and one was conquered into it, and the play never confuses the two.
The Patient Log-Man
Between the two servants Shakespeare places a third, who chooses it. Ferdinand is set to carrying logs by Prospero as a punishment and a test, and in Act 3 he explains to Miranda why he does not mind.
Original
Hear my soul speak:
The very instant that I saw you, did
My heart fly to your service; there resides,
To make me slave to it; and for your sake
Am I this patient log-man.
(Ferdinand, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But hear my heart speak:
The very moment I first saw you, then
I gave my heart to you; and there it lives,
So I’m a slave to you now; and for you,
I am this patient log-man.
His heart flew to her service the instant he saw her, and it lives there now, making him its slave. The language is the language of the sonnets, in which the lover serves a mistress and calls the service joy, but the play has made it literal: Ferdinand really is doing forced labour, and he really does prefer it to freedom without her. Miranda answers in kind, offering to carry the logs herself and, a few lines later, to be his servant whether he will or no.
The lovers’ scene turns the play’s hardest theme into its gentlest. Service freely given is the opposite of Caliban’s and the fulfilment of Ariel’s: it is what Prospero’s servants would offer if they were not compelled. That Ferdinand is a prince and can afford to play at slavery is part of the point. The theme of nature and nurture is being argued here in the difference between the log-man who chose and the log-fetcher who did not.
A New Master
The comic plot is the theme played as farce. Caliban, having escaped one master’s spirits, meets a drunk with a bottle and kneels to him within twenty lines.
Original
I'll show thee every fertile inch o' th' island;
And I will kiss thy foot: I prithee, be my god.
(Caliban, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll show you every fertile inch of the island;
And I will kiss your feet: please, be my god.
It is exactly the offer he once made to Prospero: the fresh springs, the brine-pits, every quality of the isle, in return for kindness. Caliban has learned nothing from the first betrayal, or rather he has learned the wrong lesson, that freedom is a matter of choosing a better lord. His freedom song, "Has a new master: get a new man", says so in its own words. He is celebrating a change of employer.
Trinculo, who is a fool and can see it, says what the audience is thinking: a most ridiculous monster, to make a wonder of a poor drunkard. Stephano, who is a butler, accepts the worship and starts distributing viceroyalties. By Act 4 the servant has led his new master to the cell and the new master has been distracted by a line of clothes. The theme of power and control is what the clowns think they are pursuing. What the play shows is three men who cannot imagine a world without somebody on top.
"Shakespear has, as it were by design, drawn off from Caliban the elements of whatever is ethereal and refined, to compound them in the unearthly mould of Ariel."
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, 1817
Key Quotes on Masters and Servants
Quote 1
You mar our labour: keep your cabins: you do assist the storm.
(Boatswain, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You’re making our job harder: stay in your cabins, else you’ll be helping the storm.
Quote Analysis: The Boatswain to the King of Naples and his court, in the first minute of the play. On a sinking ship the servants are in charge and the masters are in the way, and the sailor says so without apology. It is the play’s first inversion of rank, and it is not a joke: the ship is saved by the men who do the work, and the lords who abuse them are the ones who will spend the rest of the play under someone else’s orders. Prospero is watching from the shore, and the Boatswain is, without knowing it, his first servant.
my brother's servants
Were then my fellows; now they are my men.
(Antonio, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My brother’s servants
Were once my equals; now they work for me.
Quote Analysis: Antonio explaining to Sebastian what usurpation feels like afterwards. The men who were once his equals now serve him, and the change fits him, he says, much more neatly than before. It is the theme seen from the top: power is the ability to turn fellows into servants, and Antonio enjoys it. The line is spoken over a sleeping king he is about to try to kill, and it is offered as encouragement. This is what you get.
FERDINAND: My mistress, dearest;
And I thus humble ever.
MIRANDA: My husband, then?
FERDINAND: Ay, with a heart as willing
As bondage e'er of freedom: here's my hand.
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
FERDINAND: My dearest mistress,
I’ll serve you just the same.
MIRANDA: So, you’re my husband?
FERDINAND: Yes, and with a keen heart
As keen as slaves want freedom: here’s my hand.
Quote Analysis: The betrothal, in five lines. Miranda has proposed and offered to be his servant whether he will or no; Ferdinand answers that he is her humble servant for ever, and when she asks whether he is then her husband, he says yes with a heart as willing as bondage ever was of freedom. Servant, husband, bondage, freedom: the vocabulary of the whole play is in one exchange, and here every word means love. It is the only master-and-servant bargain in The Tempest that both parties make gladly.
Go, sirrah, to my cell;
Take with you your companions; as you look
To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Go, matey, to my cave;
Take all your friends with you; and as you strive
For my forgiveness, tidy up my cave well.
Quote Analysis: Prospero’s last order to Caliban. Ariel has just been promised his freedom; Caliban is sent to tidy the cell, with pardon conditional on how well he does it. It is a servant’s task, given in a servant’s terms, and it is the last we see of him. Whether he is freed, taken to Milan, or left on the island with the housework done is not said. The play ends one servitude in the same scene in which it declines to end another, and lets the audience notice the difference.
Key Takeaways
- Service Founded on Debt: Ariel owes Prospero his release from the pine. Prospero turns the debt into a term of years, and rules by reminding him of it.
- Two Servants, Two Histories: Ariel was rescued into service; Caliban was conquered into it. The play never confuses them.
- Service Chosen: Ferdinand calls himself Miranda's slave and means it as love. It is the only bargain both parties make gladly.
- A Better Lord: Caliban's freedom song celebrates a new master. Nobody in the comic plot can imagine a world without someone on top.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why is service so central to The Tempest?
Because the play has a master at its centre and almost no one who is not, in some way, his servant. Prospero summons Ariel the moment Miranda is asleep, and the summons is the play’s first act of magic:
Come away, servant, come. I am ready now.
Approach, my Ariel, come.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come here now, servant. Come here now; I’m ready.
Approach, my Ariel, come over here.
From that line on, everything that happens on the island is done by servants: Ariel raises the storm, leads Ferdinand, charms the court, plays the harpy, stages the masque, hunts the conspirators. Caliban fetches wood. Ferdinand carries logs. The court, when it is charmed, is a set of servants who cannot move until their master releases them. Even the audience, in the Epilogue, is asked to do Prospero a service.
Frank Kermode (1954) read the pattern as the structure of Art: a disciplined mind acting on the world through instruments, with Ariel the willing instrument and Caliban the unwilling one. Paul Brown (1985) read the same pattern as the structure of colonial rule, a master who divides his subjects into the compliant and the resistant and rewards one to discipline the other. The two readings share a picture and disagree about its morality. What the play insists on, whichever reading is taken, is that service on the island has an end date. Ariel is freed, Prospero gives up the book, and the last person seen asking to be released is the master.
Is Ariel a slave?
The play calls him a servant and a spirit, and Prospero calls him, in the same scene, "my Ariel" and "malignant thing". He is bound by a debt rather than a purchase: Prospero freed him from the pine, and the freeing created an obligation with a fixed term. When Ariel asks to be released early, the master’s answer is to remind him what he was rescued from:
Thou liest, malignant thing! Hast thou forgot
The foul witch Sycorax...
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You lie, you wretched thing! Have you forgotten
The foul witch Sycorax...
The reminder is delivered monthly, Prospero says, and it is followed by a threat of twelve more years in a tree. Whatever word is used, Ariel cannot leave, cannot refuse, and is punished for asking. He is also promised freedom, and the promise is kept.
Paul Brown (1985) read Ariel as the compliant native of colonial writing, the one who serves willingly and is rewarded, set against Caliban the resistant native who is punished; on that reading the difference between servant and slave is the master’s to define. Aimé Césaire dramatised the same split in Une Tempête (1969), where the cast list gives Ariel as "a mulatto slave" and Caliban as "a black slave", and the two argue about whether patience or revolt is the way to freedom. Stephen Orgel’s Oxford edition (1987) noted how the play keeps Ariel’s consent out of the question: he was never asked whether he wanted the job. The honest answer is that Ariel is a bound servant whose bondage the play treats as temporary and just, and that the word "slave", which Prospero uses for Caliban, is one he never uses for Ariel.
How does Caliban’s service differ from Ariel’s?
In its history and in its enforcement. Ariel was released into service; Caliban was welcomed, taught, and then confined to a rock. Ariel is threatened but never touched; Caliban is pinched every night by spirits, and describes it:
His spirits hear me
And yet I needs must curse. But they'll nor pinch,
Fright me with urchin-shows...
(Caliban, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
His spirits hear me
But I just have to curse him. They won’t pinch me;
Or scare me dressed as urchins...
Apes that bite, hedgehogs in his path, adders that hiss him mad: that is the discipline Caliban serves under, and he curses anyway. Ariel serves with songs; Caliban serves with curses. And the play gives them opposite ends: Ariel freed, Caliban sent to tidy the cell with pardon still to be earned.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecturing in 1811–12, made the pair a matter of elements, "a sort of creature of the earth, as Ariel is a sort of creature of the air", and William Hazlitt (1817) went further, suggesting that Shakespeare had drawn off from Caliban everything refined "to compound them in the unearthly mould of Ariel", so that the two servants are one nature divided. The post-colonial critics kept the pairing and turned it political: on Paul Brown’s reading (1985) the two servants are the two responses to a coloniser, and the play rewards the one that submits. Students should notice one more difference. Ariel was promised his freedom on a date and got it. Caliban was promised nothing, and the play does not tell us what happens to him.
What is the significance of Ferdinand carrying logs?
It puts a prince in a servant’s place and lets the play watch what happens. Prospero sets the task as a test and says so in an aside: too light a winning would make the prize seem cheap. Ferdinand accepts it as the price of seeing Miranda once a day. And Miranda, watching him work, offers to do it for him:
It would become me
As well as it does you: and I should do it
With much more ease; for my good will is to it,
And yours it is against.
(Miranda, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Well, it suits me
As much as it does you; and I can do it
With much more ease, because I want to do it,
Whilst you do not.
She would carry the logs more easily because she wants to; he carries them against his will and for her. It is the play’s definition of the difference between service and slavery: not the task but the wanting. The log scene is the only one in the play where a master’s command turns into a servant’s free choice, and it is the scene in which the lovers become engaged.
Frank Kermode (1954) read the trial as part of the play’s discipline of Art, the young prince learning the patience that civility requires, and set it against Caliban, who carries the same logs and learns nothing. Lorie Jerrell Leininger, in "The Miranda Trap" (1980), noticed that the woman for whom the service is performed is not consulted about it, and that her offer to carry the logs is the nearest she comes to choosing anything. Both readings agree that the logs are symbolic. The play makes the symbol comic and tender at once: the heir to Naples piling wood, and the girl who has never seen a man before him telling him to sit down and rest.
How does the Stephano plot parody the theme?
By reducing it to a bottle. Stephano arrives on the island with wine and, within a scene, has a servant who kneels to it and calls him a god. He takes to command at once:
Drink, servant-monster, when I bid thee: thy eyes are almost set in thy head.
(Stephano, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Drink, servant-monster, when I tell you: your eyes look like they’re set in your head.
"Servant-monster" is the whole relationship in a word, and Stephano, a butler, has learned it from the men he served. He beats Trinculo for interrupting, appoints viceroys, promises to be king. The service he receives from Caliban is more devoted than anything Prospero gets, and it is bought with sack.
Jan Kott (1964) read the comic plot as the play’s thesis in miniature: on the island every relationship reproduces the same shape of master and man, from the duke down to the drunk, and the shape does not change when the men do. Paul Brown (1985) asked what it means that the one servant with a genuine grievance is made ridiculous by the company he chooses. The parody cuts both ways. It makes Caliban’s rebellion absurd, and it makes Prospero’s mastery look like a more competent version of Stephano’s. Both men have a subject who kneels to a magic he does not understand. One magic is in a book and one is in a bottle, and the play, which loves the bottle, does not pretend the difference is nothing.
Does the play criticise Prospero as a master?
It lets his servants criticise him, which is not quite the same thing. Prospero’s own account of his mastery is confident and unembarrassed. He describes Caliban to Ariel as a thing he keeps:
Dull thing, I say so; he, that Caliban
Whom now I keep in service.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ve said that, dullard; him, that Caliban
Who now is in my service.
And he describes his treatment of Caliban as human care repaid with attempted rape. The play does not contradict him. But it gives Caliban the story of the island’s dispossession, gives Ariel the request for liberty and the threat that answers it, and gives the audience the Boatswain’s question about what the name of king is worth. Prospero is never wrong on his own terms. The play keeps supplying other terms.
For three centuries the criticism was muted. Frank Kermode (1954) saw Prospero’s severity as the discipline a good magus needs, and his servants’ complaints as the noise nature makes under art. From the 1980s the servants were heard differently. Paul Brown (1985) and Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (1985) read Prospero’s mastery as colonial rule, complete with the anxiety of a ruler whose title is not clean, and Ania Loomba (1989) read his control of Miranda and of Caliban as the same act, "both racial plunder and a transfer to patriarchy". What none of these readings can remove is Ariel’s freedom and Prospero’s drowned book. The play criticises its master by showing him, at the end, give up mastery. Whether that is enough is the question it leaves with the audience.
What does the freeing of Ariel mean for the theme?
That service in the play has an end, and that the master keeps his word. Ariel is promised his liberty in Act 1, reminded of it every time he does something well, and given it in the last lines of Act 5, after one final errand. Prospero’s farewell is the tenderest thing he says to anyone:
Why, that's my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee:
But yet thou shalt have freedom: so, so, so.
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Well, that’s my lovely Ariel! I shall miss you:
But you will have your freedom: so that’s better.
He will miss him. It is the first time in the play that Prospero has admitted needing anyone, and he admits it about a servant at the moment of losing him. Ariel’s last song has already told us what he will do with liberty: lie in a cowslip, ride on a bat, follow the summer. Nothing in it is a task.
W. H. Auden made the parting the opening of The Sea and the Mirror (1944), a poem that begins after the play with Prospero saying goodbye to Ariel, as if the one clean ending the play provides was the place to start thinking about the rest. Jan Kott (1964), who thought Prospero’s experiment in ruling the island had failed, allowed that Ariel’s release was the one part of it that worked. The contrast with Caliban is the play’s last word on the theme. The spirit who served gladly is freed; the creature who served under pinches is sent indoors. The theme of imprisonment and freedom closes for one servant and stays open for the other, and Shakespeare does not tell us why.
