The Tempest

The Tempest opens with a shipwreck arranged on purpose. Prospero, exiled years ago and living on a remote island with his daughter and two unwilling servants, has finally got his enemies within reach, and spends a single day deciding what to do with them.

He was a duke once, deposed by his brother and set adrift. Now he has his books, his magic, a spirit called Ariel who wants to be released, and Caliban, who was on the island first and says so at every opportunity. As the survivors wander in separate groups — some plotting murder, some falling in love, some merely drunk — Prospero arranges encounters and tests, and works his way towards a choice between revenge and letting it go.

Shakespeare wrote it around 1610, and it is generally taken to be the last play he wrote alone. It is unusually compact, holding close to a single place and a single day, and it ends with an epilogue in which the man who has controlled everything asks the audience to set him free.

The play holds comedy, masque and something much colder together. The treatment of Caliban is not softened, and Prospero's power reads as coercion at least as often as it reads as wonder. The magic is beautiful and it is also a means of control, and the play knows it.

It suits audiences who want Shakespeare at his strangest and most forgiving. It works best live, where the storm, the music and that final request to be released all depend on there being a room full of people to hear them.