Interpreting The Tempest
Dr Sean McEvoy looks at the wide range of different ways in which Shakespeare has been
interpreted over time, arguing that the interpretations reveal as much about the context of
criticism as about the play itself.
The Tempest (1611) is such a strange play that it has prompted many readers and critics to think that
it must be an allegory. It tells of Prospero, the anxious magician whose devotion to his occult
learning enabled his wicked brother Antonio to depose him from the Dukedom of Milan and exile
him to a remote island. On the day on which the action takes place, Prospero seizes the chance to
use his art to wreak vengeance when his enemies’ ship comes near. Prospero is accompanied in his
exile, by his daughter Miranda, and he is attended by Ariel, a spirit of the air, and he rules over
Caliban, described in the cast list as ‘a savage and deformed slave’. With its airy spirits, magic spells,
apparitions and illusions The Tempest seemed in the past to stand out from the broadly ‘realistic’
human world of the histories, comedies and tragedies. What could Shakespeare be up to here?
What message must be hiding beneath the surface? Different critical views have been proposed over
the years, opening up the possible meanings of the play in fascinating ways, but also revealing as
much about the critic and the context in which they interpret the play, as the text itself.
Is it coded autobiography?
In fact, The Tempest, like The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, was Shakespeare’s response to the new
fashion for ‘romances’: tragicomedies with a fantastic or supernatural element. The plot of The
Winter’s Tale turns on a divine oracle and its denouement requires a statue to come to life
(apparently). In Cymbeline the Roman god Jupiter
descends in thunder and lightning, sitting on an eagle. He throws a thunderbolt.
Rather than look at the theatre for which Shakespeare was writing, 19th- and early 20th-century
critics were wedded to a Romantic idea that the writer’s life had its fullest expression in his or her
work, and read the plays as an account of Shakespeare’s own emotional experiences as his life
progressed. The plays, in turn, were to be read as coded autobiography. (Incidentally, since William
Shakespeare’s relatively undramatic middle-class life could not be mapped onto the high drama of
his plays, this way of thinking led some to the weird conclusion that he couldn’t have written his own
plays.)
These critics looked in particular at two climactic moments: when Prospero causes the masque he
has created to celebrate the engagement of Miranda to Ferdinand to disappear, and when he
decides to renounce his magic and forgive his brother. In the first of these moments he declares:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits; and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
This irresistibly seemed to be Shakespeare saying goodbye to the imaginary worlds his plays had
created, with the clincher being his announcement that his theatre (‘the great globe itself’) was to
disappear. When later he talks of how his ‘so potent art’ had summoned up storms and made the
dead (historical figures?) walk again, and then announces that he will break his staff, it seemed clear
to critics like John Dover Wilson, writing in 1932, that this must be Shakespeare’s own ‘farewell to
the theatre’.
If The Tempest had been Shakespeare’s last play this idea might perhaps be persuasive, if not very
informative about the play itself. But it was known even in the 1930s that he went on to co-author
three more plays after The Tempest. There is also some evidence that he went on to write The
Winter’s Tale on his own after completing The Tempest. Critical opinion such as this can tell us as
much about of the time of the critics and their ideological views as it can about the play.
Prospero the Director
Two particular interpretations of the play had wide currency in the late 20th century. When in 1956
the Berliner Ensemble brought Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage to London it began a longlasting fascination with the left-wing German playwright and theorist’s work which had a great
influence both in the theatre and among critics. Brecht’s own plays don’t hide from the audience the
fact that they are plays and seek to ‘alienate’ the audience from emotional connection to the action
so that they can make judgements on the political situation depicted. In The Tempest, it could be
argued, Prospero acts like a theatre director at many points. He instructs his actor Ariel how to
perform down to the last detail the illusions which will terrify his shipwrecked brother and his ally
Alonso, the King of Naples. These range from the initial tempest itself, to the magic table which is
snatched away by Ariel as a harpy in Act 3 Scene 3, to the spell which traps them in a lime grove.
Apart from the amazing masque which he puts on in Act 4 Scene 1 he also conjures up the hunting
dogs which chase away the drunken conspirators Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban later in that scene.
Prospero also makes his daughter and Alonso’s son Ferdinand fall in love as his ‘soul prompts it’.
In this interpretation Prospero is not Shakespeare the playwright, but Shakespeare the Brechtian
director. The Tempest is one big play-within-a-play, drawing attention to its own theatricality by
exposing the way The Tempest itself manipulates our emotions and thoughts by showing just such a
manipulation in action by Prospero. In the 1980s this approach coincided historically with an attack
from some quarters on Shakespeare’s deployment in English culture as a means of making ‘natural …
a ruling-class perspective and thereby … preserve the status quo’, as an essay of 1988 put it. In the
same year the theatre company Cheek by Jowl toured Britain with a production of the play based
closely on this interpretation of Prospero as director. Prospero was seen putting the other
characters in costume and directing their moves on stage. We see the magician Prospero in action
and we see how his tricks are done. Shakespeare himself shows us how he has duped us into
believing in a set of patriarchal, monarchical views through his dramatic skills.
Prospero the Colonist
The other influential late 20th-century view took an interest in Caliban. It noted that one of
Shakespeare’s sources for the play was an account of how an English ship taking the governor to the
new American colony of Virginia had been thought lost in a storm, but in fact safely reached
Bermuda. All on board were later discovered to be safe. This echoes what happens to Alonso’s ship,
and Bermuda is even mentioned in play by Ariel. Since it also seems evident that Gonzalo’s account
of his utopian society is taken from the French essayist Montaigne’s description of New World
‘cannibals’ – the word is so close to Caliban’s own name – it was argued that The Tempest was about
the English colonisation of America, and about colonisation in general. The play becomes an
examination of what happens when Europeans take over distant territories and enslave the
inhabitants by force. The colonised seem to respond in two ways. Ariel seems to seek his master’s
approval no matter how brutally he is threatened; but, though a spirit, his humanity is greater than
his master’s and it is he who ultimately persuades Prospero that
the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance.
The play becomes anti-colonialist: the coloniser is shown to have no innate moral superiority which
justifies his imperialism.
But more critical attention has been paid to Caliban, and to his statement to Prospero that:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is I know how to curse.
In a famous 1990 essay the American critic Stephen Greenblatt wrote of the ‘devastating justness’ of
this remark. If Caliban is a savage, a would-be rapist of Miranda, he is also a product of violent
enslavement by Prospero: no matter what the civilising discourse of the coloniser may be, his
language is shot through with the selfishness, fear and hatred which underpin the colonialist project
which Caliban learns through speaking his language. At the end Prospero admits this:
this thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine
And still Caliban himself, as Greenblatt points out, gets to speak perhaps the play’s most beautiful,
lyrical and hopeful speech, which begins ‘Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises…’. The first notable
example of many stage productions of The Tempest which made the play a commentary on
imperialism was directed by Jonathan Miller in 1970, with two West Indian actors, Norman Beaton
and Rudolph Walker, as Ariel and Caliban.
The New World Tempest probably reflected the fact that Shakespeare criticism in the late 20th
century was increasingly dominated by American academics. Its politics also suited well the strength
of anti-imperialist feeling in the years following the American defeat in Vietnam and the growing
multiculturalism of British urban society. But, as Jerry Brotton pointed out in 1998, the New World
Tempest clearly gets its geography wrong. Alonso’s ship is on its way from Tunis to Naples.
Prospero’s island, if anywhere, must be somewhere in the Mediterranean.
An English Caliban?
Caliban’s language also turns out to be much more European, too. Some new research published in
2013 by the American academic Todd Andrew Borlik has gone back to looking at the very English
landscape of Caliban’s world. When Caliban curses Prospero, he twice calls for diseases to rise from
the fenlands and to infect his master. Antonio also sees the island as a stinking ‘fen’ and Caliban says
it has ‘brine pits’. Caliban’s tasks seem to be those of fen-dwellers, collecting wood and catching fish.
The fens are a large low-lying area in eastern England. In the early 17th century they were marshy
and wild, but there were many schemes to drain them and exploit the fertile farm land that would
be produced (as parodied in Ben Jonson’s 1616 comedy The Devil is an Ass). London was full of
money-making schemes aimed at taming the fenlands.
The inhabitants of this muddy and reedy wasteland were regarded as little better than savages, as
superstitious near-pagans who believed in monsters and spirits who dwelt there. Borlik suggests that
the legend of St Guthlac was well-known in Shakespeare’s time. Guthlac was an 8th-century
scholarly hermit who retired to the Lincolnshire fens. Guthlac could make the air and water obey his
commands; he brought demons under his control. He has an angelic familiar, like Ariel, and a magic
garment, like Prospero’s cloak. In other words, we need not look any further than provincial England
for the isolated wilderness and the reclusive magician.
This is not a postcolonial interpretation, it turns out, but an environmentalist one. Caliban is the wild
spirit of the fens and also its inhabitant trying to resist the scientific (i.e. magical) exploitation of the
wilderness – the ‘colonisation of non-human nature by anthropocentric science’, as Borlik puts it. It’s
an interpretation for our time. Caliban’s curses call on the forces of nature to fall on their enemies in
a kind of ‘environmental-blowback’, when nature enacts its revenge on its exploiters.
The Tempest isn’t a mystery; but it is a richly open text that anticipates the world created by the
actions of our early-modern forebears who wielded power.
Dr Sean McEvoy teaches English at Varndean College in Brighton. He is the author of William
Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’: a Sourcebook.
This article first appeared in emagazine 65, September 2014.