The Tempest, Critical perspectives

Miscellaneous
Wikipedia has some useful references on the character pages for the play
which were sure youve already found.
Kahn: Prospero is lacking as a hero because the maternal is lacking from The Tempest
Mikics: Isnt this, Prosperos self-proclaimed struggle with his fury all an act?
Prosperos purpose all along has been the marriage of his daughter
Prosperos berating of Ferdinand is just the action of a man trying to enforce the
moralizing power of his super ego
Much of The Tempest is a game
Loreto Todd: Our culture has Biblical associations with storms (Book of Job, Psalm 107;
Christs calming of the waters). Order being put onto disorder.
Anne Barton: In act one, scene one, the normal world of the court, the accustomed
social responses, have been dislocated
Riga: Prospero can be viewed as a beneficent, kindly figure
Kozinsky: Prospero can be viewed as a selfish and vengeful tyrant
Westlund states Prospero is a deeply subjective character.
Moseley: the banquet with its food and drink The links to the Mass are clear
communion, forgiveness and a worthiness to partake
Prospero enters on a level that symbolises his overall control and capacity to test and
judge
Antonio and Sebastian react (to the banquet) with scornful flippancy
Smith: using a system of belief in the supernatural in order to control just as
Machiavelli saw religion as a form of social control
Poole: The play first performed at Blackfriars Theatre, which afforded more scope for
effects than the Globe
A betrothal masque with images of beauty and fruition
It looks back to the mythical harmonious Golden Age
Moseley: A masque is a means of saying the unsayable
Prospero presents an ideal of Good Marriage
It is an elaborate way for Prospero to pronounce his blessing on the couple
An example of how the play concerns itself with education

An anti-masque: comic or ugly moments symbolising the containment of dangerous

disorder within order
Despite this harmony, there is still discord on the island
The purity of the masque, juxtaposed with the impure conspiracy to seize power
Stephano and Trinculo are far more repulsive than Caliban in this scene
Hobson: Prospero is a great producer-dramatist
Thompson: Thompson suggests that The Tempest demonstrates an insistence on
male control over these female qualities
Greenblatt: Rapt in secret studies, Prospero loses his dukedom, but even in exile he
does not escape the authority to which he was culpably indifferent. Instead he finds
himself, together with his daughter, on an island that serves as a kind of experimental
space for testing the ethics of authority. Prospero possesses many of the princely virtues
that the Renaissance prized, but the results of the experiment are at best deeply
ambiguous: one of the islands native inhabitants is liberated only to be forced into
compulsory servitude; the other is educated only to be enslaved.
Prospero does seem to make one crucial ethical breakthrough: though he has his hated
brother and his other enemies under his absolute control, he chooses not to exact
vengeance upon them. But this choice is made at the urging of the nonhuman spirit
Ariel, who declares what he would do were I human. Perhaps the more striking ethical
choice that Prospero makesand makes on his own, without Ariels urgingis to give up
his magical powers (the romance equivalent of martial law), take back the dukedom he
had lost twelve years earlier, and return to the city from which he had been exiled. By
doing so he deliberately plunges back into the contingency, risk, and moral uncertainty
that he had temporarily escaped. And, tellingly, he leaves Ariel behind.
"It is very difficult to argue that The Tempest is not about imperialism," Greenblatt wrote.
"It is, of course, about many other things, as well," he hastened to add.
Said: In late plays such as The Tempest or The Winters Tale, Shakespeare returns to the
forms of romance and parable
Edward Dowden: "We identify Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare himself
because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self-mastery,
his calm validity of will and with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the
common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakespeare as discovered
to us in all his latest plays."
Hazlitt:
The Tempest is one of the most original and perfect of Shakespeares productions, and
he has shown in it all the variety of his powers. It is full of grace and grandeur. The

human and imaginary characters, the dramatic and the grotesque, are blended together
with the greatest art, and without any appearance of it.

The character of Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) to be one of the authors
masterpieces. It is not indeed pleasant to see this character on the stage any more than
it is to see the God Pan personated there. But in itself it is one of the wildest and most
abstracted of all Shakespeares characters, whose deformity whether of body or mind is
redeemed by the power and truth of the imagination displayed in it. It is the essence of
grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in it. Shakespeare has described the
brutal mind of Caliban in contact with the pure and original forms of nature; the
character grows out of the soil where it is rooted uncontrolled, uncouth and wild,
uncramped by any of the meannesses of custom. It is of the earth, earthy.

Schlegel, the admirable German critic on Shakespeare observes that Caliban is a

poetical character, and always speaks in blank verse.
The poet here shows us the savage with the simplicity of a child, and makes the strange
monster amiable. Shakespeare had to paint the human animal rude and without choice
in its pleasures, but not without the sense of pleasure or some germ of the affections.
Ariel is imaginary power, the swiftness of thought personified.
The courtship between Ferdinand and Miranda is one of the chief beauties of this play. It
is the very purity of love.

Coleridge:
The Tempest is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the interest is not
historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connexion of events,
but is a birth of the imagination, and rests only on the coaptation and union of the
elements granted to, or assumed by, the poet.
It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space, and in which,
therefore, errors of chronology and geographyno mortal sins in any speciesare venial
faults, and count for nothing.
But in Shakspeare all the elements of womanhood are holy.
In all the Shakspearean women there is essentially the same foundation and principle ;
the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of
circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katherine the
queen.

The language in which these truths are expressed was not drawn from any set fashion,
but from the profoundest depths of his moral being, and is therefore for all ages.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeares Last Plays

Literary invocations of The Tempest, Virginia Mason Vaughan
W.H. Auden: a mythopoeic work [that] encourages adaptations
unusual emphasis on the role of art in human consciousness
Prospero spends much of his time torn between fascination with his illusions and his
responsibilities
The Tempest questions whether art is an escape from everyday realities or a way to
transform the corrupt and unjust world we live in
Antonios silence in the plays final moments suggests that the maguss reformatory
project has failed at least once, and, arguably, also with Caliban.
Auden: His anger at Caliban stems from his consciousness of this failure.
For many readers, Calibans impassioned resistance to Prosperos power calls into
question the magicians role as moral arbiter.
If art, like human life, is the stuff that dreams are made on, why pursue it?
Sharing the white mans burden, they [Victorian critics] often identified Prosperos drive
to educate his subalterns, especially Caliban. These writers saw a species of subhumanity that with proper cultivation could evolve into civilised humanity.
On Caliban: We can never discover the absolute truth about our creator. Indeed, God is
only comprehensible in terms of ourselves.
MacKaye: The masques goal, was to present Prosperos art as the art of the theatre
culminating in Shakespeare and to lead Caliban step by step from his original path of
brute force and ignorance to the realm of love, reason, and self-discipline.
Caliban represents primitive man
The Caliban-Ariel-Prospero triangle seemed prescient of Europes future colonial history
Miranda assumes, rather ethnocentrically, that Calibans native speech patterns were
brutish, mere gabble without meaning.
After Mirandas lessons, Caliban is in sense a hybrid, a Creole who speaks the
imperialists European language with his own inflections and emphases.
Through his magical powers, Prospero enjoyed the ultimate patriarchal control over his
daughter Miranda; her marriage to Ferdinand was essential to his project
Shakespeares Prospero is obsessed with time

Prosperos pain in remembrance of past things is conveyed in 1.2 by the irregularity of

his blank verse lines and his frequent interruptions to ask Miranda is she is listening
For Prospero, memories of the past are an obstacle to harmony in the future.
Prospero is obsessed with his daughters chastity
The Tempests opposition between Caliban , a creature of the earth upon whom nurture
never stuck, and Prospero, the cultivated European, also raises a seeming opposition
between nature and art. For Prospero, the land is to be cultivated, the native to be
civilised.
Notable texts inspired by The Tempest to research particularly Calibans
presentation:

Ernest Renan, Caliban: Suite de la Tempete

Robert Browning, Caliban upon Setebos
W.H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror
Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Caliban

Researching the key features of these provide you with further critical
perspectives and will impress the examiner

What is a late play?, Gordon McMullan

Edward Said disliked work manifesting a sense of calm resignation or resolution in old
age and lacking the edge, the jaggedness, the difficulty that, for him, marks true
lateness.
Mincoff: The Tempest is very much an old mans play. OR: The Tempest fails to be an
old mans play with Prospero as a mixture of Father Christmas, a colonial Bishop, and
the President of the Magicians Union.

Blackfriars, music and masque, David Lindley

The betrothal masque for Miranda and Ferdinand in Act 4this entertainment deploys
its mythological figures precisely and appropriately, as a well behaved court masque
should.
Prospero sees the masque as a vanity of mine art
The Tempest is concerned with the limits of art and magic
the antimasque figures of Caliban and his cronies
Caliban is a monstrous figure who has some parallels in the grotesques of courtly
masque

The parody court of Stephano can be coerced into the mould of the antimasque
distortion of the true courtly prince
The court masque aims at an absolute clarity of moral distinction and its reliance on
allegory
Performance History: This was a play designed with the Blackfriars in mind but was
also performed at The Globe by The Kings Men

The literary and dramatic contexts of the last plays, Charles

Moseley
John Fletcher: A tragi-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in
respect it wants [lacks] deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some
neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie.
women as resolvers of ancient grudgeand male confusion
The Tempest has strong links with the pastoral, frequently used to highlight the
corruption of the court, as well as with the romantic comedic move from court to the
educative wilderness and then back to the responsibilities of everyday.
Prosperos idea of the right to rule, which is the result of the study and nurture ,
parallels Gonzalos Utopian motif, relying on nature which too likely might generate
only whores and idlers
Renaissance art theory: outward shape is an index of inner nature
Mirandas and Calibans responses to education, to rule, to new experience, to new
people, are clearly counterpointing each other.
A play driven by providential purpose

Politics, religion, geography and travel: historical contexts of the

last plays, Karen Britland
David Beregon has suggested that Shakespeares late plays all, in part, re-present
King James and his family
For James, then, a king was Gods representative on earth and ruled by divine right,
placed at the top of a hierarchy that demanded obedience and submission from all his
subjects
The play most frequently associated with the colonial project, however, is The Tempest,
the plot of which has been variously linked to the Virginia Companys experiences in the
Americas

Ariel, himself, like the coarser Caliban, has been interpreted from a colonial perspective
as a native subjected to an usurping imperialism
Fuchs: Caliban rcalls a model developed by the English to justify colonialization: the
subject in need of civilising. Similarly, Ariel incarnates the colonisers fantasy of a pliant,
essentially accommodating, and useful subject.
The connection of travel with personal and national identities is clearly present the
possibility that there is no ground and no home

Shakespeares Late Plays: A readers guide to essential

criticism
William Hazlitt:
Caliban is the essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in it
Ariel is imaginary power
Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Caliban is all earth, all condensed and gross in feelings and images
Coleridge notes interestingly that Ariel and Miranda never appear together, he surmises
lest the natural and human of the one and the supernatural of the other should tend to
neutralize each other
Shakespeare makes men on stage what they are in nature
F.R. Leavis:
Not only does Propsero finally renounce magic, break his staff and drown his book, but
the daydream has never been allowed to falsify human and moral realities
E.M.W. Tillyard:
Antonios transformation from the cynical and lazy badgerer of Gonzalos loquacity to
the brilliantly swift and unscrupulous man of action is a thrilling affair
Miranda is a symbol of original virtue
G. Wilson Knight:
The Tempest patterned storm and music of Shakespeares world
Jan Nott:
In the prologue to The Tempest, the deprivation of majestys sacred character so
characteristic of the Renaissance is realised once more. Faced with a roaring sea, a
boatswain means more than a king

Situations in Shakespeares theatre are always real, even when interpreted by ghosts
and monsters
Caliban was overthrown by Prospero, just as Prospero had been overthrown by Antonio