Prospero

Prospero is a man who has spent twelve years turning suffering into power. The rightful Duke of Milan, he was betrayed by his brother Antonio, set adrift with his three-year-old daughter, and washed up on an uninhabited island. Instead of dying, he mastered the magical arts he had been studying and built a dominion more complete than any dukedom — commanding spirits, controlling the weather, and bending every living thing on the island to his will. By the time the play opens, he is ready. His enemies are sailing nearby, and he has the power to destroy them. The question the play asks is whether he will.

Prospero is not easy to like. He is imperious, controlling, and short-tempered. He bullies Ariel with reminders of past debts. He threatens Caliban with physical torment. He orchestrates his daughter's love life like a theatrical director blocking a scene. Yet the play insists on his complexity. The same man who threatens to imprison Ariel in an oak tree also genuinely loves his daughter, weeps when reunited with Gonzalo, and ultimately chooses mercy when vengeance is within his grasp.

Detailed Analysis

Prospero's arc is structured around a paradox of power and its renunciation. His backstory establishes that he lost Milan precisely because he was more interested in books than in governing — "I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of my mind." His island exile gave him time to perfect the art that his political negligence had begun. The twelve years of magical study produced an authority so absolute that he can control the elements, bind spirits, and puppet the movements of a dozen people simultaneously. Yet the play's climax is not the exercise of this power but its surrender. "This rough magic / I here abjure," he declares in Act 5, promising to break his staff and drown his book.

What drives the renunciation? Not philosophy — Prospero does not arrive at mercy through abstract reasoning. Ariel's simple observation that he would feel pity if he were human shames Prospero into recognizing what his pursuit of control has cost him. "The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance" is a moral discovery, not a moral axiom. Prospero has to learn it in the moment. His final speech — the Epilogue — strips him of every source of authority. No magic, no spirit servants, no dukedom on this bare stage. He stands before the audience as a man asking for something he cannot command: forgiveness. The character who controlled everything ends by controlling nothing, and the play suggests this is not a defeat but a kind of grace.

The colonial reading of Prospero — as a European who arrives on an island, enslaves its inhabitants, and justifies his authority through claims of cultural superiority — has been central to the play's reception since the mid-twentieth century. Prospero teaches Caliban language and then uses that act of teaching as evidence of benevolence, while Caliban's claim to the land is dismissed. Whether Shakespeare intended this critique is debatable; that the text supports it is not.

Ariel

Ariel is the most powerful character in The Tempest who has no power over his own fate. He can fly, conjure storms, become invisible, impersonate harpies, and lull entire companies to sleep with music — but he does all of it at Prospero's command, counting the hours until his promised freedom. He was imprisoned in a pine tree by the witch Sycorax before Prospero arrived on the island, and Prospero freed him in exchange for service. That debt is the chain that holds Ariel, and Prospero is not above yanking it. When Ariel asks for early release in Act 1, Prospero threatens to peg him in an oak tree's "knotty entrails" for twelve more years.

Despite the coercion, Ariel's relationship with Prospero has a genuine warmth that Caliban's does not. He calls Prospero "master" with what seems like affection, asks "Do you love me, master?" during the masque preparations, and performs his tasks with enthusiastic creativity. His songs — "Full fathom five" and "Where the bee sucks, there suck I" — are among the most beautiful lyrics in Shakespeare, and they suggest a being whose nature is fundamentally joyful, even in servitude.

Detailed Analysis

Ariel's most significant dramatic moment is his exchange with Prospero about the imprisoned courtiers in Act 5. Reporting that Alonso and his companions are "Brimful of sorrow and dismay," Ariel adds that "your affections / Would become tender" if Prospero could see them. When Prospero asks whether Ariel thinks so, the spirit replies: "Mine would, sir, were I human." The line operates on multiple levels. Ariel is explicitly not human — he is air, spirit, something elemental — yet he identifies the compassionate response more accurately than Prospero, who has been planning vengeance for twelve years. The inhuman creature recognizes humanity better than the human does.

Ariel's relationship to freedom structures the entire play's timeline. Prospero promises release after two days; Ariel accepts, negotiates, pushes back, and complies. His final song — "Where the bee sucks, there suck I; / In a cowslip's bell I lie" — imagines a life of purposeless beauty, following summer "merrily" with no master, no task, no debt. It is the play's purest expression of liberty, and Shakespeare places it just before Ariel disappears from the text forever. He is freed in a half-line — "then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well!" — and never speaks again. The swiftness is deliberate. Freedom, for Ariel, is not a speech but a departure.

Caliban

Caliban is the play's most contested character and has been for four centuries. He is the son of the witch Sycorax, born on the island before Prospero arrived, and he claims the land as his birthright: "This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou takest from me." Prospero's account is different — he took Caliban in, taught him language, and lodged him in his own cell until Caliban attempted to assault Miranda. Caliban does not deny this; he regrets only that he failed ("Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans"). What the audience is left with is a character who is simultaneously a victim of colonial dispossession and a would-be rapist, and the play refuses to let either fact cancel the other.

Caliban is bitter, crude, and dangerous. He curses Prospero with plagues and plans his murder with specific, chilling instructions. But he is also capable of extraordinary beauty. His speech about the island's music — "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not" — is one of the most lyrical passages in all of Shakespeare, and it comes from the character most of the other characters treat as a monster.

Detailed Analysis

The critical history of Caliban is a map of changing political consciousness. In the nineteenth century, he was played as a bestial comic figure — the "savage and deformed slave" of the stage directions. In the twentieth century, particularly after decolonization movements in Africa and the Caribbean, he became a symbol of the colonized subject. Writers like Aime Cesaire (who rewrote the play as A Tempest in 1969) and Roberto Fernandez Retamar centered Caliban as the play's moral protagonist, recasting Prospero as the colonizer who steals land, imposes language, and calls it civilization.

Shakespeare's text supports both readings without fully endorsing either. Caliban's complaint about language — "You taught me language; and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse" — is devastating whether you read it as ingratitude or as a precise indictment of colonial education. He learns the colonizer's language and uses it to articulate his dispossession. Prospero's assertion that kindness cannot stick to Caliban's "nature" — "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick" — invokes a nature-versus-nurture argument that conveniently exempts the colonial project from self-examination. If Caliban is incorrigible by nature, then Prospero bears no responsibility for his condition.

Yet the play's final gesture toward Caliban complicates this. Prospero's line — "this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine" — has been read as ownership (my slave), as responsibility (my creation), and even as psychological confession (my shadow self). Caliban's own final words promise reform: "I'll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace." Whether this represents genuine transformation or the defeated compliance of a subject who has run out of options is left entirely to the audience.

Miranda

Miranda has seen exactly three men in her conscious life — her father, Caliban, and now Ferdinand — and this radical inexperience is both her defining trait and her limitation. She is compassionate, direct, and entirely without guile. When she watches the shipwreck in Act 1, her first instinct is empathy: "O, I have suffer'd / With those that I saw suffer!" When she meets Ferdinand, she proposes marriage with an honesty that would be unthinkable in any court in Europe: "I am your wife, if you will marry me; / If not, I'll die your maid." She has never learned the social performances that other Shakespearean heroines navigate, and this makes her both refreshing and vulnerable.

Detailed Analysis

Miranda's role in the play raises questions about agency that the text does not fully answer. Her love for Ferdinand is genuine, but it was engineered by Prospero. Her compassion for the shipwreck victims is real, but Prospero assures her no one was harmed before she can act on it. Her most famous line — "O brave new world, / That has such people in't!" — expresses wonder at a group of people that includes the men who cast her father out to die. Prospero's reply, "'Tis new to thee," is both protective and diminishing: he knows what she does not, and his knowledge frames her innocence as naivety rather than virtue.

Yet Miranda is not passive. She defies Prospero twice — once to tell Ferdinand her name against her father's wishes, and once to advocate for Ferdinand when Prospero threatens him. "There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple," she insists when Prospero calls Ferdinand a traitor, and Prospero's response — "My foot my tutor?" — reveals his discomfort with a daughter who has her own judgment. Miranda's agency is limited by the play's structure, which gives her father control over virtually every aspect of her life. But within those constraints, her choices are her own, and her directness marks her as one of the few characters in the play who says exactly what she means.

Ferdinand

Ferdinand arrives on the island believing his father is dead and himself alone in the world. Ariel's song — "Full fathom five thy father lies" — tells him his father's bones are coral, his eyes are pearls, and Ferdinand accepts this beautiful lie as truth. He follows the music, meets Miranda, and falls in love on sight. He is young, earnest, and willing to submit to Prospero's arbitrary punishment — hauling thousands of logs — because the labor keeps him near Miranda. "The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead, / And makes my labours pleasures," he says, and there is no irony in it.

Detailed Analysis

Ferdinand's function in the play is structural rather than psychological. He is the instrument through which Prospero can secure a political alliance — a marriage between the heir of Milan and the heir of Naples — that undoes the damage Antonio caused twelve years ago. Ferdinand does not know he is playing this role. He thinks he is falling in love; Prospero knows he is forging a dynasty. The log-bearing trial Prospero imposes is explicitly designed to make Ferdinand value what he wins: "lest too light winning / Make the prize light." Ferdinand endures it, and his endurance proves him worthy — but worthy by whose standard? The trial is Prospero's invention, testing qualities Prospero values.

Where Ferdinand gains depth is in the chess scene of Act 5. Miranda accuses him of playing false, and he denies it — "No, my dear'st love, / I would not for the world" — but Miranda replies, "Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, / And I would call it fair play." The exchange is playful on the surface, but it resonates with the play's larger themes of deception and forgiveness. Miranda is willing to accept Ferdinand's cheating because she loves him. It is a tiny, domestic version of Prospero's choice to forgive Antonio: love that persists despite knowledge of imperfection.

Gonzalo

Gonzalo is the play's moral conscience, and he carries that role with a gentleness that makes the cynics around him look petty. He is the old counsellor who, when Antonio overthrew Prospero, smuggled food, water, and — crucially — Prospero's beloved books into the boat. Without Gonzalo's compassion, Prospero and Miranda would have died at sea. Twelve years later, shipwrecked on Prospero's island, Gonzalo remains the same man: kind, talkative, optimistic to the point of annoyance, and endlessly mocked by Sebastian and Antonio for his good nature.

Detailed Analysis

Gonzalo's utopian speech in Act 2 — his vision of an ideal commonwealth with no commerce, no labor, no sovereignty — is drawn from Montaigne's "Of Cannibals" and reveals both the character's idealism and its limits. He imagines a world without hierarchy while standing in the presence of a king, and Sebastian's taunt ("Yet he would be king on't") exposes the contradiction. But Shakespeare gives Gonzalo's vision genuine eloquence, and the fact that the two men mocking it are currently plotting regicide puts their cynicism in perspective. Gonzalo's ideas may be impractical, but the men who dismiss them are murderous.

Prospero's tribute to Gonzalo in Act 5 — "Holy Gonzalo, honourable man, / Mine eyes, even sociable to the show of thine, / Fall fellowly drops" — is the play's most emotionally direct moment between two adult men. Prospero weeps alongside Gonzalo, and the tears are not magical but human. Gonzalo is also the character who provides the play's thematic summary: "Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue / Should become kings of Naples? O, rejoice / Beyond a common joy!" He frames the play's painful history as a providential narrative — suffering that produced a greater good. Whether the play fully endorses this optimistic reading or merely allows Gonzalo to voice it is one of its lasting ambiguities.

Antonio

Antonio is the play's villain, but Shakespeare gives him almost nothing to explain himself with. He overthrew his brother, conspired with a foreign king, and set his niece adrift to die — and when the play offers him a chance to repent, he says nothing. His silence in Act 5, when Prospero forgives him, is the play's most provocative gap. Every other character receives some form of resolution. Antonio receives forgiveness and gives back nothing.

Detailed Analysis

Antonio's most revealing scene is his temptation of Sebastian in Act 2. The language he uses is precise, pragmatic, and entirely devoid of moral hesitation. When Sebastian asks about conscience, Antonio replies: "Ay, sir; where lies that? if 'twere a kibe, / 'Twould put me to my slipper: but I feel not / This deity in my bosom." Conscience, for Antonio, is not a moral category but a physical sensation — and he does not feel it. He frames the proposed murder as a simple transaction: kill Alonso, and Sebastian becomes king of Naples; kill Gonzalo, and no one will object.

What distinguishes Antonio from Shakespeare's other villains is his ordinariness. He has none of Richard III's theatrical self-awareness, none of Iago's intellectual sadism, none of Macbeth's tortured conscience. He usurped a dukedom because he could, and he would help Sebastian usurp a kingdom for the same reason. His final silence — no repentance, no defiance, just absence — suggests a character for whom moral categories simply do not apply. The play's vision of forgiveness is tested most severely by Antonio, because he is the one character who neither seeks it nor acknowledges it.