William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

Shakespeare presents Caliban as a deliberately divided figure: coarse and dangerous in the action of the play, yet dispossessed and even lyrical in his language. This division is the point — the audience is denied the comfort of a simple judgement, and our inherited categories of 'civilised' and 'savage' are quietly unsettled.

At first, Shakespeare invites us to see Caliban as a brute. Prospero calls him a 'poisonous slave' and accuses him of attempting to violate Miranda, and Caliban's own plot — to have Stephano 'brain' Prospero and 'possess his books' — seems to confirm a creature of appetite and violence. By giving Caliban prose in these scenes, alongside the drunken Stephano and Trinculo, Shakespeare aligns him with low comedy and disorder.

Yet Shakespeare complicates this almost immediately. Caliban's claim, 'This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak'st from me', gives the 'slave' a legal vocabulary of inheritance and a genuine grievance: he was 'king' here before Prospero arrived, was at first loved ('Thou strok'st me'), and was then dispossessed. The bitter irony of 'You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse' turns the coloniser's supposed gift into an instrument of resentment. Suddenly the 'monster' has a case.

Most strikingly of all, Shakespeare gives Caliban the most beautiful verse in the play. 'Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not' is tender, musical and sensitive — and it is spoken to two coarse drunkards who understand none of it. The dramatic form itself dignifies Caliban above his 'masters': the savage is the play's true poet.

The effect of this divided presentation is to keep the audience morally uncomfortable. We cannot simply condemn a dispossessed islander who speaks in such verse, nor simply pity a would-be murderer. When Prospero finally says of him, 'this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine', the ambiguity is sealed: Caliban is at once Prospero's responsibility, his shadow, and his victim. Shakespeare presents him not as a monster to be judged but as a question to be sat with.

This short exchange crystallises the whole relationship between Ariel and Prospero: a bond of service shot through with the longing for freedom. Shakespeare uses tone, brevity and the imagery of labour to present Ariel as willing yet impatient, and Prospero as a master whose generosity is inseparable from his control.

Ariel's opening question, 'Is there more toil?', strikes a note of weary exasperation. The word 'toil' frames service as burdensome labour, and the rhetorical question implies that the tasks never end. Crucially, Ariel does not refuse — he reminds: 'Let me remember thee what thou hast promised.' The verb 'remember' (here meaning 'remind') is tactful but pointed; Ariel holds Prospero to a contract, presenting himself as a servant with rights, not a possession without them.

Prospero's response, 'How now? Moody?', is the language of a master managing a subordinate — faintly indulgent, faintly threatening. The clipped questions assert his authority and reduce Ariel's grievance to a passing mood. Yet his follow-up, 'What is't thou canst demand?', concedes that Ariel may demand something — the relationship is transactional, not purely tyrannical.

Ariel's answer is the most powerful moment in the exchange precisely because of its brevity: 'My liberty.' Two words, a single foot, answering Prospero's longer lines. Shakespeare gives the desire for freedom the shortest, plainest utterance in the passage, and its very simplicity makes it irreducible: liberty is not negotiable, not elaborate, not earned by argument — it is simply wanted.

Across the play this tension is never quite resolved into cruelty: Ariel serves with grace and is, at last, freed ('to the elements / Be free'). But this passage shows why Ariel's service always carries an edge. Set beside Caliban's enslavement and Ferdinand's chosen labour, Ariel represents a third kind of servitude — earned, time-limited, and yearning toward release. In miniature, the exchange dramatises the play's largest question: what we owe those who serve us, and when their freedom falls due.

This passage is the moral fault-line of The Tempest. In a few lines Shakespeare lets the 'slave' tell the story of the island from the other side — as a tale of welcome, betrayal and theft — and in doing so converts a comic monster into a dispossessed native with a genuine grievance. The presentation of power here is unsettling because it gives the loser of history a voice.

The speech opens as a legal claim: 'This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak'st from me.' The possessive 'mine' and the inheritance formula 'by… my mother' assert a right of succession; the present tense 'tak'st' insists the theft is ongoing, not past. Shakespeare frames Caliban's loss not as savagery overcome but as property seized — a strikingly modern challenge to the right of conquest, and one that would have resonated against the land-claims of the contemporary Virginia Company.

The middle of the passage rewrites the colonial encounter as seduction and betrayal. 'When thou cam'st first, / Thou strok'st me and made much of me' presents Prospero's arrival as false tenderness; the verbs of affection set up the wound to come. Caliban, in turn, 'loved' Prospero and 'showed thee all the qualities o' th' isle' — fresh springs, fertile spots. The tragedy is one of generosity exploited: the native gave knowledge of the land and received bondage in return. Shakespeare arranges the speech as a narrative arc from love to curse, so that we feel the betrayal as a movement, not just hear about it.

That arc lands on its devastating final turn: 'Cursed be I that did so!' Caliban curses not Prospero but himself — for the crime of having trusted. Shakespeare gives him the recognisable bitterness of the colonised who blames their own openness for their subjugation. And he gives it in verse: the dispossessed speaks with a dignity the form itself confers.

The passage's significance ripples across the whole play. It blocks any comfortable reading of Prospero as simply benevolent: the magus who lectures on 'virtue' is also a usurper of someone else's island. It complicates the play's own celebrations — Miranda's 'brave new world' is, after all, built on another's dispossession. And it ensures that when Prospero finally acknowledges 'this thing of darkness… mine', the line carries the weight of a responsibility never quite discharged. Here, more than anywhere, Shakespeare lets power be questioned by those it crushes.

Shakespeare does indeed make freedom and servitude central to The Tempest — but the play's real sophistication lies in distinguishing between kinds of service. By setting three forms of bondage side by side — Ariel's earned service, Caliban's enslavement, and Ferdinand's chosen labour — Shakespeare turns 'freedom and servitude' from a theme into an argument about what makes service just.

Ariel embodies contracted service. He works willingly and with grace, yet he counts the days and reminds Prospero of his 'promise'; his single-word demand, 'My liberty', gives the longing for freedom the plainest, most irreducible utterance in the play. His service is bearable because it is finite and freely entered — and Shakespeare rewards it: 'to the elements / Be free.' Ariel shows service at its most dignified.

Caliban embodies enslavement — service imposed by force on the island's own native. His protest, 'This island's mine… Which thou tak'st from me', reframes his bondage as theft, and the irony of 'You taught me language… I know how to curse' exposes the coloniser's 'civilising' gift as a tool of control. Where Ariel's service is earned and ends, Caliban's is seized and seemingly endless. Shakespeare deliberately denies Caliban the clean liberation Ariel receives, leaving his fate ambiguous — a discomfort that keeps the play honest.

Ferdinand provides the crucial contrast: chosen servitude. Made to bear logs, he insists 'The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead / And makes my labours pleasures.' Identical labour (log-bearing recalls Caliban's tasks) becomes 'pleasure' when freely undertaken for love. Shakespeare's point is sharp: it is not the work that enslaves but the absence of consent.

Above all these stands Prospero, whose own arc is from a different bondage — to revenge — toward freedom. His decision that 'The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance' frees him from his 'fury', and his final surrender of magic ('I'll drown my book') frees Ariel, his enemies, and himself. The Epilogue completes the pattern: 'release me from my bands / With the help of your good hands' — even the master begs to be set free.

So Shakespeare does not merely depict freedom and servitude; he grades them. Service freely given (Ferdinand, Ariel) is honoured; service imposed (Caliban) festers; and the deepest freedom in the play is moral — the release that comes from giving up the desire to control. The play is 'obsessed' with the theme only in the sense that it keeps refining it.

The proposition is attractive but, I will argue, too neat. The Tempest neither cleanly 'endorses' Prospero's authority nor merely 'exposes its cost'; it does something more disquieting — it makes the case for his power and the case against it inseparable, so that the audience is left unable to ratify the restoration of order without also flinching at what it rests on. The play does not balance endorsement and cost; it fuses them.

The endorsement is real. Prospero is the wronged man: usurped by Antonio, exiled with an infant, he has a genuine claim to the dukedom, and the play arranges its sympathies around restoring it. His authority is, moreover, presented as benevolent in crucial respects — he educates Miranda, engineers a marriage that will reconcile Milan and Naples, and, decisively, chooses mercy: 'The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance.' Shakespeare even dignifies his power aesthetically, through Ariel's music and the masque, so that order, harmony and art seem to flow from the magus's hand. To this extent the play endorses him.

But Shakespeare embeds the cost inside the endorsement, so that the two cannot be separated. The same magic that produces harmony begins with a storm that terrorises innocents and a regime that enslaves the island's native. Prospero's benevolence toward Miranda coexists with cramps for Caliban and threats for Ariel; his eloquent mercy in Act 5 is delivered by a man who, in the same act, must be reminded by a spirit to feel it: 'Mine would, sir, were I human.' That a non-human servant must teach humanity to the human master is a quiet indictment built into the very scene of forgiveness.

This is why the proposition's 'even as' is misleading: it implies endorsement and exposure run in parallel, when Shakespeare makes them the same gesture. Consider Caliban. To endorse Prospero's rule is to accept the dispossession encoded in 'This island's mine… Which thou tak'st from me'; the legitimacy of the restored Duke of Milan is underwritten by the illegitimacy of the seized island. The play will not let us have the just ending without the unjust foundation. Likewise Antonio's unrepentant silence when forgiven — Shakespeare gives him no line of contrition — leaves a hole in the harmony: order is restored over a man who has not changed.

What, then, of the abjuration of magic? Here I think the play makes its subtlest move. Prospero's greatest exercise of authority is to renounce it: 'this rough magic / I here abjure… I'll drown my book.' If the play endorses anything unequivocally, it is not power but its relinquishing. The Epilogue confirms this: stripped of charms, Prospero begs the audience to 'release me… With the help of your good hands'. The figure who began by raising a storm ends by asking for applause. Shakespeare's deepest statement about power is that its only fully honourable use is to give it up — which is less an endorsement of Prospero's authority than a critique of authority as such.

My judgement, therefore, is that the view is half-right and consequently misleading. Yes, the play exposes the cost of Prospero's power; yes, it grants his cause. But it does not 'endorse' his authority so much as stage its retirement. The Tempest is moving precisely because it cannot celebrate the restoration of a ruler without also dramatising the relief of his abdication — and that fusion of triumph and renunciation is a more honest, and more troubling, account of power than the proposition allows.

This is the play's great meditation on its own art. Prospero has just dissolved the betrothal masque, and Shakespeare uses the moment to fuse three subjects — theatrical illusion, the vanity of human achievement, and mortality — into a single, devastatingly quiet speech. Its dramatic method is metatheatre: a character in a play tells us that plays, and lives, are made of the same disappearing stuff.

The passage works by a controlled dissolving. 'Our revels now are ended' announces a close not only to the masque but, we feel, to something larger; the gentle finality of 'ended' sets the tone. Then Shakespeare stages disappearance through repetition and rhythm: the actors 'Are melted into air, into thin air.' The reiteration of 'air' — the second time qualified to 'thin air' — enacts evaporation in the very sound of the line, as the substantial thins to nothing before our ears. The verb 'melted' denies any violence or rupture: the masque does not break, it simply ceases to be, like breath.

The speech then widens from the theatrical to the universal. The 'cloud-capped towers', 'gorgeous palaces' and 'solemn temples' (the 'great globe itself') will, Prospero says, 'dissolve' and 'Leave not a rack behind.' Shakespeare's choice of the grandest human structures — and the pun on the 'Globe', Shakespeare's own theatre — collapses the distinction between a stage illusion and civilisation itself. If the masque is unreal, so are the towers; both are performances that end.

The famous lines bring the argument home to the body: 'We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.' The metaphor of dream-stuff makes human substance itself illusory, and 'rounded with a sleep' frames a life between two sleeps — the sleep before birth and the sleep of death — with terrible gentleness. There is no horror in the lines, only a vast, calm melancholy. Shakespeare's method is understatement: the most frightening idea in the play is delivered in its softest music.

The passage is central to the whole work in two ways. First, it is the key to the play's metatheatre: Prospero, the playwright-figure, here all but steps out of the fiction to speak of theatre, and he prepares us for the Epilogue, in which he will hand his 'charms' to the audience's applause. The masque's dissolution is a rehearsal for the play's own ending — and, many have felt, for Shakespeare's farewell to the stage. Second, it reframes everything the play has valued. If towers, temples and lives all 'dissolve', then power, revenge and even art are revealed as transient — which is precisely why Prospero can, moments later, choose to 'abjure' his 'rough magic.' Having seen that all illusions end, he chooses to end his own. The speech does not merely decorate the play; it provides the philosophical ground for its central act of renunciation.