The Tempest is a play by
William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that
Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where the sorcerer
Prospero, rightful
Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter
Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skilful manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his usurping brother
Antonio and the complicit
King Alonso of
Naples to the island. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio's lowly nature, the redemption of the King, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso's son,
Ferdinand.
There is no obvious single source for the plot of The Tempest, but researchers have seen parallels in
Erasmus's Naufragium,
Peter Martyr's De orbe novo, and eyewitness reports by
William Strachey and
Sylvester Jordain of the real-life shipwreck of the
Sea Venture on the islands of
Bermuda, and the subsequent conflict between
Sir Thomas Gates and
Sir George Somers. In addition, one of
Gonzalo's speeches is derived from
Montaigne's essay Of the Canibales, and much of Prospero's renunciative speech is taken word for word from a speech by
Medea in
Ovid's poem
Metamorphoses. The masque in Act 4 may have been a later addition, possibly in honour of the wedding of
Princess Elizabeth and
Frederick V in 1613. The play was first published in the
First Folio of 1623.
The story draws heavily on the tradition of the romance, and it was influenced by tragicomedy, the courtly masque and perhaps the commedia dell'arte. It differs from
Shakespeare's other plays in its observation of a stricter, more organised neoclassical style. Critics see The Tempest as explicitly concerned with its own nature as a play, frequently drawing links between Prospero's "art" and theatrical illusion, and early critics saw Prospero as a representation of Shakespeare, and his renunciation of magic as signalling Shakespeare's farewell to the stage. The play portrays Prospero as a rational, and not an occultist, magician by providing a contrast to him in Sycorax: her magic is frequently described as destructive and terrible, where Prospero's is said to be wondrous and beautiful.
Beginning in about
1950, with the publication of
Psychology of
Colonization by
Octave Mannoni, The Tempest was viewed more and more through the lens of postcolonial theory—exemplified in adaptations like
Aimé Césaire's
Une Tempête set in
Haiti—and there is even a scholarly journal on post-colonial criticism named after
Caliban.
The Tempest did not attract a significant amount of attention before the ban on the performance of plays in 1642, and only attained popularity after the
Restoration, and then only in adapted versions
. In the mid-19th century, theatre productions began to reinstate the original
Shakespearean text, and in the
20th century, critics and scholars undertook a significant re-appraisal of the play's value, to the extent that it is now considered to be one of Shakespeare's greatest works. It has been adapted numerous times in a variety of styles and formats: in music, at least 46 operas by composers such as
Fromental Halévy,
Zdeněk Fibich and
Thomas Adès; orchestral works by
Tchaikovsky,
Arthur Sullivan and
Arthur Honegger; and songs by such diverse artists as
Ralph Vaughan Williams,
Michael Nyman and
Pete Seeger; in literature,
Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem With a
Guitar, To
Jane and
W. H. Auden's
The Sea and the Mirror; novels by Aimé Césaire and
The Diviners by
Margaret Laurence; in paintings by
William Hogarth,
Henry Fuseli, and
John Everett Millais; and on screen, ranging through a hand-tinted version of
Herbert Beerbohm Tree's
1905 stage performance, the science fiction film
Forbidden Planet in
1956,
Peter Greenaway's
1991 Prospero's Books featuring
John Gielgud as Prospero, to
Julie Taymor's
2010 film version which changed Prospero to Prospera (as played by
Helen Mirren), and
Des McAnuff's
2010 Stratford Shakespeare Festival production which starred
Christopher Plummer.
- published: 15 Dec 2015
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