The themes of The Tempest all turn on power, and on the moment a man who holds it completely decides what to do with it: the play asks whether ruling, teaching, and even magic can be justified, and finds its answer in forgiveness.
This guide explains the play’s major themes, with the key lines for each and how they connect. For the plot and famous quotations, see our full guide to The Tempest, and for everyone who appears in the play, see our guide to the Tempest characters.
At a Glance
Here are the main themes of The Tempest in brief.
Power and Usurpation
The play’s story begins with a crime against power. Twelve years before the storm, Antonio took his brother’s dukedom with the help of Alonso, King of Naples, while Prospero was absorbed in his books. Prospero admits his own part in it: “Me, poor man, my library / Was dukedom large enough.” By neglecting Milan, he left the door open.
On the island, that first usurpation is repeated three times. Antonio tempts Sebastian to kill his brother, King Alonso, and take the crown of Naples: “as thou got’st Milan, / I’ll come by Naples,” Sebastian agrees. Caliban urges Stephano to murder Prospero and rule the island. And Prospero, as Caliban tells it, is himself a usurper who took the island by sorcery: “This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me.”
The repeated plots are the same crime in different costumes, from the courtly to the comic. Antonio’s plot is stopped by Ariel’s song, and Stephano’s by a line of fine clothes. Prospero’s own power, the greatest in the play, is the one he finally gives up.
Freedom and Servitude
Almost everyone on the island serves someone. Ariel serves Prospero for a promised freedom and asks for it at their first meeting: “My liberty.” Prospero keeps renewing the promise (“Thou shalt be as free / As mountain winds”) while giving Ariel more work.
Caliban serves unwillingly and dreams of escape, but his idea of freedom is to change masters. Having sworn himself Stephano’s subject, he sings, “’Ban, ’ban, Ca-caliban / Has a new master. Get a new man. / Freedom, high-day!” The joke is plain: he has swapped one master for a worse one and calls it liberty.
Ferdinand shows a third kind of service, the kind that is chosen freely. Set to carry logs, he finds that love makes the labor light, and that prison is no prison with Miranda nearby: “Space enough / Have I in such a prison.” When she asks if he will be her husband, he answers, “Ay, with a heart as willing / As bondage e’er of freedom.” In this play, being bound can be a joy, if it is bondage one has chosen.
Forgiveness and Revenge
The play looks at first like a revenge story. Prospero has his enemies shipwrecked, separated, frightened, and driven mad by guilt. Ariel, as a Harpy, tells them they are “three men of sin” and that their only escape is “heart’s sorrow / And a clear life ensuing.” By Act 5, as Prospero says, “Lies at my mercy all mine enemies.”
The turn comes from an unexpected teacher. Ariel reports that the prisoners’ suffering would move anyone who saw it: “Mine would, sir, were I human.” Prospero is shamed into feeling: if a spirit made of air can pity them, “shall not myself, / One of their kind,” be moved more? He decides, “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent, / The sole drift of my purpose doth extend / Not a frown further.”
The forgiveness is real, but it is not always returned. Alonso asks pardon at once. Antonio, forgiven for “Thy rankest fault,” never answers. And in the epilogue, Prospero turns the theme on the audience itself, asking for the mercy he has shown: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free.”
Colonization
The Tempest was written in an age of European voyages to new lands, and many modern readers have read it as a play about colonization. The island already has an inhabitant when Prospero arrives. At first there is exchange: Prospero teaches Caliban words, and Caliban shows him “all the qualities o’ th’ isle, / The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.” Then the newcomer takes control, and the native becomes a servant confined to a rock.
The other Europeans repeat the pattern in miniature. Gonzalo, the kindest of them, immediately imagines governing the island as a perfect commonwealth, though Sebastian points out the contradiction: “Yet he would be king on ’t.” Trinculo sees Caliban as a moneymaker to exhibit in England, where people “will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar” but pay to see “a dead Indian.” And Antonio, in the last scene, judges him “no doubt marketable.”
The play does not simply take Caliban’s side. He tried to rape Miranda, and he offers Stephano the same worship he once gave Prospero. But it gives him a voice, a claim, and some of its finest poetry, and it lets the question of who the island belongs to hang unresolved. Our guide to the Tempest characters looks at how each newcomer lays claim to the island.
Nature and Nurture
Prospero is a teacher as well as a ruler. He has been Miranda’s “schoolmaster” on the island and boasts that she has learned more from him “Than other princes can, that have more time / For vainer hours and tutors not so careful.” With Miranda, education has worked.
With Caliban, Prospero believes it has failed. Miranda reminds Caliban that she “Took pains to make thee speak,” but says his nature “any print of goodness wilt not take.” Caliban turns the lesson into an insult: “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t / Is I know how to curse.” Prospero reaches the bitterest verdict of all, calling him “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick.”
Yet the play complicates that verdict from both sides. Antonio had the best birth and upbringing anyone could want, and he became a usurper; as Miranda says on hearing his story, “Good wombs have borne bad sons.” And Caliban, the supposedly unteachable savage, ends the play resolving to “be wise hereafter / And seek for grace.” Neither nature nor nurture has the last word.
Magic and Theater
Prospero’s magic often looks like stagecraft. He raises a storm with sound and fire, sets out a banquet that vanishes, sends Ariel on as a Harpy, and stages a masque of goddesses for Miranda and Ferdinand. He even calls his spirits actors. When he breaks off the masque, he tells Ferdinand, “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air.”
From there, his thought widens to the whole world: “the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.” If the masque was an illusion, so, in the end, is everything else.
In Act 5, he gives the magic up: “this rough magic / I here abjure,” he says, promising to break his staff and “drown my book.” The epilogue then speaks of his art in the language of a play. Without “Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,” he says, his “project fails, / Which was to please.” Many readers have heard in these lines a farewell from Shakespeare himself, since The Tempest is thought to be one of the last plays he wrote alone, though the play itself never says so. For another play that turns its magic into theater, see our guide to the themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Love and Wonder
Miranda has grown up seeing almost no one, and so she meets the world with wonder. Ferdinand is to her “A thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble.” He, in turn, takes her for a goddess. Prospero watches and approves: “At the first sight / They have changed eyes.”
Their love is quick but not careless. Prospero tests it with hard labor and warnings about patience, and they pass. Miranda’s wonder reaches its height in the last scene, when she sees the court for the first time: “O wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in ’t!”
Prospero’s reply, “’Tis new to thee,” is only four words, but it holds the play’s double vision. Miranda sees a brave new world; her father sees the men who betrayed him. The play leaves both views standing, and lets the young see the world freshly while the old forgive it.
A Closer Reading: Rounded with a Sleep
Prospero rules his island largely by putting people to sleep, and the play’s most famous speech turns that habit into a vision of life itself.
Count the sleepers. Miranda falls asleep at her father’s command in the first act: “Thou art inclined to sleep. ’Tis a good dullness.” In Act 2, Ariel’s music sends the king and his courtiers to sleep. The mariners are left “asleep” under the hatches until the end, and the boatswain says they were brought to Prospero “Even in a dream.” Sleep is how Prospero keeps the island in order.
The dangerous people are the ones who stay awake. When the king’s party drops off, only Antonio and Sebastian are untouched: “I find / Not myself disposed to sleep,” says Sebastian, and Antonio agrees, “Nor I. My spirits are nimble.” Their wakefulness is the opening for murder. Antonio even turns sleep into an accusation, telling Sebastian that by failing to act, “Thou let’st thy fortune sleep.” The guilty stay awake; the innocent sleep and are protected.
Caliban, meanwhile, loves sleep for its dreams. The island’s music sends him back to sleep, and there the clouds open with riches, “that when I waked / I cried to dream again.” It is the most tender thing he says, and it is about wanting to go back to sleep.
Then Prospero widens the idea to take in everyone, including the audience: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Life is a short waking between two sleeps. In the epilogue, he steps forward and asks the audience not to let him “dwell / In this bare island by your spell,” but to release him “With the help of your good hands.” The man who controlled everyone by sending them to sleep ends by admitting that he, too, is only a dreamer. Our full guide to The Tempest follows how the play releases each of its captives.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the themes of The Tempest, answered briefly.
What Is the Main Theme of The Tempest?
Power, and the choice between revenge and forgiveness. Prospero spends the play in complete control of his enemies, and its climax is his decision to forgive them rather than punish them.
What Does “We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On” Mean?
That human life is as brief and insubstantial as a dream. Prospero says it in Act 4, after ending the masque, and adds that “our little life / Is rounded with a sleep,” which most readers take to mean that life is bounded by the sleep of death.
What Does the Storm Symbolize?
On the surface, Prospero’s power and his anger. But the storm harms no one (“Not a hair perished,” Ariel reports), so it also works as a test and a turning point, bringing Prospero’s enemies to the island where they can be judged and forgiven.
Is The Tempest About Colonialism?
Many modern readers think so. Prospero takes control of an island that Caliban calls his own, and the other newcomers imagine ruling or selling what they find there. The play does not settle the question, but it gives Caliban a strong voice and a real claim.
Why Does Prospero Forgive His Enemies?
Partly because Ariel moves him to pity, and partly by choice. As he says, “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance.” He also sets a condition: they must be penitent.
Related Reading
Three pages that take The Tempest further.