The Tempest, a play by William Shakespeare, is believed to have been written in 1610–11 and is also thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote. It is also believed to be one of the onto plays with a completely original plot. For many years, The Tempest was regarded as one of Shakespeare’s comedies; however, the presence of tragedy, comedy, and a good deal of romance means that the play does not easily fit into any of these three genres exclusively.
There is no obvious single origin for the plot of the tempest; it seems to have been created out of an amalgamation of sources.
The Tempest is thought to have been partially inspired by Shakespeare’s reading of a real-life event; a letter written by William Strachey, detailing the experiences of a shipwreck survivor. On July 24, 1609 a fleet of nine English vessels who were apart of The Virginia Company, were nearing the end of a supply voyage to the new colony of the Bermudas when it ran into “a cruel tempest”. The vessels in the fleet couldn’t keep together, and two fared particularly badly. One of them, The Sea Venture, carrying the fleet’s Admiral, ran ashore. The passengers and crew of the fleet’s flagship, the Sea Venture, were stranded for months on a deserted island in the Bermudas, during which time they were believed to be lost at sea. Shakespeare also knew many others who were involved in the Virginia Company venture; Southampton and Pembroke, to whom Shakespeare dedicated a few of his works. There are clear parallels between William Strachey’s letter and the events described within The Tempest, so it is more than likely that Shakespeare was familiar with the text, and was inspired by it to write the play based on some events within it.
Some scholars believe that the character of Ariel was probably inspired by what the sailors saw after the wreck of the Sea venture. The Virginia Company Secretary William Strachey, one of the survivors, reports seeing in the aftermath:
‘An apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze,…shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, tempting to settle as it were on any of the four shrouds:…half the night it kept with us, running sometimes along the mainyard to the very end, and then returning.’
The logical explanation for what William Strachey actually saw was a phenomenon called “St. Elmo’s Fire”—the luminous plasma created by an electric field originating from a volcanic eruption or, is this case a storm (Tempest).
Some modern scholars see the story of Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel as a metaphor for the strained relationships between English colonists and peoples of other races, including local inhabitants and imported slaves.
Another theory suggests that the island is actually a metaphor for London, and the figure of Prospero is a version/representation of Shakespeare himself. Prospero is a man of great power and prestige on the island, possessing the ability through his magic to rule over all creatures, yet he chooses to leave his domain behind and return to a life of peaceful, family rule. Similarly, Shakespeare quit the stage after The Tempest, returning to his family estates in Stratford to live his few remaining years in relative peace. Experts have even suggested that it may be Shakespeare bidding farewell to the theatre and asking forgiveness and love from his audience.
However, other experts deem this relation of the play as strangely direct.
Shakespeare’s last plays were characterised by their originality; he drew less and less on classic stories as he grew in skill and fame. On the contrary however, it is speculated that some of his literature was drawn out of other workings. These include one of Gonzalo’s speeches, which is believed to have been derived from Montaigne’s essay Of the Canibales, and much of Prospero’s renunciative speech is taken word for word from a speech by Medea in Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses. The masque in Act 4 is speculated to have been a later addition, possibly in honour of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V in 1613.
Many scholars argue that The Tempest is a play about ‘reconciliation, forgiveness, and faith in future generations to seal such reconciliation.’ Thus, William Shakespeare may have been going through times in his own life that required these certain characteristics and what better way to express these, than in a play.
One debated aspect of this play is the idea of magic. Magic was a controversial subject in Shakespeare’s day. In Italy in 1600, around the time that William Shakespeare supposedly wrote The Tempest, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his supernatural studies. Outside the Catholic world, in Protestant England where Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, magic was prohibited and forbidden, however not all “magic” was considered ‘evil’. This initiated the study of the supernatural by several, but with a more rational approach to the discovery of unusual phenomenon, in order to not upset anybody. A German man named Henricus Cornelius Agrippa was one of these me, who published his observations of “divine” magic in De Occulta Philosophia. Agrippa’s work influenced Dr. John Dee, an Englishman and student of supernatural phenomena. Both Agrippa and Dee describe a kind of magic similar to that of Prospero’s: one that is based on 16th-century science, rationality, and divinity, rather than the occult. When King James took the throne, Dr John Dee found himself under attack for his beliefs, but was able to defend himself successfully by explaining the divine nature of his profession. The fact that magic was taboo (a prohibited and forbidden subject due to religious or social belief) and was seen upon as evil by most was the likely reason behind why Shakespeare is careful to make the distinction that Prospero presents himself as a rational, and not an occultist, magician. He does this by providing a contrast to him in Sycorax. Sycorax is said to have worshipped the devil and was unable to control Ariel, who was “too delicate” for such dark tasks. Prospero’s rational goodness enables him to control Ariel where Sycorax could only trap him in a tree. Sycorax’s magic is frequently described as destructive and terrible, compared to that of Prospero’s which said to be wondrous and beautiful. Prospero seeks to set things right in his world through his magic, and once that is done, he renounces it, setting Ariel free.
While none of these are a direct origin or source of the plot of Shakespeare’s play, there is no doubt that they were all part of the cultural and intellectual events around the time at which the play was speculated to have been written and they all would have served to stimulate and influence William Shakespeare’s imagination.
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