Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Tempest (SparkNotes Literature Guide)
    The Tempest (SparkNotes Literature Guide)
    The Tempest (SparkNotes Literature Guide)
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    The Tempest (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

    By SparkNotes

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The Tempest (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by William Shakespeare
    Making the reading experience fun!
    Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.   Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:   *Chapter-by-chapter analysis
    *Explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
    *A review quiz and essay topics Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSparkNotes
    Release dateAug 12, 2014
    ISBN9781411477865
    The Tempest (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

    Read more from Spark Notes

    Related authors

    Related to The Tempest (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

    Related ebooks

    Book Notes For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      All The World’s A Stage

      Apr 6, 2023

      All The World’s A Stage
      5 min read

    • Article

      Speaking Of Shakespeare

      May 1, 2023

      Speaking Of Shakespeare
      3 min read

    • Article

      Life And Times: William Shakespeare

      Jun 9, 2021

      Considered the first English writer to become wealthy from his published output, Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, the son of a trader. Attendance at the local grammar gave him an ample grounding in

      1 min read

    • Article

      ENGLISH HOMES OLD & NEW

      Apr 6, 2022

      ENGLISH HOMES OLD & NEW
      7 min read

    • Article

      Music Richard Osborne

      Jun 2, 2021

      SEMELE MARGARET CATCHPOLE Two catastrophes struck England near the start of Queen Anne’s reign. The first was the Great Storm of 1703, a category-two hurricane that killed more people and felled more oaks than the Great Storm of 1987. The second was

      3 min read

    • Article

      From Russia, With Love

      Sep 14, 2022

      From Russia, With Love
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Play’s The Thing

      Apr 15, 2021

      Entertainment in late medieval and Tudor London came in a variety of forms, including cockfighting, bearbaiting and even public executions. Plays at this time often had a religious theme or a moral at the end – such as the battle between good and evi

      5 min read

    • Article

      Anniversaries

      Dec 28, 2021

      Anniversaries
      5 min read

    • Article

      Brush Up Your Shakespeare

      Apr 14, 2021

      Brush Up Your Shakespeare
      5 min read

    • Article

      Godunov For Me

      Apr 1, 2022

      SAY WHAT YOU LIKE, the opera gang was out of the traps like greased pigs with their Dutch auction of cheap gestures. Once they’d detailed some intern to find Ukraine on the map, it was all go: playing the Ukie anthem before shows, lighting up the the

      3 min read

    • Article

      From Parchment To Performance

      Apr 15, 2021

      In Shakespeare’s time, playwriting was a matter of both perspiration and inspiration. First he had to think up a story, which he would shape into a plot. Usually this meant he had to do a lot of fresh reading, because most of Shakespeare’s plays are

      4 min read

    • Article

      Music

      Dec 14, 2022

      Music
      3 min read

    • Article

      An Appetite For Power

      Apr 13, 2023

      An Appetite For Power
      6 min read

    • Article

      Shakespeare Through The Ages

      Apr 15, 2021

      In 1623, the playwright and poet Ben Jonson wrote that his friend Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time”. But Jonson could scarcely have imagined the impact and influence Shakespeare would have on four centuries of thinkers, writers, compo

      4 min read

    • Article

      Richard Osborne

      Aug 24, 2022

      Richard Osborne
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Poetry of Subversion: On ‘Shakespeare in Swahililand’

      Aug 25, 2017

      Shakespeare was often handmaid to the subjugation of people by English colonialists, who used the playwright as evidence of British superiority, while at the same time he was used by people across Africa in their own striving for national self-determ

      7 min read

    • Article

      Robert Thicknesse on Opera

      Mar 28, 2024

      ABOUT BLOODY TIME TOO: FINALLY, a statue is to be raised to London’s transgender sex workers, right outside the ENO, on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Let’s hope they dedicate an opera to these unsung heroes: it would make a joyous change fro

      3 min read

    • Article

      What If We Never Had The Bard?

      May 6, 2023

      WITHOUT the First Folio, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays that had not previously been printed would have been lost, among them Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and The Tempest. No “friends, Romans and countrymen”, no “brave new world”, no “double, do

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Original Nature Boy

      May 24, 2023

      The Original Nature Boy
      5 min read

    • Article

      Authors On The Podcast

      Jun 10, 2021

      “Blackface has a very long history. It may even have been used in Greek and Roman theatre, and we know that blackface was used in medieval religious plays to depict devilish characters who had fallen from grace. But it flourished in Shakespeare’s tim

      1 min read

    • Article

      Shakespeare, Bacon And The Bullroarer

      Jan 5, 2022

      In Act 2 Scene 1 of The Tempest, (right) all the characters are beginning to argue among themselves. Ariel enters, invisible, and plays music that puts everyone to sleep except Sebastian and Antonio, who discuss how advantageous it might be to kill t

      1 min read

    • Article

      Judith Weir

      May 14, 2020

      Judith Weir
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Tempest (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Tempest (SparkNotes Literature Guide) - SparkNotes

      The Tempest

      William Shakespeare

      © 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

      This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

      Sparknotes is a registered trademark of SparkNotes LLC

      Spark Publishing

      A Division of Barnes & Noble

      120 Fifth Avenue

      New York, NY 10011

      www.sparknotes.com /

      ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7786-5

      Please submit changes or report errors to www.sparknotes.com.

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Contents

      Context

      Plot Overview

      Character List

      Analysis of Major Characters

      Themes, Motifs & Symbols

      Act I, scene i

      Act I, scene ii

      Act I, scene ii (continued)

      Act II, scene i

      Act II, scene ii

      Act III, scene i

      Act III, scene ii

      Act III, scene iii

      Act IV, scene i

      Act V, scene i & Epilogue

      Important Quotations Explained

      Key Facts

      Study Questions

      The Literary Essay: A Step-by-Step Guide

      Suggested Essay Topics

      A+ Student Essay

      Glossary of Literary Terms

      A Note on Plagiarism

      Review & Resources

      Context

      T

      he most influential writer

      in all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born in

      1564

      to a successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In

      1582

      he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around

      1590

      he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical acclaim quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England and a part-owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled

      1558–1603

      ) and James I (ruled

      1603–1625

      ), and he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare’s company the greatest possible compliment by bestowing upon its members the title of King’s Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford and died in

      1616

      at the age of fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare’s death, literary luminaries such as Ben Jonson hailed his works as timeless.

      Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact and from Shakespeare’s modest education that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by someone else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates—but the support for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.

      In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays and

      154

      sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after.

      The Tempest probably was written in

      1610–1611

      , and was first performed at Court by the King’s Men in the fall of 1611. It was performed again in the winter of

      1612–1613

      during the festivities in celebration of the marriage of King James’s daughter Elizabeth. The Tempest is most likely the last play written entirely by Shakespeare, and it is remarkable for being one of only two plays by Shakespeare (the other being Love’s Labor’s Lost) whose plot is entirely original. The play does, however, draw on travel literature of its time—most notably the accounts of a tempest off the Bermudas that separated and nearly wrecked a fleet of colonial ships sailing from Plymouth to Virginia. The English colonial project seems to be on Shakespeare’s mind throughout The Tempest, as almost every character, from the lord Gonzalo to the drunk Stephano, ponders how he would rule the island on which the play is set if he were its king. Shakespeare seems also to have drawn on Montaigne’s essay Of the Cannibals, which was translated into English in

      1603

      . The name of Prospero’s servant-monster, Caliban, seems to be an anagram or derivative of Cannibal.

      The extraordinary flexibility of Shakespeare’s stage is given particular prominence in The Tempest. Stages of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period were for the most part bare and simple. There was little on-stage scenery, and the possibilities for artificial lighting were limited. The King’s Men in

      1612

      were performing both at the outdoor Globe Theatre and the indoor Blackfriars Theatre and their plays would have had to work in either venue. Therefore, much dramatic effect was left up to the minds of the audience. We see a particularly good example of this in The Tempest, Act II, scene i when Gonzalo, Sebastian, and Antonio argue whether the island is beautiful or barren. The bareness of the stage would have allowed either option to be possible in the audience’s mind at any given moment.

      At the same time, The Tempest includes stage directions for a number of elaborate special effects. The many pageants and songs accompanied by ornately costumed figures or stage-magic—for example, the banquet in Act III, scene iii, or the wedding celebration for Ferdinand and Miranda in Act IV, scene i—give the play the feeling of a masque, a highly stylized form of dramatic, musical entertainment popular among the aristocracy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is perhaps the tension between simple stage effects and very elaborate and surprising ones that gives the play its eerie and dreamlike quality, making it seem rich and complex even though it is one of Shakespeare’s shortest, most simply constructed plays.

      It is tempting to think of The Tempest as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage because of its theme of a great magician giving up his art. Indeed, we can interpret Prospero’s reference to the dissolution of the great globe itself (IV.i.

      153

      ) as an allusion to Shakespeare’s theatre. However, Shakespeare is known to have collaborated on at least two other plays after The Tempest: The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII in

      1613

      , both probably written with John Fletcher. A performance of the latter was, in fact, the occasion for the actual dissolution of the Globe. A cannon fired during the performance accidentally ignited the thatch, and the theater burned to the ground.

      Plot Overview

      A

      storm strikes a ship

      carrying Alonso, Ferdinand, Sebastian, Antonio, Gonzalo, Stephano, and Trinculo, who are on their way to Italy after coming from the wedding of Alonso’s daughter, Claribel, to the prince of Tunis in Africa. The royal party and the other mariners, with the exception of the unflappable Boatswain, begin to fear for their lives. Lightning cracks, and the mariners cry that the ship has been hit. Everyone prepares to sink.

      The next scene begins much more quietly. Miranda and Prospero stand on the shore of their island, looking out to sea at the recent shipwreck. Miranda asks her father to do anything he can to help the poor souls in the ship. Prospero assures her that everything is all right and then informs her that it is time she learned more about herself and her past. He reveals to her that he orchestrated the shipwreck and tells her the lengthy story of her past, a story he has often started to tell her before but never finished. The story goes that Prospero was the Duke of Milan until his brother Antonio, conspiring with Alonso, the King of Naples, usurped his position. Kidnapped and left to die on a raft at sea, Prospero and his daughter survive because Gonzalo leaves them supplies and Prospero’s books, which are the source of his magic and power. Prospero and his daughter arrived on the island where they remain now and have been for twelve years. Only now, Prospero says, has Fortune at last sent his enemies his way, and he has raised the tempest in order to make things right with them once and for all.

      After telling this story, Prospero charms Miranda to sleep and then

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1