The characters of The Tempest are gathered on one small island by one man’s magic, and nearly every one of them, from the exiled duke to the drunken butler, arrives believing the island could be his.
This guide explains every major character, grouped by the part they play in Prospero’s design, with their key lines and what drives each of them. For the plot, themes, and famous quotations, see our full guide to The Tempest.
At a Glance
Here are the main characters of The Tempest and their roles.
Prospero and Miranda
A father and daughter, cast away twelve years ago and living alone on the island.
Prospero
The rightful Duke of Milan and a master of magic. Twelve years before the play begins, he handed the running of his state to his brother, Antonio, and buried himself in “secret studies.” As he puts it, “Me, poor man, my library / Was dukedom large enough.” Antonio, with the help of Alonso, King of Naples, seized the dukedom and set Prospero and his daughter, not yet three, adrift in a rotten boat. They survived thanks to the kindness of Gonzalo, who stocked the boat with supplies and with the books Prospero loved.
On the island, Prospero’s power is nearly absolute. He raises the storm, commands spirits, and keeps Ariel and Caliban as servants. He can be harsh. He threatens Ariel with twelve years pegged inside an oak, punishes Caliban with cramps, and tests Ferdinand with hard labor, “lest too light winning / Make the prize light.” Miranda has never seen him so angry as when he remembers Caliban’s plot. Yet his most famous speech is not about power at all, but about how little anything lasts: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” With his enemies in his power, he chooses mercy (“The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance”), gives up his magic, and plans to return to Milan, where “Every third thought shall be my grave.”
Miranda
Prospero’s daughter, now in her teens, who remembers almost nothing of life before the island. Her first words are a plea for the people on the sinking ship: “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!” She has seen only two men, her father and Caliban, so when Ferdinand appears she takes him for a spirit, and then for “A thing divine.” He is, as she says, “the third man that e’er I saw, the first / That e’er I sighed for.”
She is gentle, but not meek. She disobeys her father to tell Ferdinand her name, offers to carry his logs, and proposes to him herself: “I am your wife if you will marry me. / If not, I’ll die your maid.” She is also fierce with Caliban, whom she once taught to speak and now calls an “Abhorred slave.” Her most famous line comes when she sees the king’s party at last: “O brave new world / That has such people in ’t!” Her father’s quiet reply, “’Tis new to thee,” reminds us that these are the men who betrayed him.
The Island’s Servants
Two beings who lived on the island before Prospero came, and who now serve him against their will.
Ariel
A spirit of air, and Prospero’s chief agent. The witch Sycorax once imprisoned Ariel in a split pine tree for refusing her “earthy and abhorred commands,” and there Ariel stayed for a dozen years until Prospero’s magic opened the tree. Ever since, Ariel has served Prospero in return for a promise of freedom. Ariel creates the storm, flaming on the ship’s masts, sings “Full fathom five thy father lies” to Ferdinand, and appears as a Harpy to accuse the “three men of sin.”
Ariel’s one demand is freedom: asked what is owed, Ariel answers, “My liberty.” Yet the relationship is also affectionate. “Do you love me, master? No?” Ariel asks, and Prospero answers, “Dearly, my delicate Ariel.” Ariel also teaches Prospero mercy, reporting that the prisoners’ suffering would move anyone’s heart: “Mine would, sir, were I human.” At the end, singing “Where the bee sucks, there suck I,” Ariel is released to the elements, and Prospero admits, “I shall miss thee.”
Caliban
The son of Sycorax, who lived on the island before Prospero arrived. Prospero calls him a “poisonous slave” and a “devil,” and Trinculo and Stephano call him a monster, but the play gives him a strong case of his own. “This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me,” he tells Prospero. When Prospero first came, he says, “Thou strok’st me and made much of me,” and Caliban loved him and showed him “all the qualities o’ th’ isle,” the fresh springs and the fertile places. Then Prospero confined him to a rock.
Prospero’s reason is that Caliban tried to rape Miranda, and Caliban does not deny it; he only wishes he had succeeded. He is brutal and bitter, and his best-known retort turns his education against his teachers: “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t / Is I know how to curse.” Yet he also speaks some of the most beautiful poetry in the play: “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.” He takes a drunken butler for a god, plots to kill Prospero, and ends ashamed: “What a thrice-double ass / Was I to take this drunkard for a god.”
The King of Naples and His Court
The royal party shipwrecked on their way home from a wedding in Tunis.
Ferdinand
Alonso’s son and heir, the Prince of Naples. In the storm he is the first to leap from the burning ship, crying, “Hell is empty, / And all the devils are here.” Ariel brings him ashore alone, and he believes his father drowned. Following Ariel’s music, he meets Miranda and falls in love at once: “Most sure, the goddess / On whom these airs attend!”
Prospero calls him a traitor and sets him to piling logs, and Ferdinand takes it gladly for Miranda’s sake: “some kinds of baseness / Are nobly undergone.” A prison is no hardship, he says, if he can see her once a day: “Space enough / Have I in such a prison.” When she tells him her name, he answers, “Admired Miranda! / Indeed the top of admiration.” At the end, Prospero reveals the couple playing chess, and the prince is restored to his father.
Alonso
The King of Naples, who helped Antonio overthrow Prospero in return for Milan’s tribute and homage. On the island, he is consumed by grief, certain that his son has drowned. Ariel’s Harpy tells him that Ferdinand’s loss is punishment for his crime against Prospero, and his guilt overwhelms him. The thunder itself, he says, “pronounced / The name of Prosper,” and he runs off to seek his son “deeper than e’er plummet sounded.”
Of the three “men of sin,” he is the only one who shows real remorse. When Prospero reveals himself, Alonso returns his dukedom at once: “Thy dukedom I resign, and do entreat / Thou pardon me my wrongs.” Finding Ferdinand alive and engaged to Prospero’s daughter, he is humbled again: “how oddly will it sound that I / Must ask my child forgiveness!”
Gonzalo
An old councillor to Alonso, and the most honest man in the play. When Prospero was cast out, Gonzalo, “Out of his charity,” gave him food, water, clothes, and his precious books. On the island, he is endlessly hopeful, insisting that the air is sweet and the grass green while Antonio and Sebastian mock every word. He even imagines how he would govern the island, a commonwealth without trade, riches, or labor, until Sebastian points out the flaw: “Yet he would be king on ’t.”
Prospero honors him above everyone: “Holy Gonzalo, honorable man.” Fittingly, Gonzalo sums up the play’s happy ending. In one voyage, he says, Claribel found a husband at Tunis, “And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife / Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom / In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves / When no man was his own.”
The Plotters
Two brothers of rulers, who see the shipwreck as a chance to seize a crown.
Antonio
Prospero’s brother, who usurped his dukedom. According to Prospero, his trust “Awaked an evil nature” in his brother, until Antonio came to believe “He was indeed the Duke.” On the island, he is unchanged. While the king sleeps, he tempts Sebastian to murder him, arguing that the past is only a prelude to their chance (“what’s past is prologue”), and when Sebastian asks about his conscience, he dismisses it: “I feel not / This deity in my bosom.”
He is the play’s great unrepentant sinner. Prospero forgives him in the last scene, though “to call brother / Would even infect my mouth,” and demands his dukedom back. Antonio never answers. His only words afterward are a joke about Caliban being “a plain fish and no doubt marketable.” Whether he accepts his brother’s pardon, the play does not say.
Sebastian
Alonso’s brother, who spends his first scene mocking Gonzalo and blaming the king for the shipwreck. Antonio persuades him that with Ferdinand drowned, only Alonso stands between him and the crown of Naples: “as thou got’st Milan, / I’ll come by Naples.” The two draw their swords over the sleeping king, and only Ariel’s song, waking Gonzalo, stops them. When Prospero hints at the plot in the last scene, Sebastian mutters, “The devil speaks in him.”
The Clowns
Two of Alonso’s servants, washed ashore, who stage a comic version of the plot against the king.
Stephano
Alonso’s butler, who reached shore on a floating barrel of wine. Caliban, given his first drink, takes him for a god who has “dropped from heaven,” and Stephano happily agrees. Believing the king and his court drowned, he announces, “we will inherit here,” and agrees to Caliban’s plan to kill Prospero: “His daughter and I will be king and queen.”
He is a would-be tyrant, and a ridiculous one. Ariel leads him through thorns into a stinking pool, and at Prospero’s cell he is distracted by a line of fancy clothes, exactly as Prospero intended. Brought before the king at the end, stiff with Prospero’s cramps, he jokes, “I am not Stephano, but a cramp.”
Trinculo
Alonso’s jester. Caught in a new storm, he crawls under Caliban’s cloak for shelter, observing, “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” His first thought on seeing Caliban is how much money he could make showing him in England, where people “will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar” but will pay “ten to see a dead Indian.”
He mocks Caliban throughout as a “most poor, credulous monster,” and he is beaten by Stephano when the invisible Ariel, imitating his voice, calls Caliban a liar. He too falls for Prospero’s bait of glittering clothes.
Sycorax
Caliban’s mother, a witch banished from Algiers (“Argier” in the play) and left pregnant on the island, where she died before Prospero arrived. She never appears, and everything we know of her comes from Prospero, who calls her a “foul witch” and a “damned witch.” Yet she shadows the play. She imprisoned Ariel, gave Caliban his claim to the island, and practiced a magic that Prospero both condemns and, in his great farewell to his art, seems to echo.
A Closer Reading: Who Owns the Island?
Almost every character who sets foot on the island imagines owning it, and the one whose claim is oldest ends the play with no one arguing for him.
Caliban’s claim is inheritance: “This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother.” Prospero’s is power. He calls himself “the lord on ’t,” and he tells Alonso that he was landed on this shore “To be the lord on ’t.” Between them lies the question the play never quite settles, whether Prospero has ruled the island or simply taken it.
The newcomers make claims of their own within hours of arriving. Gonzalo, the kindest of them, begins his dream of an ideal state with “Had I plantation of this isle,” a word that in his day meant a colony. Stephano, believing the king drowned, decides, “we will inherit here,” and plans to be king with Miranda as his queen. Even the island’s music becomes property: “This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing.” Trinculo wants to ship Caliban to England as a fairground show, and in the last scene Antonio values him as “marketable.”
Prospero’s final word on Caliban is the most ambiguous. Of Stephano and Trinculo, he tells the king, “Two of these fellows you / Must know and own,” and of Caliban, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine.” “Own” here means recognize as yours, and the line can be heard as a claim of possession, a confession, or both. Then Prospero prepares to sail home to Milan. The play does not say whether Caliban goes with him or stays behind on the island he called his. Our full guide to The Tempest follows how the play frees each of its captives in turn.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the characters in The Tempest, answered briefly.
Who Is the Main Character in The Tempest?
Prospero. He causes the storm, directs nearly every event on the island through Ariel, and speaks the epilogue that ends the play.
Is Caliban a Villain?
He is one of Shakespeare’s most debated characters. He tried to rape Miranda and plots to murder Prospero, but he also has a real claim to the island, a real grievance against Prospero, and some of the play’s most beautiful poetry. Many modern readers see him as a victim of colonization as well as a villain.
What Is Ariel?
A spirit of the air, whom the witch Sycorax imprisoned in a pine tree and Prospero set free. Ariel serves Prospero in return for a promise of liberty, which is granted at the end of the play.
Why Did Antonio Overthrow Prospero?
Prospero neglected his duties for his studies and left Antonio to govern Milan. Antonio grew to believe he was the real duke and, with the help of Alonso, King of Naples, drove Prospero out.
Do Miranda and Ferdinand Marry?
They are betrothed on the island with Prospero’s blessing, and he plans to see them married in Naples. The wedding itself takes place after the play ends.
Related Reading
Three pages that take The Tempest further.