Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How power is held on an island where one man commands the weather, the spirits and everyone’s sleep; how it was lost in Milan; and what Prospero does with it once every enemy he has is at his mercy.
- Key Characters: Prospero, Ariel, Caliban, Antonio, Alonso, Ferdinand, Stephano and Trinculo.
- The Core Tension: Prospero controls everything on the island and still cannot make anyone love him, repent, or be good. The play asks whether power that complete is worth having, and answers by having him give it up.
- Key Manifestations: The Boatswain asks what the waves care for the name of king (A1S1); Prospero’s account of how Antonio took Milan (A1S2); his threats to Ariel, Caliban and Ferdinand (A1S2); the plot against the sleeping king (A2S1); the drunken coup (A3S2); "Lie at my mercy all mine enemies" (A4S1); the renunciation and the Epilogue.
- Famous Quote:
"Thou shalt be free
As mountain winds: but then exactly do
All points of my command."
(Act 1, Scene 2) - The Outcome: Prospero gets Milan back, marries his daughter to the heir of Naples, frees Ariel and drowns his book. The most powerful man in the play ends it asking the audience for help.
The Name of King
The play opens with power failing. A king, a duke and their court come on deck in a storm and start giving orders, and the sailor in charge tells them to get below. Gonzalo reminds him whom he has aboard. The Boatswain’s answer is the first statement of the theme.
Original
When the sea is. Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin: silence! Trouble us not.
(Boatswain, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll be calm when the sea is calm. Go below! Do these waves care you are a king? Go to your cabin: silence! Don’t bother us.
A title is worth nothing to a wave. It is the kind of thing that gets said in shipwrecks, and Shakespeare puts it in the first sixty lines so that the audience will remember it when the same king and duke are standing in front of Prospero three hours later, equally helpless. The storm is the first of the play’s demonstrations that power belongs to whoever controls the conditions, and the conditions here are controlled by a man on the shore.
That is the joke, and the audience is let in on it in the next scene. The storm was not weather; it was Ariel, acting on orders. The Boatswain thinks he is answering to the sea. He is answering to Prospero, who has arranged for the name of king to count for nothing so that he can restore his own. The play’s treatment of illusion and reality begins in the same scene as its treatment of power, and they are never separated.
Absolute Milan
Before the play’s power was Prospero’s, it was Antonio’s, and the story of how he took it is told in Act 1 as a lesson in what happens to a ruler who stops ruling. Prospero handed his brother the government so that he could study, and his brother learned the job.
Original
To have no screen between this part he played
And him he played it for, he needs will be
Absolute Milan.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
To lift the barrier between his faux role
And me, the real duke, he must become
The actual Duke of Milan.
The word that matters is "screen". Antonio was already doing the work of a duke; the only thing between him and the title was the man whose name was on it, and the coup removed the screen. Power in Milan had passed to the person who exercised it long before it passed formally, and Prospero admits that his own neglect made the transfer easy: his library was dukedom enough.
The account is also the play’s model for every seizure that follows. Antonio needed an army and borrowed one from Naples in exchange for homage; on the island he will offer Sebastian the same bargain, and Stephano will make it with Caliban. The theme of power and control in The Tempest is a single act, repeated three times at three levels, and the first version is the one that worked.
My Foot My Tutor
On the island Prospero’s power is absolute, and the play does not pretend otherwise. He threatens Ariel with an oak, Caliban with cramps, and Ferdinand, whom he has already chosen as a son-in-law, with manacles, seawater and roots. When Ferdinand draws his sword, it is charmed from his hand; when Miranda pleads for him, her father turns on her.
Original
What? I say,
My foot my tutor? Put thy sword up, traitor;
Who makest a show but darest not strike, thy conscience
Is so possessed with guilt: come from thy ward,
For I can here disarm thee with this stick
And make thy weapon drop.
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You what? You think
That you are now my teacher? Sheathe your sword, thief;
You flaunt your strength, but you won’t dare to strike me
Because you’re overwhelmed with guilt. Stand down,
Because I can disarm you with this wand
And make your weapon drop.
"My foot my tutor?" is the language of a man who cannot conceive of being argued with. A daughter is a foot; a foot does not instruct the head. The speech is addressed to Miranda but demonstrated on Ferdinand, whose weapon drops at the mention of a stick, and the whole exchange is designed to show both young people who is in charge before it shows them anything else.
What makes this bearable, and it is only just bearable, is that Prospero’s control has an aim beyond itself. He is testing Ferdinand so that the prize will not seem light, and he says so in an aside. But the play is honest about the method. Prospero gets what he wants by force, magic and threat, and never once by persuasion. The theme of masters and servants is the same theme seen from below.
Lie at My Mercy All Mine Enemies
By the end of Act 4 the plan has worked. The king and his lords are charmed in a grove, the conspirators are being hunted by spirit hounds, the lovers are in the cell, and Prospero, for the first time in the play, says what he has been aiming at.
Original
At this hour
Lie at my mercy all mine enemies:
Shortly shall all my labours end...
(Prospero, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And at this time,
Let all my enemies lie at my mercy:
Soon all my work is over...
It is a statement of total power, and the play immediately begins to take it apart. In the next scene Ariel describes the prisoners, and Prospero, hearing that a spirit would pity them, decides to be kinder than his fury. Then he lists everything his magic can do and gives it up. Then he forgives men who have not asked to be forgiven. The mercy that all his enemies lie at is the mercy he chooses to show, and he chooses it within a hundred lines of announcing that he has them.
The Epilogue completes the reversal. Prospero comes forward without his spirits, his charms overthrown, his strength his own and faint, and asks the audience to release him with their applause. The man who commanded the tempest cannot leave the stage without permission. The theme of imprisonment and freedom closes on the one character who seemed exempt from it, and the play’s last word on power is that it is something you give back.
"Prospero’s takeover is both racial plunder and a transfer to patriarchy"
— Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, 1989
Key Quotes on Power and Control
Quote 1
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me
In this hard rock...
(Caliban, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For I’m the only person that you rule,
Where I ruled first; you lock me in a pigsty,
In this hard rock...
Quote Analysis: Caliban’s summary of the island’s politics, and the most exact one anybody gives. Prospero is a king with one subject, and the subject used to be the king. The speech has already told us how the transfer happened: welcome, water with berries, the names of the sun and moon, and then a rock. What the lines add is the arithmetic of it. Prospero’s power on the island is power over a single creature, and the play lets Caliban say so before Prospero can explain why he deserved it.
There be that can rule Naples
As well as he that sleeps...
(Antonio, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
There’s men that can rule Naples
As well as him who’s sleeping there...
Quote Analysis: Antonio to Sebastian, over the sleeping Alonso. The argument is that kings are replaceable, and it is made in the flattest possible language: there are men who can rule Naples as well as the one asleep on the ground. It is the voice of a man who has already replaced one ruler and found it easy. What Antonio does not know is that he is himself on an island ruled by the brother he replaced, who has arranged the sleep he is proposing to take advantage of. The lines are true, and they are about him.
Thou shalt be lord of it and I'll serve thee.
(Caliban, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You’ll rule this land, and I will work for you.
Quote Analysis: Caliban offering Stephano the island in exchange for killing Prospero. It is the same bargain Antonio struck with Naples, and the same one he is striking with Sebastian in the other half of the play: you take the title, I do the service, and the man in the way is removed. Caliban cannot imagine freedom except as a change of lord. The play lets the drunken version of the bargain run alongside the sober one, and the drunken one is the more honest, because Caliban says the word "serve" aloud.
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint...
(Prospero, Epilogue)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My magic powers are on the shelf,
And all my strength I make myself,
And I’m not strong.
Quote Analysis: The first lines of the Epilogue, spoken by Prospero to the audience after the play is over. The magic is gone, the strength he has left is his own, and it is faint. It is the only moment in The Tempest when the man who has controlled everything describes himself as weak, and he does it in rhyming couplets, in the plainest words in the play. The theme of power ends not with a coronation but with a request. He needs the audience’s hands to fill his sails.
Key Takeaways
- Power Is Whoever Controls the Conditions: The Boatswain tells a king that the waves do not care about his title. The waves are Ariel, and Ariel is Prospero's.
- One Coup, Three Times: Antonio took Milan with a borrowed army. On the island he offers Sebastian the same deal, and Stephano makes it with Caliban.
- Force, Never Persuasion: Prospero rules Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand and Miranda by threat and magic. He is never once seen convincing anyone.
- Given Back: With every enemy at his mercy, Prospero forgives them, drowns his book, and asks the audience to set him free.
Study Questions and Analysis
How does Prospero control the island?
Through Ariel, almost entirely. Prospero has the book and the staff, but every act of power in the play is performed by his spirit: the tempest, the music that leads Ferdinand, the sleep that falls on the court, the harpy, the masque, the hounds. Prospero’s first question to Ariel is a manager’s question:
Hast thou, spirit,
Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?
(Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Have you, spirit,
Controlled the tempest like I told you to?
The answer is a report, to every article, and the pattern holds for the whole play. Prospero commands; Ariel executes; Prospero congratulates. Even Caliban’s cramps are administered by spirits. The one thing Prospero does with his own hands is take off and put on his cloak.
Paul Brown, in "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" (1985), read this arrangement as the play’s picture of colonial government: a ruler who produces the disorder he then contains, using a compliant native to discipline a resistant one. Frank Kermode’s Arden edition (1954) read it as the structure of Art, with Ariel as the instrument through which a disciplined mind acts on the world. The two readings agree on the mechanism and disagree about whether it is admirable. The play gives Ariel the last word on it, and the word is "were I human".
Is Prospero’s power over the island legitimate?
The play lets two people answer, and they contradict each other. Prospero says the island was uninhabited except for a witch’s whelp when he arrived, that he treated the whelp with human care until it tried to rape his daughter, and that he rules by right of his art and his wrongs. Caliban says this:
As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.
(Caliban, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
As I told you before, I am a slave to a tyrant, a magician, who has stolen the island from me by his stealth.
Both accounts are true as far as they go. Prospero did arrive on an inhabited island and take it; Caliban did attempt Miranda. The play never says which fact should weigh more, and it is careful to give the claim of title to Caliban twice, once in Act 1 and once here, so that it cannot be missed.
Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, in "Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish" (1985), pointed to Prospero’s violent reaction when he remembers Caliban’s plot in the middle of the masque, and read it as the anxiety of a ruler whose title is not secure. Meredith Anne Skura, in "Discourse and the Individual" (1989), warned against turning the question into a colonial allegory and nothing else: Prospero is also a duke who lost Milan by neglect and is trying to be a better ruler of a smaller place. The honest answer is that the play sets legitimacy aside. Prospero rules because he can, and the question it asks is what he does with that, not whether he should have it.
What does the opening storm scene say about power?
That it depends on circumstances, and that circumstances can be arranged. The scene is written so that rank is useless: the king asks where the master is and is told to keep below, the duke calls the Boatswain a dog, and the Boatswain, who is trying to save the ship, tells the counsellor what his authority is worth:
None that I more love than myself. You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority...
(Boatswain, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
There’s no one on board I love more than myself. You are a person of authority; if you can order the wind to die down and reach agreement with the current storm, we will no longer pull the ropes. Use your authority...
If a counsellor can command the elements, the sailors will stop pulling ropes. He cannot, so they will not. It is a plain-spoken statement that power is the ability to act on the world, not the right to be obeyed, and the lords cannot answer it except with abuse.
The joke, revealed in the next scene, is that somebody on the island can command the elements, and has. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), read the storm as the play’s first act of stagecraft, the moment Prospero sets up his experiment by stripping the court of everything that made them powerful. On that reading the Boatswain is right about the sea and wrong about who sent it. The scene establishes the terms on which the rest of the play will be played: on this island the name of king is nothing, and the name of Prospero is everything.
How is power seized in The Tempest?
Three times, by the same method, with diminishing dignity. Antonio took Milan from his brother twelve years ago with an army lent by Naples. On the island he tries to take Naples for Sebastian by killing the sleeping king, and his method is to make ambition look like a fact of nature that Sebastian has been ignoring:
If you but knew how you the purpose cherish
Whiles thus you mock it!
(Antonio, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If you just realised you are ambitious,
Although you mock ambition!
A scene later Caliban offers the island to Stephano in exchange for murdering Prospero in his sleep, and the butler accepts with a distribution of offices: himself king, Miranda queen, Trinculo and Caliban viceroys. The three coups share a shape. A ruler asleep or absent, an accomplice who needs persuading, and a man who has decided that the place is his because he is standing in it.
Jan Kott (1964) built his reading of the play on the repetition: the island is a stage on which history is rehearsed, and it rehearses the same scene of usurpation at every level of society. Paul Brown (1985) noticed that the drunken version is the one the audience is invited to laugh at, and asked why the play makes rebellion ridiculous only when the rebel has a real grievance. Both are right that the repetition is the point. Every seizure of power in The Tempest fails, because every one is foreseen by the man who seized the island first.
Why does Prospero give up his power?
He gives two reasons and the play supplies a third. The first is that the work is done: the enemies are forgiven, the dukedom is restored, and there is nothing left for the magic to do. The second is in the speech itself, where the list of what his art can do slides from raising storms to opening graves, and Prospero calls it rough magic and renounces it in the same breath:
I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll break my wand,
And bury it deep down within the earth,
And deeper than an anchor ever dropped to,
I’ll throw my book of spells.
The third reason is Ariel. Prospero has promised the spirit freedom, and the magic cannot work without him. Giving up the power and keeping the promise are the same act.
G. Wilson Knight, in The Crown of Life (1947), read the renunciation as Shakespeare’s farewell to his own art, with Prospero standing for the playwright who has finished: "Prospero, who controls this comprehensive Shakespearian world, automatically reflects Shakespeare himself." Jan Kott (1964) read it as the failure of an experiment: Prospero has tried to build a just world with absolute power and found that power cannot make men good, so he breaks the instrument. Either way the play is unambiguous that the giving up is voluntary. Nobody takes the staff from him. The theme of power and control in The Tempest is finally about the one thing power cannot do, which is decide to stop being used.
How does the play connect power over people with power over nature?
By making them the same power. Prospero’s control of the court is exercised through weather, sleep and music, and when he describes his art in Act 5 he does not mention people at all:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune...
(Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You elves within the hills, streams, lakes and groves,
And you that leave no footprint in the sand
When chasing out the tide...
The speech goes on to the darkened sun, the mutinous winds, the split oak and the opened graves, and it is borrowed almost line for line from the witch Medea in Ovid. Prospero is claiming a sorceress’s power over the physical world, and everything he has done to the men on the island has been done with it. The storm was politics by other means.
Stephen Orgel, in his Oxford edition (1987), read Prospero’s magic as a version of the royal power that James I claimed over nature and subjects alike, the king as the source of order in both. Frank Kermode (1954) saw the Medea borrowing as the play’s admission that Art and black magic use the same tools and differ only in their ends. What the play insists on is that the tools are given up together. Prospero does not keep his power over the weather and lose his power over men. He drowns the book, and the ship sails home with a fair wind that Ariel provides as a parting favour, not a command.
Does anyone in The Tempest hold power legitimately?
Nobody, if you count. Antonio stole Milan; Alonso helped him; Prospero took the island from Caliban, who inherited it from a witch who was dumped there by sailors; Sebastian and Stephano would take what they could. The one man who describes a legitimate order is Gonzalo, and it is an order with no power in it at all:
I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate...
(Gonzalo, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’d run my commonwealth quite opposite
To every other place: no form of commerce
Would I allow; there’d be no law or judges...
No trade, no law, no letters, no sovereignty. Antonio and Sebastian point out at once that Gonzalo would be king of it, and the old man admits the joke. The commonwealth is a dream, and the play puts it in the mouth of the one man on the island who would never try to seize anything.
The speech comes from Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals, in Florio’s translation of 1603, and Frank Kermode (1954) read it as the play’s statement of the nature side of its great debate, an innocent world against the disciplines of government. Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) set it beside the reports from Virginia, where the colony’s governors were discovering that an undisciplined settlement fell apart, and read the play as unable to decide between the two. The ending is a restoration, not a reform: Prospero gets his dukedom, Alonso keeps his crown, and Gonzalo’s commonwealth is left on the island with Caliban. Legitimate power in The Tempest is the power that was there before, given back.
