暴风雨

In the play's final scene, before the curtain falls, the magician breaks his own wand in two and sinks into the sea the book he has pored over his whole life. A man who can command wind and storm gives up all his power — so that his enemy can live.

This is not the climax of a fairy tale. It is a man who has plotted alone on an island for twelve years, walking to the cliff's edge, and changing his mind at the last moment. The Tempest was the last play Shakespeare wrote alone, composed in London in the early seventeenth century, when he was about forty-seven. After his death in 1623, his fellow actors gathered it with his other plays into the First Folio, the first printed collection of his work — and later readers have taken it as Shakespeare's long farewell letter to the stage, and to a lifetime's craft.

The whole play takes place on a single island, and the text never names it. Scholars place it somewhere between Naples and North Africa, since the ship is sailing home to Naples from Tunis. The whole play is compressed almost to the point of cruelty — Shakespeare, unusually for him, obeys the classical unities to the letter: one day, one island, almost no jump in time.

The island holds four worlds. Prospero's cave, stacked with magic books, is a scholar's study; the beach and clearing outside it are the strange ground where newcomers first wash ashore; the wilderness where spirits and monsters roam is the island's true, older interior. And it holds four factions: the exiled former duke and his daughter; the air spirit pressed into service; the enslaved native; and the enemies a storm has washed back onto this same shore twelve years later. Every conflict resolves inside a single day.

Prospero was once Duke of Milan, but he was so absorbed in the study of magic that he handed the business of state to his brother Antonio. Antonio turned around and conspired with Alonso, King of Naples, seized the dukedom, and had his brother and Miranda — then not yet three — put out to sea in a rotten boat with no sail.

The old councillor Gonzalo secretly stowed food, clothing, and Prospero's most cherished books of magic aboard. Father and daughter drifted to this island. With the learning in those books, Prospero undid two knots in turn: he freed the spirit Ariel, whom the witch Sycorax had imprisoned inside a cloven pine for twelve years, and he enslaved Sycorax's son Caliban, the island's native inhabitant. From that day, the island had a new master.

Twelve years later, a ship carrying Alonso, Antonio, Prince Ferdinand, and old Gonzalo sails home to Naples from Tunis and passes near the island. Prospero summons Ariel and conjures a towering storm to 'wreck' the ship —

But not one person aboard dies. Ariel, following his master's orders, scatters everyone and sets them safely ashore in different corners of the island, and even hides the ship itself, unharmed. Each of them lands carrying a different burden: the King, believing his son has drowned, is consumed by grief and guilt; Antonio is already plotting his next move; the jester Trinculo staggers ashore clutching a bottle. From start to finish, the storm is a magic trick, not an act of nature.

Prince Ferdinand washes up alone at one end of the island and meets Miranda — who, in her whole life, has never seen a third man besides her father and Caliban. They fall in love at once, and Miranda blurts out the line that has been quoted endlessly ever since: 'O brave new world.' The first time I read it, I paused too: it isn't knowledge speaking. It's wonder.

Prospero watches from hiding, then deliberately makes things hard: he sentences the prince to hauling heavy logs. It isn't a test of strength — it's a test of whether a prince is willing to lower himself for a girl's sake. Ferdinand, sweating under the wet wood, wins Miranda's sympathy; she wants to help him, and the two exchange glances over the woodpile. He passes the trial, and her father consents to the marriage.

Two acts of usurpation play out on the island at once. The first is the deadly one: seeing that everyone believes Ferdinand dead, Antonio wastes no time talking Sebastian, Alonso's brother, into murder — while the King is distracted by grief, draw a sword, kill him and loyal Gonzalo, and blame it on the wreck. Ariel appears just in time to wake Gonzalo, and the plot collapses. This is the real, bloody stuff of court intrigue.

The second is its absurd mirror image: the jester Trinculo and Stephano, a drunken butler, stumble across Caliban on the beach. Caliban has never tasted wine before; one swallow goes straight to his head, and he drops to his knees, clutching the bottle, hailing Stephano as a god fallen from the sky, and drags him into a plot to kill Prospero and seize the island. The three of them bumble and clown their way into their master's territory — and Ariel toys with them without mercy, speaking through invisible voices, laying out a banquet that vanishes the instant they reach for it, and appearing as a harpy to scold them before it all falls apart. The same crime, killing the master, set against the deadly version next to it — the gap between the two is the joke.

To celebrate the engagement, Prospero has his spirits stage a masque: Iris, goddess of the rainbow, Ceres, goddess of the harvest, and Juno, queen of the gods, appear in turn to bless the young couple. The island has never been so radiant. But halfway through, Prospero suddenly remembers that Caliban's gang is closing in — he barks a sudden order to stop, and the ceremony breaks off mid-note. To the spirits, he leaves one line: 'Our revels now are ended.'

It is one of the coldest turns in the whole play. On one side, a blessing for the young couple; on the other, thugs coming to kill him. Magic can stage a pageant of gods, but it cannot make a man change his mind in an instant. Prospero has to step onto the stage himself and clean up the mess.

Ariel herds Alonso's whole party back to his master's cave. Prospero pulls back the curtain in front of everyone: he sheds the magician's robe and stands revealed in the old clothes of the Duke of Milan. Twelve years of plotted revenge have led to this moment. His enemy stands before him — Antonio, the brother who put him and his infant daughter out to sea.

But he doesn't kill him. He chooses forgiveness instead. In front of everyone, he snaps the wand in two and orders Ariel to sink the book of magic and never speak of it again. He pardons Antonio, forgives Alonso, and draws back a curtain to show Alonso the son he believed drowned, alive and playing chess with Miranda. Last, as promised, he grants Ariel freedom — the spirit of the air who spent twelve years trapped in a tree and another twelve in his service.

From sorcerer back to mortal man, from vengeance toward mercy — that arc is the real miracle of this play.

On the surface, The Tempest is a play of illusions. Underneath, it is several intertwined stories of bondage and release. The most direct one: which takes more from a man, revenge or forgiveness? Prospero plots for twelve years and then breaks his own staff of power — 'the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance' is the conclusion he writes for himself, in his own hand.

Prompt

The colder thread: who really owns this island? Before Prospero and his daughter arrived, it was home to Caliban and his dead mother, Sycorax. Once the newcomers took charge, the native became a servant. Since the twentieth century, critics have kept coming back to this thread: Shakespeare produced one of the earliest and most enduring colonial allegories in European literature, and Caliban has become a name postcolonial criticism cannot avoid. That is also why he cannot be flattened into a simple clown or monster — he is coarse, but he is human.

Everything above is only a map. The play's real flesh only wakes up once you return to its sentences. Prospero's famous line 'our revels now are ended' is, in the original, a passage that moves almost like verse set to music; Caliban's cursing of the island carries the smell of earth and sea wind in every line; and in the soliloquy where Prospero talks himself out of revenge, standing at the cliff's edge and telling himself, again and again, to forgive, you feel the weight of that breathing only in the original lines. Knowing the plot leaves you standing on the shore. Reading the play is actually going into the water.