The Tempest: William Shakespeare's enchanted island fantasy set in a sea of ambiguity

A reflection on the play often seen as William Shakespeare's own valedictory message

Tim McMullan as Prospero in Dominic Dromgoole's The Tempest (The globe)

The Tempest is the only Shakespeare play to have become a science fiction movie. It is about evil and forgiveness, nature and sophistication, youth and age, art and life.

It explores, centuries ahead of its time, the moral contradictions of the European colonisation of the New World.

The play was first staged in 1611, five years before Shakespeare’s death and nine years before The Mayflower sailed for America. It was probably the last play that Shakespeare wrote entirely by himself.

When I was 17 years old, The Tempest was one of my A-level set texts. I also studied it at university.

I was charmed and puzzled by it at 17. Nearly half a century later, it seems to me the most perfect and the most tantalising of Shakespeare’s plays. It contains some of his finest poetry:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest also contains one of Shakespeare’s most moving and enigmatic characters. Caliban, the man-monster, is presented as a stupid, treacherous, murderous, would-be child-rapist. And yet he has some of the most lyrically beautiful lines in Shakespeare.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Caliban is the first profound portrait in Western literature of the “native peoples” about to be destroyed, corrupted or civilised by European colonisation. The fact that the portrait is ambiguous – brutal but poetic – should not be a surprise. The play is ambiguous. Can tired, unthinking wickedness be redeemed by youthful, unthinking innocence? Is sophistication preferable to raw instinct or rural simplicity?

Shakespeare asks the questions. He does not provide the answers. The actress Vivien Leigh once said that this was what made Shakespeare so wonderful to act. He leaves so much unsaid.

To appear in a Bernard Shaw play, she said, was like “catching a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one’s place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea – one swims where one wants.”

The Tempest is part King Lear, part Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is the Shakespeare play that comes closest to observing the classical dramatic requirements that events should occur in “real time” and in one place.

The third classical “unity” – consistency of tone and action – is trampled with Shakespearean exuberance.

There is a drunken sub-plot. There are songs and fairies and apparitions and rude words such as “horse-piss”. You will find none of those in Greek or French classical drama.

The action of The Tempest takes place on a small island in the Mediterranean. In the film Forbidden Planet (1956), the island becomes a far-away world in a distant galaxy.

Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan, has become a Gandalf-like sorcerer. He lives with his 15-year-old daughter, Miranda, and his monster-servant, Caliban.

He calls up a storm which maroons on the island a gaggle of courtiers, including the wicked brother who deposed him and the King of Naples, who plotted against him. Everything seems to be moving towards the body-strewn ending of a typical Jacobean revenge tragedy.

Then Prospero suddenly declares that he intends to forgive everyone.

The symbol of the renewal of hope is the instant love of Miranda and Sebastian, the son of the King of Naples.

So the play ends happily. Yes, but with a dark undercurrent of warning.

Miranda, a teenager who has never seen anyone but her father and a monster is delighted when the island is invaded by men.

She says:

O brave new world,

That has such people in ’t!

Prospero knows better. What seems beauteous today can be ugly or wicked tomorrow.

He puts down Miranda with the chilling line: “Tis new to you.”