The Tempest

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, written about 1610 to 1611 and counted among the last he wrote alone. The King's Men performed it before James I and the court at Whitehall Palace on November 1, 1611, the night of Hallowmas. It was printed in 1623 as the first play in the First Folio.^[1]

Twelve years before the action, Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, was overthrown by his brother Antonio with the help of Alonso, King of Naples, and put to sea with his infant daughter, Miranda. They came to an island, where Prospero made the spirit Ariel his servant and forced Caliban, the island's only native, to work for him. The play opens with a storm that Prospero raises to wreck a ship carrying Alonso, Antonio, Alonso's son Ferdinand and their companions home from Tunis, where Alonso's daughter Claribel has just been married. Ferdinand and Miranda fall in love under Prospero's eye. Caliban and two drunken sailors, Trinculo and Stephano, plot against Prospero, and Antonio and Alonso's brother Sebastian plot to kill Alonso; Prospero and Ariel defeat both conspiracies. In the last act Prospero forgives his enemies, regains his dukedom and frees Ariel, and in the epilogue he asks the audience to release him with their applause.^[1]

The shipwreck draws on William Strachey's account of the wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda in 1609, which was written in 1610 and published in 1625. Gonzalo's picture of an ideal commonwealth follows Montaigne's essay "Of the Canibales" in John Florio's translation of 1603, and Prospero's farewell to magic echoes the invocation of the sorceress Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses.^[1]

In Act 4, scene 1, Prospero is entertaining Ferdinand and Miranda with a masque of spirits when he remembers the conspiracy of Caliban and his companions, and the spirits vanish. He tells the young couple that the actors "were all spirits" and have melted into air. He goes on: "the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve", and leave "not a rack behind". "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."

Most of the action takes place on the island, which is full of sound. Ariel leads Ferdinand through the trees with song, telling him that his drowned father lies "Full fathom five". Caliban, to whom Prospero and Miranda taught language, tells his fellow conspirators that "the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not."

John Dryden and William Davenant rewrote the play as The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island, which opened at the Duke's Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields on November 7, 1667. They gave Prospero a second daughter, Dorinda, and added Hippolito, a young man who has never seen a woman, as a counterpart to Miranda, who has never seen a man.^[2] Thomas Adès composed an opera of the play in 2004.^[1] Miranda's last speech, "O brave new world / That has such people in't!", gave Aldous Huxley the title of his novel of 1932. Most of the moons of Uranus are named for characters in Shakespeare's plays, and Miranda, Caliban, Sycorax and Prospero are among those taken from this one.^[3]

The essay that introduces Epic Quest Bio asks its readers to look past its author's credentials: "Name-dropping makes Kemmishtree sad. Never mind the impressive people I've worked with, the august institutions, the cloud capp'd towers."^[4] The last phrase is Prospero's, and the essay does not name the play. In the next sentence the usual signals of rank are said to buzz "like a Harrison Bergeron implant". The essay is by Kent Kemmish, under the handle Kemmishtree.

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