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Prospero uses Ariel to
bring Alonso and the others before him. He then sends Ariel to bring the
sail men. Prospero faces Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian with their
treachery, but tells them that he forgives them. Alonso worries about his
son and Ariel sends the two in front of Alonso. Ferdinand and Miranda tell
them their marriage. Prospero goes back to Milan and the play ends with a
speech of Prospero saying sorry for his wrongs and asking the audience to
forgive him.
The Tempest tells a
story involving an unjust act, the take-over of Prospero’s throne by his
brother, and Prospero’s desire to re-establish justice by giving himself
back to power. However, the idea of justice that the play works toward seems
highly subjective, since this idea is the view of one character that
controls the fate of all the other characters. Prospero presents himself as
a victim of injustice working to right the wrongs. Prospero’s idea of
justice and injustice is a little hypocritical—though he is angry with his
brother for taking his power, he has no doubts about making slaves of Ariel
and Caliban in order to get his aims. At many moments throughout the play,
Prospero’s sense of justice seems extremely one-sided, mainly for what is
good for Prospero. Moreover, because the play offers no notion of higher
order or justice to replace Prospero’s interpretation of events, the play
seems a bit morally questionable.
At the first sight of Ferdinand, Miranda says that he
is “the third man that e’er I saw” (Act I, Scene ii, L449). The other two
are Prospero and Caliban. But through the conversation with Caliban, Miranda
and Prospero give little opinion of Caliban as a human. Before she taught
Caliban language, he gabbled “like / A thing most brutish” (Act I, Scene ii,
L59–60) and Prospero says that he gave Caliban “human care” (Act I, Scene
ii, L349), Miranda and Prospero both have contradictory views of Caliban’s
humanity. Caliban claims that he was kind to Prospero, and that Prospero
repaid that kindness by imprisoning him (Act I, Scene ii, L347). In
contrast, Prospero claims that he stopped being kind to Caliban once Caliban
had tried to rape Miranda (Act I, Scene ii, L347–351). Which character the
audience decides to believe depends on whether it views Caliban as inborn
brutish, or as made brutish by oppression. The play leaves the matter
uncertain.
Prospero is one of Shakespeare’s more enigmatic protagonists.
He is a sympathetic character in that he was wronged by his usurping
brother, but his absolute power over the other characters and his
overwrought speeches make him difficult to like. In our first glimpse of
him, he appears puffed up and self-important, and his repeated insistence
that Miranda pay attention suggest that his story is boring her. Once
Prospero moves on to a subject other than his absorption in the pursuit of
knowledge, Miranda’s attention is riveted.
The pursuit of knowledge gets Prospero into trouble in the
first place. By neglecting everyday matters when he was duke, he gave his
brother a chance to rise up against him. His possession and use of magical
knowledge renders him extremely powerful and not entirely sympathetic. His
punishments of Caliban are petty and vindictive, as he calls upon his
spirits to pinch Caliban when he curses. He is defensively autocratic with
Ariel. For example, when Ariel reminds his master of his promise to relieve
him of his duties early if he performs them willingly, Prospero bursts into
fury and threatens to return him to his former imprisonment and torment. He
is similarly unpleasant in his treatment of Ferdinand, leading him to his
daughter and then imprisoning and enslaving him.
Despite his shortcomings as a man, however, Prospero is central to The
Tempest’s narrative. Prospero generates the plot of the play almost
single-handedly, as his various schemes, spells, and manipulations all work
as part of his grand design to achieve the play’s happy ending. Watching
Prospero work through The Tempest is like watching a dramatist create
a play, building a story from material at hand and developing his plot so
that the resolution brings the world into line with his idea of goodness and
justice. Many critics and readers of the play have interpreted Prospero as a
surrogate for Shakespeare, enabling the audience to explore firsthand the
ambiguities and ultimate wonder of the creative endeavor.
Prospero’s final speech, in which he likens himself to a
playwright by asking the audience for applause, strengthens this reading of
the play, and makes the play’s final scene function as a moving celebration
of creativity, humanity, and art. Prospero emerges as a more likable and
sympathetic figure in the final two acts of the play. In these acts, his
love for Miranda, his forgiveness of his enemies, and the legitimately happy
ending his scheme creates all work to mitigate some of the undesirable means
he has used to achieve his happy ending. If Prospero sometimes seems
autocratic, he ultimately manages to persuade the audience to share his
understanding of the world—an achievement that is, after all, the final goal
of every author and every play.
Just under fifteen years old, Miranda is a gentle and
compassionate, but also relatively passive, heroine. From her very first
lines she displays a meek and emotional nature. “O, I have suffered / With
those that I saw suffer!” she says of the shipwreck (Act I, Scene ii, L5–6),
and hearing Prospero’s tale of their narrow escape from Milan, she says “I,
not rememb’ring how I cried out then, / Will cry it o’er again” (Act I,
Scene ii, L133–134). Miranda does not choose her own husband. Instead, while
she sleeps, Prospero sends Ariel to fetch Ferdinand, and arranges things so
that the two will come to love one another. After Prospero has given the
lovers his blessing, he and Ferdinand talk with surprising frankness about
her virginity and the pleasures of the marriage bed while she stands quietly
by. Prospero tells Ferdinand to be sure not to “break her virgin-knot”
before the wedding night (Act IV, Scene i, L15), and Ferdinand replies with
no small anticipation that lust shall never take away “the edge of that
day’s celebration” (Act IV, Scene i, L29). In the play’s final scene,
Miranda is presented, with Ferdinand, almost as a prop or piece of the
scenery as Prospero draws aside a curtain to reveal the pair playing chess.
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