Study Guide for The Tempest

Date

Performed May 1611, probably at the Blackfriars; performed at court in late fall of the year as one of 13 entertainments scheduled for the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine.

Genre

Romance; tragicomedy.  Characteristics: Disruptive shipwrecks, lost children, magic, conflation of historical elements, heavy use of supernatural elements, perilous closeness to tragedy, reconciled and chastened (but improved) humanity at the end.  (See also Shakespearean Romance, Tragicomedy, and the Jacobean Theater).

Special Features

After The Comedy of Errors (c. 1598) this is Shakespeare's shortest play, and it is enacted in "real time," between 2-6 p.m.  Music takes up at least an hour, thus making The Tempest probably Shakespeare's "loudest" play.  Even moreso than the earlier Roman play, The Tempest marks Shakespeare's closest adherence to the "unities" of time, place, and action.

The play also is marked by compressed poetical language and syntax:  contractions, omissions of words ⁄ incomplete expressions that audiences and readers intuitively supply.  Note as well the play's compressed linguistic field:  For example, the word brave and its variants are used 16 times, and words referring to memory (including remembrance) help further its dreamlike quality.

Symmetrical structure:  Beginning and end mirror one another in terms of reversed situations of character groupings, with the masque of Ceres at the play's center (4.1);  this and the compressed language contrive to further the impression of the play as a "dream" or "hall of mirrors."

Prospero

How we view Prospero basically determines how we view the play, and this has changed throughout its history:

• As benevolent despot or tyrant;
• As theurgist, mage:  white magic (as opposed to evil powers).  See Frank Kermode's interpretation, one that has guided generations of scholars (Arden 2nd edition);
• As imperialist ⁄ colonist, "stealer" of Caliban's island.

In terms of our view of Prospero, we can understand the play on a number of levels:

• As about the "Americas" and colonial enterprises (actually a rather weak view);
• As about the oppositions between civilization and savagery; nobility ⁄ vileness; nature vs. nurture (see, for example, Montaigne's "Of the Cannibals");
• As about European dynastic concerns (probably the strongest interpretation), hence the play's interest in usurpation, succession, and so forth;
• As a "revenge comedy" (my term here)—for that, see the Notes to Hamlet regarding revenge tragedy and then transpose many of the characteristics into comic terms.

Ariel

Technically male (the pronoun his used once), but usually considered sexually indeterminate:  properties of air and water, as opposed to Caliban's connection to earth.  Be careful not to dichotomize these two characters (as in virtue vs. vice), since they are extremely different.