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Ariel reports back to Prospero on the success of the storm

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"Prospero controls the destiny of other characters."

"Prospero takes pleasure in Ariel's successes"

"Only Caliban's body is enslaved"

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He is the protagonist of the play.

His absolute power over the other characters and his overwrought speeches make him difficult to like.

Prospero could be understood to be a parable of European colonist in the New world.

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Shakespeare, as member of the higher classes, believed that colonization could be necessary, but as a civilized man, he did agree that some of the colonization techniques had gone too far and could be rather negative for the colonized, who at the end of the day, where still human.

Shakespeare explores themes of colonization through characters such as Trinculo and Stephano.

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“There’s no man or race not considered barbarous with respect to some other man or race.”

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Prospero's epilogue could be seen as Shakespeare's final goodbye. "And my ending is despair, unless I be reliev'd by prayer" and "Let your indulgence set me free"

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“Prospero is the director and his subjects are actors”

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“Stephano, Trinculo and the plot to murder Prospero are vital parts of the dark underworld of the play”

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'Do you love me'

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Shakespeare's last full play

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Prospero positively educated Miranda
Caliban is negatively educated by Prospero

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"You taught me language and my profit on't is I know how to curse"

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“My library was dukedom large enough.

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"My Ariel" "My Chick"

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"Good wombs have born bad sons"

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Shakespeare included Ariel to most likely appel to King James I as he was a highly superstitious

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Explores the complex and problematic relationship between the European colonizer and the native colonized people through the relationship of Prospero and Caliban.

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Prospero feels he must establish justice, mainly for himself, and he feels people must be punished for their misdeeds.

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"This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" - Act 5, Scene 1

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"The red plague rid you"

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"Rotten carcass of a butt" - Prospero describing how himself and Miranda were treated.

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Miranda was an unusual character for the time as she was educated and had some social standing. In Elizabethan society many women did not have a high social standing and all their power came from men.

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Littler's 2021 Production at The Jermyn Street Theatre Review

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Littler's 2021 Production at The Jermyn Street Theatre Review

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The Tempest review – Michael Pennington’s mighty magician lends spark

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Pennington plays Prospero in Tom Littler’s production, with a bewitching, naughty Ariel in Whitney Kehinde

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Miranda is viewed as a strong, independent women who chooses her relationships (proposes to Ferdinand)
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Mirrors Prospero's dialogue (condemns Caliban.)
Miranda employs clever constructions to hide a powerful demand in the guise of powerless femininity. Miranda takes the traditionally male role and asks Ferdinand to marry her.

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Prospero and Miranda are forced to live in exile on a remote island

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"Thou didst smile, infused with a fortitude from heaven" - Praising Miranda's beauty and perfection that gave him strength and hope.

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Ariel portrayed holding a model of a boat when causing the tempest at the beginning of the play.
Prospero reads from his magic books throughout the performance showing his attachment to his magic and his total control over the other characters.

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He is a monster who tried to rape Miranda and is therefore deserving of mistreatment.
OR
He is someone who has been colonialised and marginalised as a result of his difference. The island belongs to him because he was there first.

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Ariel - The Globe Theatre's 2013 Production

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Ariel - The Globe Theatre's 2013 Production

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Played as both a female and a male or sometimes, neither.

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During the Jacobean reign, feudalist society relied on power and the obedience between masters and servants, imperialism was expanding this power to new colonies across the globe.

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Staging Past Productions of 'The Tempest'

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Staging Past Productions of 'The Tempest'

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Pick one of these moments, settings or relationships from The Tempest to investigate how they have been staged in performance.

As you explore you will find picture galleries from past productions and things to consider as you look at these.

The following activity will help students to think about interpretive choices and how they might stage the opening scene and the set up on the island.
Staging the Opening Scene (2016)
The activity can be found on page 5 and takes approximately 30 minutes.
Arriving on the Island (2011)
The activity can be found on page 8 and can also be developed into the following activity creating puppets for one or more of the characters and designing and making these for performance.

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Investigate Past Productions of The Tempest | Shakespeare Learning Zone | Royal Shakespeare Company

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Pick one of these moments, settings or relationships from The Tempest to investigate how they have been staged in performance. As you explore you will find picture galleries from past productions and things to consider as you look at these.

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Miramax's 2010 Film Adaptation of 'The Tempest'

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Miramax's 2010 Film Adaptation of 'The Tempest'

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Prospero played by a woman

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Sycorax’s island could be seen as a representation of America, which suffered the same impositions than the island did. America was founded in 1492.

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Has unrealistic expectations of society and represents communism to a degree. (Good in concept, unrealistic in reality.) - He talks of a leaderless world where he is the King which is quite ironic.

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"All the venom on Prospero's island is secreted by men"

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Martin Butler shows how Renaissance travel, trade and colonisation shaped the portrayal of Caliban and the Italians in The Tempest.

The Tempest is Shakespeare 's travel drama, a play responding to the enlarged geographical and mental horizons created by European exploration into distant places. It stages the disconcerting effects of surprise and estrangement provoked by the burgeoning literature of global discovery, with its reports of new and wonderful lands. Set on an island lying somewhere between North Africa and Italy, the play's action takes place amidst the increasingly busy shipping lanes which criss-crossed the Mediterranean, through which exotic goods from Asia and the Middle East were pouring into Europe. The North African ports mentioned in the dialogue, Tunis and Algiers (2.1.72, 1.2.265), were places where European traders encountered representatives of other nations and felt the disturbance involved in crossing cultural divides. When Trinculo and Antonio meet Caliban, they react like profit-hungry merchants, weighing up his value as a commodity, a 'strange fish' that would be 'marketable' at home (2.2.27, 5.1.266). But other characters respond to the island with astonishment, experiencing its marvels as a challenge to their inbuilt habits and assumptions. The island makes them confront the way they live as if from an alien perspective, reappraising the familiar from the standpoint of the world's margins.

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Trans-Atlantic discovery: 'O brave new world'

Shakespeare's perspective in The Tempest stretches far beyond the Mediterranean, for his imagination was caught by stories of trans-Atlantic discovery. The 'nimble marmoset' (2.2.170) which inhabits the island is one of those creatures brought back to Europe by Portuguese explorers in South America. Caliban's name suggests 'cannibal', a practice found amongst the native peoples discovered in Brazil, and depicted in gruesome images by the Belgian artist Theodor de Bry. Caliban's mother worships a Patagonian god called Setebos (1.2.373), a deity that Shakespeare found in the account of Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe anthologised in Richard Eden's travel collection, Decades of the New World or West India (1555). When Gonzalo muses about making 'plantation' of the island (2.1.144), he is using language associated with the English colonial settlements in Virginia, and Ariel remembers fetching dew 'from the still-vexed Bermudas' (1.2.229), stormy islands which lay en route to the new English colony at Jamestown. Fittingly, Miranda's naïve but resonant phrase, 'O brave new world' (5.1.183), has come to symbolise the mix of promises and disappointments in Europe's discovery of the Americas. Ironically, however, she is not addressing persons from the New World but from the Old, the Europeans that she has never previously met. Shakespeare upsets our assumptions by presenting the colonial encounter as if from the point of view of the soon-to-be disenchanted native. ''Tis new to thee', Prospero wearily replies.

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Shipwreck

One recent incident associated with Virginia probably provided the impetus for the plot, for in 1609 an English fleet heading there was caught in a three-day tempest and broken up. A report by the colonist William Strachey (not printed until 1625, but accessible to Shakespeare in manuscript) describes how his ship, the Sea Venture, was overwhelmed by the storm. He recounts the mariners' helplessness and terror, and notes the seemingly supernatural phenomenon of St Elmo's fire - which, in the play, Ariel imitates by running along the masts in the form of a flame (1.2.196-201). Eventually the colonists were cast ashore in the Bermudas, uninhabited islands reputed to be the home of devils but which turned out to be unexpectedly hospitable. With his narrative see-sawing between moments of desperate catastrophe and miraculous redemption, Strachey presents these events as mysteriously determined by Providence: 'It pleased our merciful God', he says, 'to make even this hideous and hated place both the place of our safety and means of our deliverance'. Shakespeare's characters are similarly haunted by a sense of supernatural forces over which they have no control, though spectators of the play have a different view, as we can see that much of the mystery is created not by God's hand but by Prospero's.

Strachey's 'A true reportory of the wreck' in Bermuda

William Strachey's dramatic account of a shipwreck off Bermuda in 1609 was probably a source for Shakespeare's play, The Tempest.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Coloured engravings of Native Americans and Picts bound with Strachey's New World 'Dictionary' and 'History'

William Strachey wrote a manuscript account of colonial life in Virginia and a dictionary of the indigenous Powhatan language. It is bound with hand-coloured versions of de Bry's engravings of Virginians.

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Caliban

The issues raised by global discovery are brought into focus in the relationship between Prospero and Caliban, the European intellectual and his 'savage' foster-child ('savage' being Miranda's word for him: 1.2.355). The representation of Caliban raises difficult questions about how members of colonised cultures are perceived by those who find them, and on what basis a colonising culture justifies wielding power over them. Shakespeare is careful to leave Caliban's appearance and origins enigmatic. Prospero says he is the child of an Algerian witch and the devil, but we never learn quite what he looks like or where he comes from, and he cannot easily be pigeonholed. Although the play does not associate him directly with the New World, the combination of fear and fascination which he inspires echoes at a distance the public reaction to the trickle of American natives being brought to Europe as curiosities - the most famous being Pocahontas, who married an Englishman and arrived in London with a dozen fellow Algonquians in 1616. Caliban's fishy smell perhaps links him with the Inuit brought back from Baffin Island by Martin Frobisher in 1577, whose clothes were made of sealskin. Other figures he recalls include the native peoples of Roanoke painted by the colonist John White in 1585, and engraved by Theodor de Bry for the second edition of Thomas Hariot's A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590). For the play's Europeans, Caliban's determining factor is his strangeness, which they take as a licence to treat him as little more than an animal. But by foregrounding his category-defying identity, the play forces us to reflect on where, and to what effect, the imagined boundary line between human and non-human is being drawn.

Paintings of London in the friendship album of Michael van Meer, c. 1614-1615

A small number of Native Americans were brought to England by explorers and exhibited as curiosities. This miniature painting shows a Virginian man in St James's Park, c. 1614-15.

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Montaigne

The most influential response to New World visitors came from the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who saw Tupinamba Indians from Brazil at Rouen in 1562. This encounter inspired his essay 'Of the Cannibals', which Shakespeare read in John Florio's English translation (1603). For Montaigne, the strangeness of the Tupinamba did not confirm the supposed superiority of European culture but called it into question. Far from seeming savage, they struck him as dignified and intelligent. He was impressed that they had their own customs, language and even poetry, and he admired the harmonious natural simplicity of their lives, which (he thought) put to shame the false sophistication of contemporary Europe, torn apart as it was by violence and greed. Montaigne came to suppose that the Tupinamba retained a state of Edenic plainness which Europe had lost: 'We have so much by our inventions surcharged the beauties and riches of [Nature's] works, that we have altogether over-choked her; yet wherever her purity shineth, she makes our vain and frivolous enterprises wonderfully ashamed'. Shakespeare ventriloquises similar sentiments, with direct echoes from Montaigne, when he has Gonzalo speculate about how he might create a perfect state on the island, free from the corruptions of 'civilised' society (2.1.144-69). Of course, to the other courtiers Gonzalo's ideas seem sentimental and unrealistic, and, crucially, Caliban, for all his delight in music, is no noble savage. However, the Europeans' repulsive behaviour, their ambition, conspiracy, drunkenness and exploitation of others, prevents us from taking for granted the idea that they have a God-given superiority to the 'native'.

Montaigne's Essays translated by Florio

Gonzalo's speech has clear echoes of Michel de Montaigne's essay 'Of the Cannibals', first translated into English by John Florio in 1603.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Prospero

Against this, Prospero's claims to rule the island rest on his cultural advantage, the intellectual and moral pre-eminence which underwrites his authority. Being a learned European, he has a civility which automatically subordinates Caliban, who can see how much Prospero's supremacy depends on his knowledge: 'Burn but his books', he urges Stephano (3.2.95). The play's shorthand for Prospero's pre-eminence is his 'Art', the magic which gives him ideological heft and practical power. Prospero is a 'magus' - that is, a wise man expert in the most esoteric forms of learning, often of a hermetic or obscurely philosophical cast. The famous English magus was John Dee (1527-1609), an astronomer, mathematician and astrologer who was renowned for his scientific and technological skill. Dee was an early advocate for overseas exploration, and his General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation (1577) is the first printed book to imagine the idea of a 'British empire' - something that would have seemed fanciful to most readers at the time, given how undeveloped England's overseas trade still was. Dee's scientific interests also extended into occult fields, such as alchemy and angelology, for he believed the pursuit of knowledge should encompass the supernatural as well as natural sphere. He practised divination with spirits, by 'scrying' or gazing into an obsidian disk (probably a trophy brought back to Europe from Mexico), and he had magic seals of wax through which he tried to communicate with the archangels Michael and Uriel. Dee's varied interests demonstrate how porous the borderline was at this time between science and magic, and suggest the anxieties that modern technological advances could provoke amongst those who feared and misunderstood them. A more negative image of a scientist/conjurer rather like him can be seen in Christopher Marlowe's tragedy Doctor Faustus, in which the title-character's knowledge and pride lead him to dabble with devils. Interestingly, the names Prospero and Faustus both mean the same thing: 'fortunate'.

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Prospero's magic raises questions about his intentions and power, but what it particularly does to the play's design is prevent us from taking anything for the reality that it purports to be. The double vision that it creates is evident from the spectacularly deceitful opening. The storm scene does all it can to promote an impression of realism. No other play begins with quite such a coup de théâtre, plunging us without preparation into violent action which is at once pitiful and terrifying. The emphasis is on authenticity and believability. Shakespeare ransacked the glossaries of seamanship to ensure that his sailors spoke the language of nautical life and that the events seemed technically convincing. Yet within an instant the weather clears and it becomes evident that all this menace has been merely an illusion. After this opening, in which apparently tragic circumstances turn out to be a magician's charm, we can never be quite sure where the reality ends and theatre begins. It makes the whole play provisional, an act of imaginative collusion, in which whatever resolutions are achieved will always be understood on one level as effects of art.

The masque

Prospero's claim to the island may be problematic, but his magic echoes at one remove the technological advantages that Europeans took to the New World. It evokes the compasses, navigational tools and gunpowder that helped them to conquer. On another level, it gestures towards the utopian idea of the philosopher-king, who aspired to make his court a centre of learning and a beacon of culture. The play's projection of this is yet another species of wonder: the masque in Act 4. Here Prospero conjures up a marvellous operatic festival of the kind that was frequently performed at the contemporary English court, with song and dance, performers dressed as deities, magnificent costumes and stage wizardry such as flying effects or sudden magical transformations. Such masques, danced by courtiers in honour of the prince, were home-grown examples of the political power of wonder, adapting modern technology to celebrate the dignity of the state. Masques publicised the court's claims to civility, its wealth, learning and pomp, and they underwrote the power of monarchy by projecting the illusion of a world under perfect sovereign control. But in The Tempest, the world beyond bites back: Prospero suddenly plunges into anxiety, the masque is cut off, and his family is left troubled at this unexpected turn of events. In the famous set-piece speech, 'Our revels now are ended' (4.1.166), Prospero reflects on the limits of his art and the evanescence of the world of power over which he presides. In the final act, he will abjure his magic, resume normal clothes, and go back to life as an ordinary man in Milan, where 'every third thought shall be my grave' (5.1.312). The world to which he returns is stripped of its illusions, and is a less magical place. Nonetheless, he and everyone else are changed, their identities enlarged by their temporary exposure to wonder.

Written by Martin Butler

Martin Butler is Professor of English Renaissance Drama at the University of Leeds. He has edited The Tempest for the Penguin Shakespeare (2007).

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the tempest and the wonder of literature

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The Tempest and the literature of wonder

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Martin Butler shows how Renaissance travel, trade and colonisation shaped the portrayal of Caliban and the Italians in The Tempest. The Tempest is Shakespeare 's travel drama, a play responding to the enlarged geographical and mental horizons created by European exploration into distant places.

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"Prospero is a controller and manipulator"

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"The Tempest is about moral and social order in human society"

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"The Tempest is Miranda’s coming of age ritual, begins with the revelation of her true identity and ends with her betrothal."

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"It's a tempest of the mind"

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'The Tempest' conjures up the spirt of European colonisation

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"Caliban, initially branded as the ultimate Evil other, is acknowledged as part of Prospero's own identity"

"Prospero's' noble rational magic, is contrasted to the black sorcery practiced by Sycorax"

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“It was his primitive instinct to populate the island, Prospero is responsible for not being aware of this risk.”

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A spirit who 'works' for Prospero, he found Ariel trapped in a cloven pine tree and freed the spirit. In return for freedom Ariel promised to serve Prospero for a year, however, we don't know how long Ariel has already worked for Prospero but we know they are asking for freedom. Prospero leans on Ariel for their magic and without them the tempest wouldn't have happened.

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AS and A Level - English Literature - H072, H472 (from 2015) - OCR

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OCR AS and A Level English Literature (from 2015) qualification information including specification, exam materials, teaching resources, learning resources

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there's a power struggle throughout, after the storm the power dynamic is thrown into disorganisation. all of the characters have a want for power which is what lead to the tempest in the first place when antionos want for power lead to him banishing his brother. another example is Miranda and her father and how she wants to be let free to live her life and gain her power over herself back however Prospero manipulates her into staying submissive. Caliban also wants his power back and be free from Prospero's control however Prospero is unwilling to give it to him leading Caliban to rebel

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The dynamic between characters such as Caliban and Ariel with Prospero. This is usually a negative theme as it can include the abuse of the servants which is explored through Caliban. On the other hand Ariel has a more positive relationship with Prospero which is shown by their release at the end of the play.

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Whenever people ask me that inevitable question, "Who's your favourite author?" I always say "Shakespeare". There are some good reasons for that. First, so much of what we know about plots, characters, the stage, fairies and inventive swearwords comes from Shakespeare. Second, if you name a living author the other living authors will be mad at you because it isn't them, but Shakespeare is conveniently dead.

Third, Shakespeare refuses to be boxed in. Not only do we know very little about what he really thought, felt and believed, but the plays themselves are elusive. Just when you think you've got a meaning nailed down, your interpretation melts like jelly and you're left scratching your head. Maybe he's deep, very deep. Or maybe he didn't have a continuity editor. And Shakespeare will never turn up on a talkshow and be asked to explain himself, the lucky devil.

Shakespeare is infinitely interpretable. We've had a fascist Richard III, we've had a Canadian First Nations Macbeth, we've had a with a female Prospero called Prospera, starring Helen Mirren. In the 18th century they had a Tempest opera, which used only a third of Shakespeare's original text. Caliban had a sister called Sycorax, Miranda had a sister called Dorinda, and there was an extra young man so Dorinda would have someone to marry.

People have been redoing Shakespeare for a long time, often with odd results. And I too have redone Shakespeare, also with odd results. In honour of his 400th anniversary the Hogarth Shakespeare project has invited a number of authors to choose a play and revisit it in the form of a prose novel. I chose The Tempest. It was my first choice, by miles. Itcontains a great many unanswered questions as well as several very complex characters, and the challenge of trying to answer the questions and tease out the complexities was part of the attraction.

I'd thought about The Tempest before, and written about it as well. In my book about writers and writing - called, oddly enough, On Writers and Writing - there's a chapter on the artist as magician and/or impostor called "Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co". All of these figures are illusionists, as artists are. And illusionists always have a dubious side to them. The Wizard of Oz is only pretending to be a real magician: really he's a fraud. But the magic in The Tempest is real.

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Michael Clark as Caliban in Propero's Books (1991) Photograph: Allstar/Channel 4

It is the story of a magician and former duke of Milan, Prospero, set afloat with his infant daughter Miranda after being deposed in a coup by his treacherous brother Antonio and Alonso, the king of Naples. They land on an island, already inhabited by a savage creature called Caliban, the son of a dead witch, Sycorax, and the air-spirit Ariel, who was imprisoned by Sycorax in a pine tree. Prospero at first befriends Caliban, but when the creature tries to rape Miranda, Prospero enslaves him with the aid of his magic.

When an auspicious star brings Prospero's enemies within his reach 12 years later, he raises an illusory tempest with the aid of Ariel. His enemies, his one-time helper Gonzalo and Ferdinand, son of Alonso, end up on the island and are manipulated in various magical ways by Prospero, with the upshot that Ferdinand and Miranda fall in love and the enemies are entranced, tortured and, at length, forgiven.

Meanwhile, Caliban has joined two lowlifes, Trinculo and Stephano - a drunken butler and a jester - and the three of them plan to murder Prospero, but are punished by Prospero's goblins. At the end, Ariel is set free, everyone sails off to Naples and Prospero steps out of his own play and asks to be released from it: perhaps the most puzzling ending to any Shakespeare play.

In On Writers and Writing, I wrote:

Prospero uses his arts - magic arts, arts of illusion - not just for entertainment, though he does some of that as well, but for the purposes of moral and social improvement.

That being said, it must also be said that Prospero plays God. If you don't happen to agree with him - as Caliban doesn't - you'd call him a tyrant, as Caliban does. With a slight twist, Prospero might be the Grand Inquisitor, torturing people for their own good. You might also call him a usurper - he's stolen the island from Caliban, just as his own brother has stolen the dukedom from him; and you might call him a sorcerer, as Caliban also terms him. We - the audience - are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to see him as a benevolent despot. Or we are inclined most of the time. But Caliban is not without insight.

Add to that the fact that Prospero's loss of his dukedom is largely his own fault - by his own admission, he neglected to take care of his realm, plunging himself into his magic studies instead and delegating his power to Antonio - and we find him altogether an ambiguous gentleman.

I couldn't write it straight - all the islands are now known; Prospero would have been rescued by helicopter

The first thing I did when starting this project was to reread the play. Then I read it again. Then I got my hands on all the films of it that I could find, and watched them. Then I read the play again.

Then came the usual episodes of panic and chaos: why had I foolishly agreed to write a book in this series? Why had I chosen The Tempest? Really it was impossible! What was the modern-day equivalent of a magician marooned on an island for 12 years with a now adolescent daughter? You couldn't write that straight: all the islands are known, there are satellites now, they would have been rescued by a helicopter in no time flat. And what about the flying air spirit? And the Caliban figure?

Calm, calm, I told myself. I read the play again, this time backwards. The last three words Prospero says are "Set me free." But free from what? In what has he been imprisoned?

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Julian Bleach (Ariel) and Patrick Stewart at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-on-Avon (2006)

I started counting up the prisons and imprisonments in the book. There are a lot of them. In fact, every one of the characters is constrained at some point in the play. This was suggestive. The play is about illusions: magic is the only weapon Prospero has. And it is about vengeance versus mercy, as in so many of Shakespeare's plays. But it's also about prisons. So I decided to set my novel in a prison.

Other questions quickly arose. Is Prospero's island magical in itself? How to suggest that quality in a modern novel? Is the island a place of trial? Maybe both.

And the characters: is Prospero wise and kind, or a tetchy old crank? Is Miranda sweet and pure, or a more savvy, tougher girl who knows about wombs and abuses and vilifies Caliban? Is Caliban himself the Freudian id? Is he Natural Man? Is he a victim of colonial oppression, as he is frequently played these days? But what about his rapist tendencies? Is he bad by nature? Is he Prospero's dark shadow? What does Prospero mean when he says of Caliban, at the end of the play, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine?" And by the way, who is Caliban's father?

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Is she sweet or savvy? ... Miranda by John William Waterhouse Photograph: Alamy

The Tempest is also a musical: it has more songs and dances and music in it than any other Shakespeare play. The main musician is Ariel, but Caliban also has musical talents. So I incorporated a lot of song and dance numbers in the novel.

But above all, The Tempest is a play about a producer/director/playwright putting on a play - namely, the action that takes place on the island, complete with special effects - that contains another play, the masque of the goddesses. Of all Shakespeare's plays, this one is most obviously about plays, directing and acting.

How to do justice to all these elements in a modern novel? It was a huge challenge.

I called my novel Hag-Seed, which is one of the names used by Prospero when he is railing at Caliban, and Caliban is cursing him right back. Why name it after Caliban rather than Prospero? I won't tell you that in advance, but there is a reason.

Hag-Seed is set in the year 2013, in Canada, in a region somewhat close to a town where there is an actual Shakespeare festival. It opens with a video of The Tempest that's been made in a prison and is being watched by an unseen audience inside the prison. Act 1, Scene 1 - the actual tempest, with sailors running around and yelling - is in progress on screen, when suddenly there are sounds of a prison riot. Lockdown!

Cut to the backstory. (This is what Shakespeare gives us in Act 1, Scene 2.) Twelve years earlier, Felix Phillips, artistic director of the Makeshiweg theatre festival, was ousted from his position by Tony, his second in command, and Tony's pal Sal O'Nally, a politician. In The Tempest, these characters are dukes and kings, but Canada does not have an overpopulation of those. The nearest equivalent to courtiers and influence-peddling and backroom deals is to be found in the world of federal politics.

My Prospero has the aid of a young computer hacker: after all, what is Ariel but a special effects man?

Felix has been living in exile in a countryside shanty built into a hillside by 19th-century settlers - the closest I could get to Prospero's "cave" or "cell" - modelled, incidentally, on a real shanty I know quite well. Shakespeare does not provide Prospero with an outhouse, but I've taken care of that for Felix.

In isolation, one can hear voices. Felix has come to half-believe that the spirit of his only beloved child, Miranda - who died at the age of three - is with him, and is now 15. To ease his solitude, he's taken a position as a drama teacher at the Fletcher Correctional Institute, and has been putting on Shakespeare plays there. (Similar prison programmes do in fact exist, or have existed, in the UK, US and Italy as well as in Canada.)

When an "auspicious star" - here, a twinkly female character called Estelle, who has a lot of influence - brings Felix's enemies within his reach, he stages The Tempest in his prison, thereby hoping to entrap them, enchant them, and get both his revenge and his old position back. He has the aid of a young hacker inmate, who uses digital technology to great effect: what is Ariel to Prospero but an extremely efficient special-effects man, especially good with virtual thunder and lightning, not to mention musical accompaniments? Since no prisoner wants to play a girl, Felix hires a female actor to play the part of Miranda. Meanwhile, the spirit-girl Miranda, fascinated with the play, decides to ... but no spoilers!

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Ben Whishaw as Ariel in the 2010 film (2010). Photograph: Alamy

As with The Tempest, at the end the action is projected into the future, as the inmate student actors submit their reports about what they think will happen to the main characters once they're aboard the ship to Naples. Hint: it's not all good. One of the questions that's bothered me about The Tempest: why would Prospero, having been betrayed by his evil brother once - an evil brother who does not repent, even when he's been forgiven - throw away his magic weapons and then climb onboard a ship with that very same evil brother? What might happen then?

Writing Hag-Seed was strangely invigorating, and also very informative. I now know what a pignut is: not a peanut, as I'd previously thought, but a vegetable with nodules on the underground stem. And, in a blinding flash of light, I discovered the answer to something that's always bothered me. Why do Trinculo and Stephano go on and on about Caliban smelling like a fish? Are they just being bullies? No, came the shattering insight! Caliban smells like a fish because he's the one who catches the fish for Prospero and Miranda. That's what they've been eating for 12 years: fish, pignuts, and scamels, whatever they are. No bread, no butter, no pepper. And no wine - that's why Caliban falls victim to the demon drink the first time he encounters it.

Oh, and marmosets. And jays' nests. It's basic. No wonder Prospero is in such a mad hurry to get back to Milan.

is published on 6 October by Hogarth. Margaret Atwood will take part in a number of events across the UK from 6 October starting with the Southbank Centre's London literature festival. margaretatwood.ca/events or penguin.co.uk.
Topics

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A perfect storm: Margaret Atwood on rewriting Shakespeare's Tempest

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Whenever people ask me that inevitable question, "Who's your favourite author?" I always say "Shakespeare". There are some good reasons for that. First, so much of what we know about plots, characters, the stage, fairies and inventive swearwords comes from Shakespeare.

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Miss Anstey if you do not revise

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a soliloquy is a speech made by a character that isnt heard by other characters. This creates a sense of dramatic irony as the audience knows something the characters dont

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a monologue is a long speech made by a character with a function of telling the audience a little secret about themselves

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music in the tempest follows characters around and leads characters places, this shows a sense of magic in 'The Tempest'

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an epilogue is speech made at the end of the play. In the case of 'The Tempest' it was Prospero reflecting on his life through shakespeares pen

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an antimasque is the opposite of a masque and it shows all the grotesque stuff with all the gross people
defined as
Spectacle of disorder

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There is the use of figurative language

incorporating nature images, which is in keeping

with the island setting of the play.

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prospero in his speedo ;)

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Ariel says he thinks Prospero would feel sorry for the nobles if he saw how much they were suffering because of what he has done to them. When he adds ‘Mine would, sir, were I human’, this seems to make Prospero think about what he is doing. Prospero feels he should behave in a more human and humane way than Ariel who is just a 'spirit'.