In Defence of 'The Tempest'

 by Dawn Sands

Over the Easter holidays, I read Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I loved the play and it was possibly my favourite comedy that I’ve read so far (sorry Twelfth Night), so I was surprised to find lots of negative reviews as I scoured the internet searching for interesting takes. So because I’m defensive and apparently have nothing better to do with my time, I started to think about what the main arguments are and how I might counter them.

The first argument that I saw a lot was that Prospero is immoral and perverse, and is therefore not a protagonist we as the audience can back. Similarly, many people mentioned Prospero’s lengthy speeches and how they took up such a disproportionate amount of the very short play that the plot was rendered boring and disjointed because of it. 

This may seem a slightly counterintuitive argument to make, as the play was originally written with the aim of entertaining an audience, but I would suggest that these speeches are more valuable when it comes to reading and making literary analysis of the play, rather than viewing it on stage. Where to cut a play is always at the discretion of the director, and if for the purpose of a singular production the director wishes to cut some of Prospero’s speeches for the benefit of the audience, they are absolutely able to do that. However, I don’t think these long-winded soliloquies necessarily stop the play from being worthwhile. The reason for this links back to the original claim: that Prospero is not a protagonist the audience feels able to support.

The main reason why I think this argument comes about is that The Tempest is often placed in the same whimsical, romantic subcategory as plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rather than being treated as a problem play, the purpose for which it was, arguably, intended. Although Prospero is the protagonist, this does not automatically equate to being in the right, as is the case in many of Shakespeare’s plays. There is some debate over what constitutes a problem play, and which Shakespearean plays would fall into that bracket, but personally I would define it as a play that attempts to challenge a moral issue - colonialism, in the case of The Tempest.

Usurping the throne is a major theme in The Tempest: firstly, Antonio usurps Prospero as Duke of Milan; then Prospero takes the island from Caliban, its rightful inhabitant, and forces him into slavery. I have a tendency to be far more invested in subplots than main plots, especially when it comes to Shakespeare plays (I can take or leave Romeo and Juliet’s love at first sight, but give me two houses realising their rivalry was completely arbitrary any day), and I think this applies to The Tempest as well. Although the main conflict of the play exists between Prospero and his usurpers, what is far more intriguing to me is Caliban’s journey to liberation. Prospero spends the play walking around with his overly loquacious old man speeches, drunk with power despite the fact that he only rules over four people in the entire world - meanwhile, we see a deep humanity emerge in Caliban. As more people arrive on the island, the more Caliban realises that there is no need for him to submit to Prospero; that Prospero is no god; that there is more to life than constant slavery and that he is the rightful inhabitant of the island. 

My favourite passage in the play is probably Caliban’s short speech in Act 3, Scene 2: ‘Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not / Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments / Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices…” Caliban relays this speech to Trinculo and Stephano, two newcomers to the island who, although they have instantly adopted the same mentality as Prospero and attempted to adopt Caliban as their slave, represent freedom and renewal to Caliban. For the first time, the audience sees Caliban unrestrained and in a position of authority - he knows the island well, while Trinculo and Stephano do not - and this speech highlights the depth of Caliban’s knowledge of it. He appears to be intimately familiar with his surroundings, almost on personal terms with the island, able to anticipate its every quirk and strange mannerism. While I was reading this I couldn’t help comparing Caliban to the titular character in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, another book which I have fallen in love with recently. Both Caliban and Piranesi live for a long time in solitude, and while both are eager to share their knowledge of their habitat with others, their solitude has driven them to have a close personal connection with the place where they live. Although Prospero has dubbed himself king of the island, it is clear Caliban is its true master: he knows every inch of the island far better than anyone, and yet he is still willing to assume servitude. Upon Trinculo and Stephano’s arrival, Caliban declares that he ‘has a new master’, wishing only to be relinquished from Prospero’s grasp, and not caring who is king as long as he is treated well. It is ironic how Trinculo and Stephano consistently refer to Caliban as a ‘monster’, yet he is probably the most humane of them all - he is the only one who sees that the island, sparsely populated as it is, doesn’t need a king, it just needs harmony.

Personally, I believe that all of this was intentional on Shakespeare’s part: I see The Tempest as a condemnation of colonialism and racism, and Shakespeare accomplishes this by presenting Caliban, the victim, as humane and sensitive, while letting the white colonising characters go to extreme ends in order to achieve their ambitions of conquering. At one point in the play, Antonio persuades Sebastian that they should kill the king, Alonso, as he sleeps, as they are now far away from Naples so his kingship means nothing. This highlights even further how arbitrary the title of ‘king’ is; however, the characters are so drunk with ambition and potential power that they begin to go against their own ideals, willing to kill a king in order to assume the position that they themselves have regarded as redundant. Although, technically, Prospero is the protagonist, I see the other characters as being the main focus, with Prospero himself just being the person that links them all together. As I mentioned previously, this may not make The Tempest the most entertaining play to watch on stage, but from the point of view of analysis and gleaning what Shakespeare’s political views may have been, I believe that this play is so multifaceted and far more interesting than it is frequently given credit for.

A common counterargument I have seen is that Prospero is supposed to be a metaphor for a playwright, and as Shakespeare himself was a playwright, he was not intended to be portrayed in a bad light, but that his might over the other characters is a representation of the power a writer has over their work. The Tempest was the final play Shakespeare wrote by himself, and for this reason it is often viewed as Shakespeare’s final homage to theatre - a common motif across all of his works is the theatre as a microcosm of reality (the famous ‘all the world’s a stage’ speech from As You Like It perfectly encapsulates this concept), and you can see this sentiment repeated throughout The Tempest, too. The epilogue of The Tempest is a short soliloquy spoken by Prospero, in which he speaks to the audience directly, stating that ‘Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails / Which was to please’. This line suggests that Prospero’s only purpose is to entertain the audience, and if he has failed in that regard, then there is no point in him existing. In Act Four, as Prospero causes the spirits performing Miranda and Prospero’s wedding ceremony to vanish, Prospero simply states that ‘our revels are now ended’, and that ‘these our actors […] were no more than spirits’. Although the argument for this is convincing, there is no evidence to show that Shakespeare intended for The Tempest to be his final play; his death was sudden, and he did write two plays afterwards in collaboration with John Fletcher (Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII). Others have suggested that although it may not have been his farewell to theatre, it was still the play with which he parted from the Globe Theatre; however, the Globe burnt down during a production of Henry VIII, and no one had any way of anticipating this, either. Therefore, I believe that the interpretation that Prospero was a metaphor for Shakespeare himself, while intriguing, is largely based only on the fact that it was his last play, which was probably not intentional.

I still have a lot more to say, specifically to do with Miranda and common arguments relating to her character, but maybe I will write a part two someday. However, for now, I believe that The Tempest becomes infinitely better when you start to view it as a problem play, as a criticism of colonialism, rather than a light romance that condones Prospero’s actions. The mindset of Caliban is fascinating to me (can you tell he’s one of my favourite characters in Shakespeare?); I see the way in which he becomes more and more humane as more people arrive on the island and he is liberated, rather than Prospero’s revenge on Antonio, as being the main plot of the play, and it is mainly for this reason that I love The Tempest so much.