Brave new world
Written in late 1610 or 1611, The Tempest is often regarded as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, in which he announces “now my charms are all o’erthrown”. It is a strange, unclassifiable play about Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan (seen as Shakespeare’s self-portrait) who, set adrift on a boat, finds his way to an island where he uses magic to engineer the marriage of his daughter Miranda to Ferdinand, heir to the kingdom of Naples.
The play’s ethereal atmosphere belies its acute political contexts. There is a colonial dimension to Prospero’s relations with the island’s compliant Ariel, who begs for “freedom”, and with the rebellious Caliban, whom Prospero calls “this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”. The colonial element seems to have been inspired by pamphlets written in 1610 describing an English fleet shipwrecked in Bermuda – Ariel’s ‘still-vexed Bermudas’ – en route to the fledgling Jamestown colony in Virginia. This suggests that the play is set in what it calls the “brave new world” of the Americas.
In 1613 the play was performed as part of royal celebrations for the eagerly anticipated marriage of King James’s daughter Elizabeth to the Protestant Frederick, the Elector Palatine. The Tempest also contains a masque that Prospero calls a “contract of true love to celebrate” Miranda and Ferdinand’s nuptials.
Though not necessarily written for the marriage, the play seems to reflect the belief that dynastic marriages could establish peace and security within Europe. It was a forlorn hope: in under a decade, Shakespeare was dead and the Palatinate dispute led to the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War. DISCOVER MORE TELEVISION
an adaptation of and Richard III, will be broadcast on BBC Two soon as part of the BBC’s Shakespeare Festival