The Tempest: Overlapping Plots & Themes

1. Prospero's magical designs on Antonio, Alonso, and company, including Ariel's acts on Prospero's behalf.
2. The love of Ferdinand and Miranda, including Prospero's complication/delay of their love and the celebration masque of Iris, Ceres, and Juno.
3. The shipwrecked party involving Alonso, Gonzalo, Antonio and Sebastian, the later two who are plotting against Alonso.
4. The drunken Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban.

Of course, these are interrelated in many ways. Caliban is urging an attack on Prospero, even as Antonio is urging one on Alonso. Ariel and Caliban represent not only ends of the magical spectrum, but ironically opposite responses of those Prospero controls. Indeed, one can conceive of the play as Prospero, along with Ariel at the distant, overseeing center of the remaining cells, with the drunken trio the farthest remove from that oversight, though always accounted for:

Prospero (Ariel)--center of power and oversight

Ferdinand and Miranda--the virtue of love and the blessing of marriage

The Other Courtiers and Royalty--the interposition of loss and (potential) betrayal

The Clowns and Caliban--the low class and the beastly

1. Why does Shakespeare include so much magic in this play? How would you characterize it? How does it shape the action of the play?
2. Why is Prospero both the moving power of the play yet functionally an observer of its action?
3. What do Ariel and Caliban stand for? Do they reveal anything about Shakespeare's view of art or creativity? If so, what?
4. How do the themes of marriage and betrayal relate to one another in the play? What about purity and the beastly?
5. What purpose does the celebration masque (Act 4) serve in the play?
6. How should we feel about the characters by the end of the play, esp. Alonso, Caliban, and Antonio?
7. Is The Tempest a comedy? Why or why not?