Leonard Gaya's Reviews > The Tempest

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last plays, and somehow he probably knew this as he was writing and producing it. While I was rereading this book for the umpteenth time, I realised how strongly this particular play goes over and wraps up all the thirty-five plays that came before it.

The plot is intricate, but could be summed up like so: Prospero lives on a remote island, deposed and exiled from his dukedom of Milan (as in King Lear, as in the Duke in As You Like It, or even the Duke in The Two Gentlemen of Verona). With him live Miranda, his young daughter, and two opposite spirits or forces of Nature, the ethereal Ariel (compare with Puck) and the chthonic Caliban, son of a witch (see Aaron, see Macbeth’s trio). A ship passes by, returning from Africa (Othello?), is caught in a storm (Lear again), and runs aground. The plot, like the vessel, then splits into three parts: 1) the encounter and apparently complicated love between young prince Ferdinand and Miranda (reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet or the couples in A Midsummer Night's Dream); 2) the regicide plot, in the forest, of treacherous Antonio and Sebastian against Alonso and Gonzalo (cf. Lear once more, Macbeth once more, so on); 3) the washed down jest between Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo (see all the jesters and divine drunkards from Speed to Falstaff).

All these have a brush with disaster, but The Tempest, although it looks like a revenge play at first, is, in fact, a play on atonement, forgiveness, reconciliation and, ultimately, a journey home. And Prospero’s magic powers (the muse-like Ariel) is a device that allows Shakespeare both to test and to save all his characters, finally gathered together for the last time, before breaking his staff (his quill) and drowning his books (his plays), “deeper than did ever plummet sound”.

Both sad and sweet ending for one of Shakespeare's major plays that would later inspire a considerable number of thinkers, artists and entertainers, from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver's Travels to J.J. Abrams' Lost.

Edit: I realise that I failed to mention the massive influence this play has had on the Science-Fiction genre (the ship-that-lands-on-an-uncharted-planet business), especially in cinema, from Forbidden Planet (1956) to the Alien franchise (e.g. the plot of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Covenant). If you can think of any other similar reference, by all means, leave a comment.