Name: Solaru oluwatimilehin
Class: Ss3
Subject: Literature
Topic: Themes: ON SHAKES SPAEARS THE TEMPEST
Loss and restoration
Prospero’s attempt to recover his lost
dukedom of Milan
drives the plot of the Tempest. But Prospero isn’t the only
character in the play to experience loss.
Ariel lost his freedom
to Sycorax and now serves Prospero.
Caliban, who considers
himself the rightful ruler of the island, was overthrown and
enslaved by Prospero. By creating the tempest that shipwrecks
Alonso and his courtiers on the
island, Prospero strips them
of their position and power, and also causes Alonso to believe
that he has lost his son to the sea.
Through their reactions to these losses, the play’s characters
reveal their true natures. Reduced to desperation and
despair, Alonso recognizes his error in helping to overthrow
Prospero and gives up his claim to Milan, returning Prospero to
power and restoring order between Milan and Naples. Though
he desperately wants to be free, Ariel loyally serves his master
Prospero. Prospero, meanwhile, gives up his magic rather than
seeking revenge and frees Ariel before returning to Milan.
In contrast to Alonso,
Antonio and Sebastian never show
remorse for overthrowing Prospero and prove to be ambitious
killers in their plot to murder and overthrow Alonso.
Stephano and Trinculo, in their buffoonish way, likewise seek power
through violence. And Caliban, as opposed to Ariel, hates
Prospero, and gives himself as a slave to
Stephano in an effort
to betray and kill Prospero. As Gonzalo observes in the last
scene of the play, the characters “found ... ourselves, when no
man was his own” (5.1.206-213).
POWER
Power
From the opening scene of The Tempest during
the storm,
when the ruling courtiers on the ship must take orders from
their subjects, the sailors and the boatswain, The Tempest
examines a variety of questions about power: Who has it and
when? Who’s entitled to it? What does the responsible exercise
of power look like? How should power be transferred? The play
In LitCharts, each theme gets its own corresponding color,
which you can use to track where the themes occur in the
work. There are two ways to track themes:
Refer to the color-coded bars next to each plot point •
throughout the Summary and Analysis sections.
Use the • ThemeTracker section
to get a quick overview of
where the themes appear throughout the entire work.
is full of examples of power taken by force, and in each case
these actions lead to political instability and further attempts
to gain power through violence.
Antonio and Alonso’s overthrow of Prospero leads
to Antonio and Sebastian’s plot to
overthrow Alonso, just as Prospero’s overthrow and enslavement
of Caliban leads Caliban to seek revenge.
Ultimately, it is only when Prospero breaks the cycle of
violence by refusing to take revenge on Alonso, Antonio,
Sebastian,
or Caliban that the political tensions in the play are
calmed and reconciled. After Prospero’s merciful refusal to
seek revenge, Alonso and Prospero quickly come to an understanding
and unite their once warring cities through the
marriage of their children. The Tempest suggests
that compromise
and compassion are more effective political tools than
violence, imprisonment, or even magic.
MAGIC, ILLUSION, AND PROSPERO
AS PLAY WRIGHT
The Tempest is full of Prospero’s magic and illusions. The
play
begins with Prospero’s magic (the tempest), and ends with
Prospero’s magic (his command that Ariel send the ship safely
back to Italy). In between, the audience watches as Prospero
uses visual and aural illusions to manipulate his enemies and
expose their true selves. At nearly every point in the play,
Prospero’s magic gives him total control—he always seems to
know what will happen next, or even to control what will happen
next. At one point, Prospero even goes so far as to suggest
that all of life is actually an illusion that vanishes with death:
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is
rounded with a sleep” (4.1.156-158).
Many critics see Prospero’s magical powers as a metaphor
for a playwright’s literary techniques. Just as Prospero uses
magic to create illusions, control situations, and resolve con-
flicts, the playwright does the same using words. Throughout
the play, Prospero often lurks in the shadows behind a scene,
like a director monitoring the action as it unfolds. Prospero
refers to his magic as “art.” In Act 4 scene 1, Prospero literally
steps into the role of playwright when he puts on a masque
for Miranda and Ferdinand.
In fact, many critics take an additional
step, and argue that Prospero should actually be seen
as a stand-in for Shakespeare himself. The Tempest was one
of the last plays Shakespeare wrote before he retired from the
theatre, and many critics interpret the play’s epilogue, in which
Prospero asks the audience for applause that will set him free,
as Shakespeare’s farewell to theatre.
COLONIZATION
During the time when The Tempest was
written and first
performed, both Shakespeare and his audiences would have
been very interested in the efforts of English and other European
settlers to colonize distant lands around the globe. The
Tempest explores the complex and problematic relationship
between the European colonizer and the native colonized
peoples through the relationship between Prospero and
Caliban. Prospero views Caliban as a lesser being than himself.
As such, Prospero believes that Caliban should be grateful to
him for educating Caliban and lifting him out of “savagery.” It
simply does not occur to Prospero that he has stolen rulership
of the island from Caliban, because Prospero can’t imagine
Caliban as being fit to rule anything. In contrast, Caliban soon
realizes that Prospero views him as a second-class citizen fit
only to serve and that by giving up his rulership of the island in
return for his education, he has allowed himself to be robbed.
As a result, Caliban turns bitter and violent, which only
reinforces
Prospero’s view of him as a “savage.” Shakespeare
uses Prospero and Caliban’s relationship to show how the
misunderstandings between the colonizer and the colonized
lead to hatred and conflict, with each side thinking that the
other is at fault.
In addition to the relationship between the colonizer and
colonized, The Tempest also
explores the fears and opportunities
that colonization creates. Exposure to new and different
peoples leads to racism and intolerance, as seen when Sebastian
criticizes Alonso
for allowing his daughter to
marry
an African. Exploration and colonization led directly to slavery
and the conquering of native peoples. For instance, Stephano
and Trinculo both consider capturing Caliban to sell as a
curiosity
back at home, while Stephano eventually begins to see
himself as a potential king of the island. At the same time,
the expanded territories established by colonization created
new places in which to experiment with alternative societies.
Shakespeare conveys this idea in Gonzalo’s musings
about
the perfect civilization he would establish if he could acquire a
territory of his own.
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