"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

Speaker: Ferdinand (Act 1, Scene 2)

Ferdinand shouts this as he leaps from the burning ship during the tempest. He believes the ship is on fire (it is — Ariel set the flames) and that the world has turned demonic. In context, it is a cry of pure terror from a young prince who thinks he is about to die. Out of context, it has become one of Shakespeare's most widely quoted lines, repurposed for everything from political commentary to bumper stickers.

Detailed Analysis

The line gains its resonance from dramatic irony. Ferdinand does not know the "devils" are Ariel and his fellow spirits, performing exactly as Prospero instructed. The fires are theatrical — terrifying but harmless. "Not a hair perish'd," Ariel reports afterward. Shakespeare stages apocalypse and then reveals it as a special effect. This pattern — overwhelming experience followed by the disclosure that it was manufactured — repeats throughout the play and raises the question of whether manufactured experiences are less real for being controlled. Ferdinand's terror is genuine even though its cause is artificial. The line also foreshadows the play's recurring interest in the relationship between seeming and being: on Prospero's island, what appears to be damnation is actually the beginning of restoration.

"You taught me language; and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse."

Speaker: Caliban (Act 1, Scene 2)

Caliban hurls this at Prospero (or Miranda, depending on the textual edition) during their first confrontation. Prospero's party taught Caliban to speak, and Caliban uses that gift to articulate his hatred of them. The line is compressed and savage — two sentences that contain an entire argument about the politics of language, education, and colonialism.

Detailed Analysis

This is the single most discussed line in post-colonial readings of The Tempest. The logic is devastating: Caliban was given language as an act of supposed benevolence, but the primary use he has found for it is to curse his educators. The gift was not neutral. Language came with the colonizer's worldview, the colonizer's names for things (Prospero taught Caliban "how / To name the bigger light, and how the less"), and the colonizer's authority structure. Caliban's cursing is not ingratitude — it is the only form of resistance available to someone whose tools of expression were forged by his oppressor. The line anticipates arguments that post-colonial theorists would not articulate for another three centuries: that colonial education is itself a form of violence, reshaping the colonized subject's consciousness in the colonizer's image while calling this reshaping a gift.

"Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not."

Speaker: Caliban (Act 3, Scene 2)

Caliban speaks these lines to reassure Stephano and Trinculo, who are frightened by Ariel's invisible music. What follows is one of the most beautiful speeches in Shakespeare: Caliban describes hearing "a thousand twangling instruments" humming about his ears, voices that make him sleep and dream of riches dropping from the clouds, and waking to cry because the dream is over. It comes from the character the play identifies as a "savage and deformed slave."

Detailed Analysis

The speech is remarkable because it reveals a Caliban the rest of the play keeps hidden. The creature who curses, plots murder, and tries to assault Miranda is also capable of an aesthetic sensitivity that exceeds anything the play's Europeans express. Ferdinand calls the island's music beautiful; Caliban describes it as a lived experience of transcendence. The speech's emotional structure — delight, sleep, dreaming, waking loss — mirrors the play's larger arc: beauty is temporary, and its disappearance causes grief. "I cried to dream again" anticipates Prospero's "Our revels now are ended" in miniature. Both speeches describe the pain of returning from illusion to reality.

The placement matters too. Caliban delivers this lyrical vision while in the middle of recruiting two drunks to commit murder. Shakespeare refuses to let the beauty erase the brutality, or the brutality erase the beauty. Caliban contains both, and the play insists that we hold both simultaneously.

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air."

Speaker: Prospero (Act 4, Scene 1)

Prospero speaks these lines after abruptly ending the goddess masque, having remembered Caliban's assassination plot. He begins by explaining that the spirits who performed the masque have vanished, then expands the observation into a meditation on impermanence that encompasses all of physical reality. The speech ends: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."

Detailed Analysis

This is the speech most often cited as Shakespeare's farewell to the theatre, and the autobiographical reading has some basis — "the great globe itself" may pun on the Globe Theatre, and a retiring playwright describing his art as a dissolving vision has obvious resonance. But the speech works independently of any biographical context. Its intellectual movement — from theatrical illusion to architectural impermanence to cosmic dissolution — is a process of relentless expansion. Each new image raises the scale: spirits become towers become palaces become temples become the planet itself. And each dissolves.

"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on" is the speech's conceptual core, and it is often misquoted as "made of" rather than "made on." The preposition matters. "Made on" suggests dreams are the material from which we are constructed — not that we dream, but that we are dreamed. "Our little life / Is rounded with a sleep" reinforces this: birth and death are both forms of unconsciousness, and what happens between them has the substance of a dream. The speech is melancholy but not despairing. There is a kind of peace in the recognition that permanence was never available — that the "baseless fabric" was baseless from the start.

"The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance."

Speaker: Prospero (Act 5, Scene 1)

Prospero speaks this line at the play's moral turning point. Ariel has just told him that the imprisoned courtiers are suffering, and that a human being would pity them. Prospero, who has spent twelve years planning revenge, pauses — and chooses mercy instead. The line is his justification: virtue (moral goodness) is a "rarer" — more unusual, more valuable, more difficult — action than vengeance.

Detailed Analysis

The word "rarer" does triple work. It means more uncommon — most people in Prospero's position would choose revenge. It means more valuable — mercy is worth more than punishment. And it means more extraordinary — choosing forgiveness when you have the power to destroy requires a greater exertion of will than simply destroying. Prospero is not claiming that forgiveness is easy or natural. He is claiming it is better precisely because it is hard.

The line also marks a break from the play's governing metaphor. For four acts, Prospero has been the author of events — the playwright-magician who controls the plot. Vengeance would be the logical climax of that authorial control. Forgiveness disrupts the narrative Prospero has been writing. It is the one action in the play that is not part of his original plan, and it arrives because a non-human spirit modeled the response that Prospero, absorbed in his own power, nearly missed. The rarer action, it turns out, is also the less scripted one.

"O brave new world, / That has such people in't!"

Speaker: Miranda (Act 5, Scene 1)

Miranda says this upon seeing the assembled court for the first time — Ferdinand's father, the treacherous Antonio, the drunken Stephano, and the rest. She has lived her entire conscious life on an island with only her father and Caliban for company. The sight of a dozen new faces fills her with wonder. Prospero's reply is four words: "'Tis new to thee."

Detailed Analysis

Aldous Huxley borrowed this line for the title of his 1932 dystopian novel, and the ironic reversal he perceived is already present in Shakespeare. Miranda's "brave new world" contains the men who tried to murder her father, a pair of unrepentant conspirators, and a group of servants who just failed at an assassination attempt. Her wonder is founded on ignorance — she has no framework for recognizing villainy because she has encountered so little of it. Prospero's reply is devastating in its restraint. He does not correct her or warn her. He simply notes that her experience is limited.

The line captures something essential about the play's emotional texture. The Tempest refuses to choose between innocence and experience, wonder and disillusionment. Miranda's response is not wrong — the world is new to her, and that newness is genuine. Prospero's response is not cynical — he is not mocking her but acknowledging a truth she will eventually learn. The play holds both positions simultaneously, and the tension between them is the source of its bittersweet ending. The new world is both brave and terrible, and knowing which it is depends entirely on how much you have seen.

"This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine."

Speaker: Prospero (Act 5, Scene 1)

Prospero says this about Caliban when the plot's conspirators are brought before the assembled company. On the surface, it is a claim of ownership — this is my slave. But the phrase "thing of darkness" and the verb "acknowledge" carry weight that exceeds the immediate situation. To acknowledge something as yours is not the same as claiming property; it implies recognition, responsibility, and perhaps confession.

Detailed Analysis

The line has generated more critical debate per word than almost any other in the play. Read as ownership, it is Prospero at his most colonial — claiming a person as a possession. Read as responsibility, it is Prospero admitting that Caliban's condition is partly his creation — that the "thing of darkness" was produced by the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Read psychologically, it is Prospero confronting his own shadow — the darkness within himself that he has projected onto Caliban throughout the play. Prospero's anger, his desire for control, his capacity for cruelty: these are his own qualities, and Caliban is the mirror that reflects them.

The ambiguity is productive rather than evasive. Shakespeare gives Prospero a line that means all of these things at once, and the play does not narrow it to a single interpretation. What is certain is that the line marks a change. For the rest of the play, Prospero has referred to Caliban as "slave," "tortoise," "earth," "hag-seed." Here, for the first time, he uses a possessive that sounds like acceptance rather than domination. Whether that acceptance is genuine or performative — a public gesture before the assembled court — is left for each production, and each reader, to decide.

"Now my charms are all o'erthrown, / And what strength I have's mine own, / Which is most faint."

Speaker: Prospero (Epilogue)

The play's final speech, addressed directly to the audience. Prospero's magic is gone. His spirits are dismissed. He stands on a bare stage with nothing but his own human weakness and asks the audience to release him with applause. "Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails, / Which was to please."

Detailed Analysis

The Epilogue breaks the fourth wall completely, collapsing the distinction between character and actor, island and theatre. Prospero's "project" — which throughout the play meant his plan to restore his dukedom — becomes the playwright's project: entertaining an audience. The rhyming couplets give the speech a ceremonial quality, as if closing a ritual. And the final request — "As you from crimes would pardon'd be, / Let your indulgence set me free" — frames the audience's applause as an act of mercy. The word "indulgence" carries both its theatrical meaning (approval) and its religious one (forgiveness of sins), linking the play's themes of art and forgiveness one last time.

The speech is also startlingly vulnerable for a character who has controlled everything. "What strength I have's mine own, / Which is most faint" — Prospero without his magic is an old man with a tired body and a wish to go home. The grandeur is gone. What remains is need: the need to be released, to be forgiven, to be allowed to leave. It is a fitting end for a play about the limits of power, and it leaves the audience — not the magician — with the final act of authority.