Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: Whether people are made by what they are born or by how they are raised. The play tests the question on Caliban, who was taught and stayed savage; on Antonio, who was raised at court and became a traitor; on Miranda, who was raised alone and became good; and on an island where nature feeds everyone.
- Key Characters: Caliban, Prospero, Miranda, Antonio, Ferdinand, Gonzalo, Ariel.
- The Core Tension: Prospero believes Caliban is a devil on whose nature nurture can never stick, and the play gives Caliban the most beautiful verse in it. Nurture fails with the monster and with the brother, and succeeds with the girl who had only one teacher.
- Key Manifestations: "Good wombs have borne bad sons" (A1S2); Prospero’s account of teaching Caliban language and of his brother’s awakened evil nature (A1S2); Gonzalo’s commonwealth, where nature provides without work (A2S1); Ferdinand’s logs and the discipline of love (A3S1); Caliban’s dream speech (A3S2); "Nurture can never stick" (A4S1); Caliban’s resolve to seek for grace (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick..."
(Act 4, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Caliban promises to be wise hereafter. Antonio promises nothing. Miranda greets a brave new world. The play leaves the argument where Prospero left it: undecided, and with the evidence on both sides.
Good Wombs Have Borne Bad Sons
The theme is stated in Act 1 by the character with least experience of the world. Prospero has just described his brother’s treachery and asked Miranda whether such a man could be a brother at all. Her answer refuses the implication.
Original
I should sin
To think but nobly of my grandmother:
Good wombs have borne bad sons.
(Miranda, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I would be wrong
To think other than warmly of my grandma:
Good wombs have borne bad sons.
A good mother can produce a bad son. It is a proverb, and Miranda uses it to decline her father’s invitation to write Antonio out of the family. Wickedness is not evidence against birth; it is something that happens afterwards, or does not. The line is the play’s first statement that nature and conduct are different things, and it comes from a fifteen-year-old correcting a scholar.
Prospero’s own account of Antonio, a few lines earlier, has already half-conceded the point. His trust, he says, "like a good parent", begot in his brother a falsehood as great as the trust itself: the nurture produced its opposite. The theme of power and control in The Tempest begins with a man handed authority he was not born to, and what it made of him.
Which Any Print of Goodness Wilt Not Take
The play’s main test case is Caliban. Prospero found him on the island, took him into his cell, taught him to speak, and was repaid, he says, with an attempt on his daughter. His verdict is the harshest thing said about anyone in the play.
Original
Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill!
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Obscene slave,
No act of kindness will rub off on you,
For all you do is hurt!
Wax that will not take a print: the image is of a nature so resistant that teaching leaves no mark. Prospero goes on to describe the teaching, hour by hour, and to conclude that Caliban’s "vile race" had something in it that good natures could not abide. It is the argument from birth, made by the man who tried nurture and believes it failed.
Caliban’s reply, that the profit of language is knowing how to curse, has become the play’s most famous line because it turns the argument round. The lesson did take. Caliban learned exactly what he was taught, which was the language of a master, and he uses it as a master would, to abuse. The theme of colonialism and empire enters the play through this exchange, and so does the possibility that the nurture, not the nature, was the problem.
Nurture Can Never Stick
In Act 4 Prospero returns to the verdict, and hardens it. He has just remembered Caliban’s plot in the middle of the masque, and while he waits for Ariel to fetch the bait he says what he thinks of his pupil.
Original
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers.
(Prospero, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
He is a devil, born and bred, whose nature
Cannot be changed; the kindness that I showed him,
All done sincerely is completely lost;
And as he’s looking uglier with age,
His mind gets uglier as well.
A born devil; pains humanely taken and all lost; a body growing uglier with age and a mind cankering with it. The speech is spoken by a man who has just been frightened, and it has the bitterness of a teacher whose best pupil has tried to kill him. But it is also the play’s clearest statement of the nature side of the argument, and Shakespeare puts it in the mouth of the character with most authority.
What the play does next is give the lie to it, or at least complicate it. Caliban leads the conspirators to the cell and begs them, twice, to ignore the glittering clothes and do the murder; the two nurtured Neapolitans cannot resist a gown. And in Act 5 it is Caliban, not Antonio, who promises to be wise hereafter. The theme of masters and servants is the setting for this argument: nurture on the island has always been delivered with cramps, and the play seems to know that a lesson taught by pinching may not be the lesson learned.
The Commonwealth and the Golden Age
The play’s other picture of nature is Gonzalo’s. Walking on the island, he describes the state he would found there, with no trade, no law, no letters, no work, and nature producing everything for an innocent people. Antonio and Sebastian pick it apart line by line.
Original
GONZALO: No sovereignty; –
SEBASTIAN: Yet he would be king on't.
ANTONIO: The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the
beginning.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
GONZALO: There’d be no king…
SEBASTIAN: Except he would be king.
ANTONIO: His commonwealth has soon forgotten how
it got started.
The old man wants a commonwealth with no king and would be king of it; the end of his speech forgets the start. It is a fair hit, and it is the play’s reply to the idea that nature alone can make people good. Gonzalo’s golden age is a place where nobody governs, and it is described on an island where one man governs everything and the only native has tried to commit rape.
Shakespeare took the speech from Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals of Brazil, which argued that the savages were better than the Europeans because less nurtured. The play does not agree, exactly. It puts the argument in the mouth of its kindest character and the objections in the mouths of its worst, and lets the audience notice that the worst are right about the logic and the kindest is right about the people. The theme of illusion and reality touches this: the commonwealth is a vision, and visions on the island are always somebody’s.
"Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth, all condensed and gross in feelings and images; he has the dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the intellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked by the appearance of vice."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes on The Tempest, 1818
Key Quotes on Nature vs Nurture
Quote 1
I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race,
Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures
Could not abide to be with...
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I taught you self-expression
With words one could decipher. But your vile race,
Although you learnt, had traits in it good people
Could never tolerate...
Quote Analysis: Prospero’s account of the language lesson and its failure. He gave Caliban words; Caliban learned them; and yet something in his "vile race" made him unfit for the company of good natures. The word "race" here means lineage, the stock he came from, and the argument is that no amount of teaching could reach it. It is the clearest statement of hereditary nature in the play, and it is made by the teacher, about a pupil whose fluency in the teacher’s language is about to be demonstrated in a curse.
I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries;
I'll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.
(Caliban, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll show you water springs; I’ll pick you berries;
I’ll fish for you and gather up your wood.
Quote Analysis: Caliban offering himself to Stephano. Springs, berries, fish, wood: it is the same list he gave Prospero when Prospero first came, and it is the natural man’s idea of friendship, a knowledge of the island shared. The offer has been made twice and betrayed once. Caliban’s nature, whatever Prospero says of it, is generous, and the play shows the generosity being spent on a drunk. What he learned from nurture was to kneel.
There be some sports are painful, and their labour
Delight in them sets off: some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone...
(Ferdinand, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Some sports are painful, but the effort needed
Brings great delight; and sometimes, menial tasks
Are done without complaint...
Quote Analysis: Ferdinand, carrying logs, on why he does not mind. Some low work is nobly done, and the labour is redeemed by what it is for. It is nurture as discipline: the prince has been set a servant’s task and turns it into a lover’s trial, which is what a good upbringing was supposed to make possible. Caliban carries the same logs for the same master and curses. The play sets the two young men side by side and lets the audience decide whether the difference is what they were born or what they were taught.
my trust,
Like a good parent, did beget of him
A falsehood in its contrary as great
As my trust was; which had indeed no limit...
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
and my trust,
Just like a caring parent, then created
A lying treachery in him that matched
My trust, which at that time, was limitless...
Quote Analysis: Prospero on how Antonio became a traitor. His trust, like a good parent, begot its opposite in his brother; the more he gave, the worse Antonio grew. It is the argument from nurture turned inside out: the upbringing was good and produced evil, and Prospero half blames himself for it. The image of the parent is exact and uncomfortable. Prospero has been a parent twice, to a brother and to a monster, and both of them have tried to destroy him.
Key Takeaways
- Birth Is Not Conduct: Miranda's proverb answers her father before he has finished: good wombs have borne bad sons.
- The Lesson Took: Caliban learned exactly what he was taught, the language of a master, and uses it to curse. The teaching worked; the teacher did not like the result.
- Nurture Fails Upward Too: Antonio was raised at court by a brother who loved him. The play's worst man had the best upbringing.
- The Golden Age Has a King: Gonzalo's commonwealth would need nobody to govern it, and he would govern it. Nature alone is not a state.
Study Questions and Analysis
What does The Tempest say about nature and nurture?
It runs the experiment three times and gets three different results. Caliban was taught and stayed, on Prospero’s account, a devil. Antonio was raised at court and became a usurper. Miranda was raised alone by one teacher and became the play’s kindest person. The first case is the one the play argues over, and Caliban’s own account of it starts with the nurture:
When thou camest first,
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me...
(Caliban, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
When you first came,
You petted and fussed over me...
Stroked, made much of, given water with berries, taught the names of the sun and moon: the first nurture was kindness, and Caliban loved him for it. What followed was a rock and cramps, and a curse. The play lets both halves of the story stand, and does not say which one made Caliban what he is.
Frank Kermode’s Arden edition (1954) made the theme the play’s organising idea, arguing that "the main opposition is between the worlds of Prospero’s Art, and Caliban’s Nature", with Art meaning the disciplined cultivation of what nature provides. On that reading Caliban is the natural man against whom nurture is measured, and his failure is the failure of nature to rise. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1818 notes, saw in Caliban "the dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense", and thought the vice in him was the mark of intellect without conscience. The post-colonial critics reversed the question. On Paul Brown’s reading (1985), Prospero needs Caliban’s nature to be unteachable, because the failure of the lesson is what justifies the rock. The play gives evidence for all three, and its own last word is Caliban’s promise to seek for grace, which either proves the nurture took or proves he has learned to say what masters want to hear.
Is Caliban naturally evil?
Prospero says so, and the play gives him one piece of evidence that cannot be argued away. Accused of trying to rape Miranda, Caliban does not deny it:
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.
(Caliban, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You stopped me; if you hadn’t, I’d have fathered
This island full of Calibans.
He wishes he had succeeded and would have filled the island with his children. There is no way to make that line innocent, and the play does not try. What it does is surround the line with others: the story of the island taken from him, the curse of language, the dream speech, the generosity to Stephano, the plea to ignore the clothes and do the murder, the resolve to seek for grace. Caliban is a creature who wanted to do a terrible thing and can describe the island’s music better than anyone alive.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1811–12) refused the word evil, calling Caliban "a sort of creature of the earth" who is "in some respects a noble being", raised by the poet "far above contempt", and locating the vice in a mind that has understanding without moral reason. Samuel Johnson (1765) insisted that Caliban’s language was not a brute’s but ordinary English clouded by "the gloominess of his temper and the malignity of his purposes", which is to say that the malignity is in the purposes, not the nature. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Shakespeare’s Caliban (1991) showed how every age has answered the question in its own image, from Darwin’s missing link to the anti-colonial hero of Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969). The text supports the doubt. Caliban is the only character in the play who says he will be better, and the only one whose master has said he cannot be.
Why is Antonio evil when he was raised at a court?
The play’s answer is that he was raised at a court and then handed one. Prospero describes what he did with Milan before the coup:
The government I cast upon my brother
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I let my brother run the government,
Withdrawing from my stately role as duke,
Consumed in mystic studies.
The duke withdrew into his books; the brother ran the state; and running it taught him to want it. Prospero’s account is that his own trust "awaked an evil nature" in Antonio, which puts the evil in the nature and the awakening in the circumstances. Antonio’s own account, given to Sebastian, is that he feels no conscience at all, and the garments fit.
Frank Kermode (1954) treated Antonio as the play’s proof that nurture is not enough: a man given every advantage of civility who uses it for treachery, and whom Prospero’s Art can restrain but not reform. E. M. W. Tillyard (1938) placed the coup in the play’s hidden first act, the destruction that the romance pattern requires before regeneration. Jan Kott (1964) read Antonio as the proof that history repeats: give a man power and he will take more, whoever raised him. Antonio is the play’s hardest case for nurture, because the nurture was good. He is also the only character who never explains himself, and the play may be suggesting that some natures cannot be explained, only watched.
What does Miranda’s upbringing show about the theme?
That one teacher on an island can do what a court cannot. Miranda was three when she arrived and has had no company but her father, Caliban and the spirits. Prospero is proud of the result:
Here in this island we arrived; and here
Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit
Than other princesses can that have more time
For vainer hours and tutors not so careful.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
We landed on this island, and whilst here
I have become your teacher, and you’ve learnt more
Than other princesses that have more time
To waste with teachers who don’t care that much.
More profit than princesses with more time and worse tutors: it is a schoolmaster’s boast, and the play bears it out. Miranda is compassionate, quick, direct, and capable of correcting her father on the subject of families. She has never seen a woman, and she is the best judge of people on the island.
The feminist critics have been less impressed by the schoolmaster. Stephen Orgel’s "Prospero’s Wife" (1984) pointed out that Miranda’s mother is mentioned once and never named, and read Prospero’s nurture as the education of a daughter by a man who has removed every other influence, including her mother’s. Lorie Jerrell Leininger’s "The Miranda Trap" (1980) argued that the education produced exactly what its purpose required: a girl innocent enough to be protected from Caliban and pliant enough to be given to Ferdinand. Both readings accept that the nurture worked. What they question is whom it worked for. The play gives Miranda enough independence, in the log scene and the proposal, to suggest that her nature had something to do with it too.
How does Gonzalo’s commonwealth relate to nature and nurture?
It is the nature side of the argument made into a constitution. Gonzalo imagines the island run by contraries: no trade, no magistrates, no letters, no work, everyone idle and innocent, and nature bringing forth abundance of its own kind. The two lords answer before he has finished the first line:
GONZALO: Had I plantation of this isle, my lord, –
ANTONIO: He'ld sow't with nettle-seed.
SEBASTIAN: Or docks, or mallows.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
GONZALO: If I had a plantation on this island…
ANTONIO: He’d cover it with nettles.
SEBASTIAN: Weeds and brambles.
Nettles, docks and mallows: left to itself, they say, nature grows weeds. It is a gardener’s objection to a philosopher’s dream, and it is the objection the play as a whole makes. The island has been left to nature for twelve years under Sycorax and Caliban, and Prospero arrived to find a monster and a spirit in a tree.
The speech comes almost word for word from Montaigne’s "Of the Cannibals", in Florio’s translation of 1603, and Frank Kermode (1954) read the borrowing as Shakespeare setting up the case for nature in order to answer it with Art: Gonzalo describes the golden age, and the play shows what people do without government. Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) placed the speech beside the Virginia Company’s reports, where the colony’s idleness had nearly destroyed it, and read the play as caught between Montaigne’s hope and the governors’ experience. Gonzalo is right that the island could feed an innocent people. The play’s point is that there are no innocent people on it, and that the word "plantation", which he uses in the first line, already means someone is in charge.
Where does Ariel fit into the nature and nurture debate?
Outside it, which is the point. Ariel is a spirit, and the play is careful to say that his nature is not the kind that can be taught: he was too delicate to carry out Sycorax’s earthy commands, and was imprisoned for it. Prospero found him in the pine and reminds him, monthly, of what he was:
Thou best know'st
What torment I did find thee in...
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You know well
The pain I found you in...
Ariel’s service is not a matter of upbringing but of debt, and his goodness is not learned. He serves well because that is what he is. And yet it is Ariel who teaches Prospero the one lesson the play insists on, that a human being ought to feel for the suffering; the creature without a nature to nurture is the one who nurtures the master.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818) set Ariel and Caliban at opposite ends of a scale, the airy spirit and the creature "all earth", and read the whole play through the contrast. William Hazlitt (1817) saw the two as one nature divided, with everything refined drawn off from Caliban and compounded in Ariel. On either account Ariel stands for what nurture cannot touch, because it does not need to. The theme of masters and servants gives the pairing its politics: the servant who did not need teaching is freed, and the one who did is sent to tidy the cell.
Does nurture succeed anywhere in The Tempest?
Twice, and in both cases late. Alonso, who backed a coup twelve years ago, is taught by grief and a harpy to repent, and does. And Caliban, sent to trim the cell with a pardon dependent on how well he does it, says the thing Prospero has waited twelve years to hear:
Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter
And seek for grace.
(Caliban, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Yes, I’ll do that; and I’ll be smart from now on
And seek forgiveness.
Whether it is true is the play’s last open question. Caliban goes on to call himself an ass for taking a drunkard for a god, which is a lesson in judgement rather than morals; he may only mean that next time he will choose better. But the promise is made, and it is made by the creature whose nature was declared beyond teaching in Act 4.
Frank Kermode (1954) took the line at face value, as the natural man at last accepting the discipline of Art. Stephen Orgel’s Oxford edition (1987) was struck by what is left unsaid: the play restores every order but the island’s, and Caliban’s future is not mentioned. Paul Brown (1985) read the promise as the colonised subject learning the coloniser’s language for the second time, in the form of a confession. The theme of revenge and forgiveness depends on Alonso’s repentance and the theme of nurture on Caliban’s, and the play is more certain of the first than the second. It gives Caliban the words and walks away before we can see whether he means them.
