Performance history Shakespeare's day A record exists of a performance of
The Tempest on 1 November 1611 by the
King's Men before
James I and the English royal court at
Whitehall Palace on
Hallowmas night. The play was one of the six Shakespeare plays (and eight others for a total of 14) acted at court during the winter of 1612–13 as part of the
festivities surrounding the marriage of
Princess Elizabeth with
Frederick V, the
Elector of the Palatinate of the Rhine. There is no further public performance recorded prior to the
Restoration; but in his 1669 preface to the Dryden/Davenant version, John Dryden states that
The Tempest had been performed at the
Blackfriars Theatre. Careful consideration of stage directions within the play supports this, strongly suggesting that the play was written with Blackfriars Theatre rather than the
Globe Theatre in mind. But the mid-20th century critic Frank Kermode, while agreeing that
The Tempest is a Blackfriars play, argued that it could easily have been accommodated at The Globe also, as others of Shakespeare's late romances were.
Restoration and 18th century Adaptations of the play, not Shakespeare's original, dominated the performance history of
The Tempest from the
English Restoration until the mid-19th century. Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660,
Sir William Davenant's ''
Duke's Company had the rights to perform The Tempest
. In 1667 Davenant and John Dryden made heavy cuts and adapted it as The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island''. They tried to appeal to upper-class audiences by emphasising royalist political and social ideals: monarchy is the natural form of government; patriarchal authority decisive in education and marriage; and patrilineality preeminent in inheritance and ownership of property. They also added characters and plotlines: Miranda has a sister, named Dorinda; Caliban also has a sister, named Sycorax. As a parallel to Shakespeare's Miranda/Ferdinand plot, Prospero has a foster-son, Hippolito, who has never set eyes on a woman. Hippolito was a popular
breeches role, a man played by a woman, popular with Restoration theatre management for the opportunity to reveal actresses' legs. Scholar Michael Dobson has described
The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island by Dryden and Davenant as "the most frequently revived play of the entire Restoration" and as establishing the importance of enhanced and additional roles for women. , as Miranda, by
George Romney In 1674,
Thomas Shadwell re-adapted Dryden and Davenant as an "opera" of the same name - meaning a play with sections that were to be sung or danced. Restoration playgoers appear to have regarded the Dryden/Davenant/Shadwell version as Shakespeare's:
Samuel Pepys, for example, described it as "an old play of Shakespeares" in
his diary. The opera was extremely popular, and "full of so good variety, that I cannot be more pleased almost in a comedy" according to Pepys. Prospero in this version is very different from Shakespeare's: Eckhard Auberlen describes him as "reduced to the status of a
Polonius-like overbusy father, intent on protecting the chastity of his two sexually naive daughters while planning advantageous dynastic marriages for them". The operatic
Enchanted Island was successful enough to provoke a parody,
The Mock Tempest, or The Enchanted Castle, written by Thomas Duffett for the King's Company in 1675. It opened with what appeared to be a tempest, but turned out to be a riot in a brothel.
The Tempest was one of the staples of the repertoire of
Romantic Era theatres.
John Philip Kemble produced an acting version which was closer to Shakespeare's original, but nevertheless retained Dorinda and Hippolito. Kemble was much-mocked for his insistence on archaic pronunciation of Shakespeare's texts, including "aitches" for "aches". It was said that spectators "packed the pit, just to enjoy hissing Kemble's delivery of 'I'll rack thee with old cramps, / Fill all they bones with aches'."
19th century , 1782 It was not until
William Charles Macready's influential production in 1838 that Shakespeare's text established its primacy over the adapted and operatic versions which had been popular for most of the previous two centuries. The performance was particularly admired for
George Bennett's performance as Caliban; it was described by Patrick MacDonnell—in his "An Essay on the Play of
The Tempest" published in 1840—as "maintaining in his mind, a strong resistance to that tyranny, which held him in the thraldom of slavery". The
Victorian era marked the height of the movement which would later be described as "pictorial": based on lavish sets and visual spectacle, heavily cut texts making room for lengthy scene-changes, and elaborate stage effects. In
Charles Kean's 1857 production of
The Tempest, Ariel was several times seen to descend in a ball of fire. The hundred and forty stagehands supposedly employed on this production were described by
The Literary Gazette as "unseen ... but alas never unheard".
Hans Christian Andersen also saw this production and described Ariel as "isolated by the electric ray", referring to the effect of a
carbon arc lamp directed at the actress playing the role. In these Victorian productions it was widely accepted that the spectacle of the opening sea-storm was the highlight of the show, with the custom developing of dropping Shakespeare's lines from the opening scene altogether. The next generation of producers, which included
William Poel and
Harley Granville-Barker, returned to a leaner and more text-based style. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Caliban, not Prospero, was perceived as the star act of
The Tempest, and was the role which the actor-managers chose for themselves.
Frank Benson researched the role by viewing monkeys and baboons at the zoo. On stage, described by one reviewer as "half-monkey, half-coconut", he hung upside-down from a tree and gibbered. At Benson's opening performance in 1891 a lecturer appeared before the play began, to explain the political resonances of the opening scene. However the actual scene was cut completely, to be replaced by a performance of
Haydn's
Der Sturm.
20th century of Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Caliban in the 1904 production. Continuing the late-19th-century tradition, in 1904
Herbert Beerbohm Tree wore
fur and
seaweed to play
Caliban, with waist-length hair and
apelike bearing, suggestive of a primitive part-animal part-human stage of
evolution. This "
missing link" portrayal of Caliban became the norm in productions until
Roger Livesey, in 1934, was the first actor to play the role with black makeup. In 1945
Canada Lee played the role at the
Theatre Guild in New York, establishing a tradition of black actors taking the role, including
Earle Hyman in 1960 and
James Earl Jones in 1962. In 1916,
Percy MacKaye presented a community
masque,
Caliban by the Yellow Sands, at the
Lewisohn Stadium in New York. Amidst a huge cast of dancers and masquers, the
pageant centres on the rebellious nature of Caliban but ends with his plea for more knowledge ("I yearn to build, to be thine Artist / And 'stablish this thine Earth among the stars- / Beautiful!") followed by Shakespeare, as a character, reciting Prospero's "Our revels now are ended" speech.
John Gielgud played
Prospero numerous times, and is, according to Douglas Brode, "universally heralded as ... [the 20th] century's greatest stage Prospero". Scholar Martin Butler has described his Prospero as "a vigorous, forceful and intellectually alert individual, he always dominated the play, but was not easily likeable." In spite of the existing tradition of a black actor playing Caliban opposite a white Prospero,
postcolonial interpretations of the play did not find their way onto the stage until the 1970s. Performances in England directed by
Jonathan Miller and by
Clifford Williams explicitly portrayed Prospero as
coloniser. And later, in 1993,
Sam Mendes directed a 1993
RSC production in which
Simon Russell Beale's Ariel was openly resentful of the control exercised by
Alec McCowen's Prospero. Controversially, in the early performances of the run, Ariel spat at Prospero, once granted his freedom. Psychoanalytic interpretations have proved more difficult to depict on stage.
Gerald Freedman's production at the
American Shakespeare Theatre in 1979 and Ron Daniels'
Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1982 both attempted to depict Ariel and Caliban as opposing aspects of Prospero's psyche, but neither was regarded as wholly successful. Productions in the late 20th-century have gradually increased the focus placed on sexual tensions between the characters, including Prospero/Miranda, Prospero/Ariel, Miranda/Caliban, Miranda/Ferdinand and Caliban/Trinculo. Italian director
Giorgio Strehler directed a
Brecht-inspired version of the Tempest from 1978 which proved influential in containing the much-copied image of Prospero at the centre of the play's opening storm scene, orchestrating the visual effects around him. Japanese theatre styles have been applied to
The Tempest. In 1988 and again in 1992
Yukio Ninagawa brought his version of
The Tempest to the UK. It was staged as a rehearsal of a
Noh drama, with a traditional Noh theatre at the back of the stage, but also using elements which were at odds with Noh conventions. In 1992, Minoru Fujita presented a
Bunraku (Japanese puppet) version in
Osaka and at the
Tokyo Globe.
21st century , UK
The Tempest was performed at the
Globe Theatre in 2000 with
Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero, playing the role as neither male nor female, but with "authority, humanity and humour ... a watchful parent to both Miranda and Ariel". While the audience respected Prospero,
Jasper Britton's Caliban "was their man" (in Peter Thomson's words), in spite of the fact that he spat fish at the
groundlings, and singled some of them out for humiliating encounters. By the end of 2005,
BBC Radio had aired 21 productions of
The Tempest, more than any other play by Shakespeare. In 2016
The Tempest was produced by the
Royal Shakespeare Company. Directed by
Gregory Doran, and featuring
Simon Russell Beale as Prospero, the RSC's version used motion capture to project Ariel in real time as a "pixelated humanoid sprite" on stage. The performance was in collaboration with
The Imaginarium and
Intel, and featured (in the words of the London Standard's review) "some ... gorgeous, some interesting, and some gimmicky and distracting" use of light, special effects, and set design. In 2019,
Mohegan writer
Madeline Sayet's solo show
Where We Belong at
Shakespeare's Globe engaged in a
postcolonial speculation about the European characters' abandonment of the island at the play's end: wondering whether Caliban's native language would return to him.
Music The Tempest has more music than any other Shakespeare play, and has proved more popular as a subject for composers than most of Shakespeare's plays. Scholar Julie Sanders ascribes this to the "perceived 'musicality' or lyricism" of the play. Two settings of songs from
The Tempest which may have been used in performances during Shakespeare's lifetime have survived. These are "Full Fathom Five" and "Where The Bee Sucks There Suck I" in the 1659 publication
Cheerful Ayres or Ballads, in which they are attributed to
Robert Johnson, who regularly composed for the King's Men. It has been common throughout the history of the play for the producers to commission contemporary settings of these two songs, and also of "Come Unto These Yellow Sands". Among those who wrote incidental music to
The Tempest are: •
Arthur Sullivan: his graduation piece, completed in 1861, was a set of
incidental music to "
The Tempest". His score was still in use half a century later to add atmosphere the Old Vic's 1914 production. •
Ernest Chausson: in 1888 he wrote incidental music for
La tempête, a French translation by
Maurice Bouchor. This is believed to be the first orchestral work that made use of the
celesta. •
Jean Sibelius: his
1926 incidental music was written for a lavish production at the
Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. An epilogue was added for a 1927 performance in Helsinki. He represented individual characters through instrumentation choices: particularly admired was his use of harps and percussion to represent Prospero, said to capture the "resonant ambiguity of the character". Ballet sequences have been used in many performances of the play since Restoration times. At least forty-six operas or
semi-operas based on
The Tempest exist.
Michael Tippett's 1971 opera
The Knot Garden contains various allusions to
The Tempest. In Act 3, a psychoanalyst, Mangus, pretends to be Prospero and uses situations from Shakespeare's play in his therapy sessions.
Michael Nyman's 1991 opera
Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs was first performed as an
opera-ballet choreographed by
Karine Saporta. The three vocalists, a
soprano,
contralto, and
tenor, are voices rather than individual characters, with the tenor just as likely as the soprano to sing Miranda, or all three sing as one character. The soprano who sings the part of Ariel in
Thomas Adès's 2004 opera
The Tempest is stretched at the higher end of the register, highlighting the
androgyny of the role.
Luca Lombardi's
Prospero was premiered in April 2006 at
Nuremberg Opera House. Ariel is sung by 4 female voices (
S,S,
MS,
A) and has an instrumental alter ego on stage (flute). There is an instrumental alter ego (cello) also for Prospero. Stage musicals derived from
The Tempest have been produced. A production called
The Tempest: A Musical was produced at the
Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City in December 2006, with a concept credited to
Thomas Meehan and a script by Daniel Neiden (who also wrote the songs) and
Ryan Knowles. Neiden had previously been connected with another musical, entitled ''Tempest Toss'd''. In September 2013,
The Public Theater produced a new large-scale stage musical at the
Delacorte Theater in
Central Park, directed by Lear deBessonet with a cast of more than 200.
The Tempest has also influenced songs written in the
folk and
hippie traditions: for example, versions of "Full Fathom Five" were recorded by
Marianne Faithfull for
Come My Way in 1965 and by
Pete Seeger for
Dangerous Songs!? in 1966.
Literature , from ''the Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare's Heroines''
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the earliest poets to be influenced by
The Tempest. His "With a Guitar, To Jane" identifies Ariel with the poet and his songs with poetry. The poem uses simple diction to convey Ariel's closeness to nature and "imitates the straightforward beauty of Shakespeare's original songs". Following the publication of
Darwin's ideas on
evolution, writers began to question mankind's place in the world and its relationship with God. One writer who explored these ideas was
Robert Browning, whose poem "
Caliban upon Setebos" (1864) sets Shakespeare's character pondering theological and philosophical questions. The French philosopher
Ernest Renan wrote a closet drama, (
Caliban: Sequel to The Tempest), in 1878. This features a female Ariel who follows Prospero back to Milan, and a Caliban who leads a coup against Prospero, after the success of which he actively imitates his former master's virtues.
W. H. Auden's long poem
The Sea and the Mirror is in three parts, Prospero's farewell to Ariel referring to the matters unresolved at the end of the play; a reflection by each of the supporting characters on their experiences and intentions; then a prose narrative "Caliban to the Audience" which takes a
Freudian viewpoint, seeing Caliban as Prospero's
libidinous secret self. The novel
Brave New World by
Aldous Huxley references
The Tempest in the title, and explores
genetically modified citizens and the subsequent social effects. The novel and the phrase from
The Tempest, Barclay "brave new world", have since been associated with public debate about humankind's understanding and use of genetic modification, in particular with regards to humans. Postcolonial ideas influenced late 20th-century writings.
Aimé Césaire of Martinique, in his 1969 French-language play sets
The Tempest in a colony suffering unrest, and prefuiguring black independence. The play portrays Ariel as a
mulatto who, unlike the more rebellious black Caliban, feels that negotiation and partnership is the way to freedom from the colonisers. Roberto Fernandez Retamar sets his version of the play in
Cuba, and portrays Ariel as a wealthy Cuban (in comparison to the lower-class Caliban) who also must choose between rebellion or negotiation. Barbadian poet
E. P. Kamau Brathwaite in his 1969 poem "Caliban" identifies the character with the history of colonialism, between the
first voyage of Columbus through to the
Cuban Revolution. Jamaican-American author
Michelle Cliff's
No Telephone to Heaven has a protagonist who identifies with both Caliban and Miranda. And the figure of Caliban influenced numerous works of African literature in the 1970s, including
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o of Kenya's
A Grain of Wheat, and David Wallace of Zambia's
Do You Love Me, Master? In 1995, Sierra Leonean
Lemuel Johnson's
Highlife for Caliban imagined Caliban as king of his own kingdom. A similar phenomenon occurred in relation to feminist ideas in late 20th-century Canada, where several writers produced works inspired by Miranda, including
The Diviners by
Margaret Laurence, ''Prospero's Daughter
by Constance Beresford-Howe and The Measure of Miranda'' by Sarah Murphy. Other writers have feminised Ariel (as in
Marina Warner's novel
Indigo) or Caliban (as in
Suniti Namjoshi's sequence of poems
Snapshots of Caliban).
Art 's painting of
The Tempest . From the mid-18th century, Shakespeare's plays, including
The Tempest, began to appear as the subject of paintings. In around 1735,
William Hogarth produced his painting
A Scene from The Tempest: "a baroque, sentimental fantasy costumed in the style of Van Dyck and Rembrandt". The painting is based upon Shakespeare's text, containing no representation of the stage, nor of the (Davenant-Dryden centred) stage tradition of the time.
Henry Fuseli, in a painting commissioned for the
Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (1789) modelled his Prospero on
Leonardo da Vinci. These two 18th-century depictions of the play indicate that Prospero was regarded as its moral centre: viewers of Hogarth's and Fuseli's paintings would have accepted Prospero's wisdom and authority.
John Everett Millais's
Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1851) is among the
Pre-Raphaelite paintings based on the play. In the late 19th century, artists tended to depict Caliban as a
Darwinian "missing-link", with fish-like or ape-like features, as evidenced in
Joseph Noel Paton's
Caliban, and discussed in
Daniel Wilson's book
Caliban: The Missing Link (1873). 's
Caliban Charles Knight produced the
Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare in eight volumes (1838–43). The work attempted to translate the contents of the plays into pictorial form. This extended not just to the action, but also to images and metaphors: Gonzalo's line about "mountaineers dewlapped like bulls" is illustrated with a picture of a Swiss peasant with a
goitre. In 1908,
Edmund Dulac produced an edition of ''Shakespeare's Comedy of The Tempest'' with a scholarly plot summary and commentary by
Arthur Quiller-Couch, lavishly bound and illustrated with 40 watercolour illustrations. The illustrations highlight the fairy-tale quality of the play, avoiding its dark side. Of the 40, only 12 are direct depictions of the action of the play: the others are based on action before the play begins, or on images such as "full fathom five thy father lies" or "sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not". In 2015
Charmaine Lurch's installation
Revisiting Sycorax gave a physical form to a figure only spoken about in Shakespeare's play, and intended to draw attention to the discrepancy between the presence of African women in the world and the way they are spoken of in European male dialogue.
Screen '' (1908) , 1905
The Tempest first appeared on the screen in 1905.
Charles Urban filmed the opening storm sequence of
Herbert Beerbohm Tree's version at
Her Majesty's Theatre for a -minute
flicker, whose individual frames were hand-tinted, long before the invention of colour film. In 1908
Percy Stow directed
The Tempest running a little over ten minutes, which is now a part of the
British Film Institute's compilation
Silent Shakespeare. It portrays a condensed version of Shakespeare's play in a series of short scenes linked by
intertitles. At least two other silent versions,
one from 1911 by
Edwin Thanhouser, are known to have existed, but have been lost. The plot was adapted for the Western
Yellow Sky, directed by
William A. Wellman, in 1946. The 1956 science fiction film
Forbidden Planet set the story on a planet in space, Altair IV, instead of an island. Professor Morbius (
Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaira (
Anne Francis) are the Prospero and Miranda figures, whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of a spaceship from Earth. Ariel is represented by the helpful
Robby the Robot. Caliban is represented by the dangerous and invisible "monster from the
id", a technologically enhanced projection of Morbius' psyche. Writing in 2000, Douglas Brode expressed the opinion that there had only been one screen "performance" of
The Tempest since the silent era: He describes all other versions as "variations". That one performance is the
Hallmark Hall of Fame version from 1960, directed by
George Schaefer, and starring
Maurice Evans as Prospero,
Richard Burton as Caliban,
Lee Remick as Miranda, and
Roddy McDowall as Ariel. It cut the play to slightly less than ninety minutes. Critic Virginia Vaughan praised it as "light as a
soufflé, but ... substantial enough for the main course". In 1979,
Derek Jarman produced the homoerotic film
The Tempest that used Shakespeare's language, but was most notable for its deviations from Shakespeare. One scene shows a corpulent and naked Sycorax (
Claire Davenport) breastfeeding her adult son Caliban (
Jack Birkett). The film reaches its climax with
Elisabeth Welch belting out "
Stormy Weather". The central performances were
Toyah Willcox's Miranda and
Heathcote Williams's Prospero, a "dark brooding figure who takes pleasure in exploiting both his servants".
Paul Mazursky's 1982 modern-language adaptation
Tempest, with Philip Dimitrius (the Prospero character, played by
John Cassavetes) as a disillusioned New York architect who retreats to a lonely Greek island with his daughter Miranda after learning of his wife Antonia's infidelity with Alonzo, dealt frankly with the sexual tensions of the characters' isolated existence. The Caliban character, the goatherd Kalibanos, asks Philip which of them is going to have sex with Miranda.
John Gielgud wrote that playing Prospero in a film of
The Tempest was his life's ambition. Eventually, the project was taken on by
Peter Greenaway, who directed ''
Prospero's Books (1991) featuring "an 87-year-old John Gielgud and an impressive amount of nudity". Prospero is reimagined as the author of The Tempest'', speaking the lines of the other characters, as well as his own. Although the film was acknowledged as innovative for its "unprecedented visual complexity", critical responses were frequently negative:
John Simon called it "contemptible and pretentious". Closer to the spirit of Shakespeare's original, in the view of critics such as Brode, is
Leon Garfield's abridgement of the play for
S4C's 1992
Shakespeare: The Animated Tales series. The 29-minute production, directed by
Stanislav Sokolov and featuring
Timothy West as the voice of Prospero, used
stop-motion puppets to capture the fairy-tale quality of the play. Another "offbeat variation" (in Brode's words) was produced for
NBC in 1998:
Jack Bender's
The Tempest featured
Peter Fonda as Gideon Prosper, a Southern slave-owner forced off his plantation by his brother shortly before the
Civil War. A magician who has learned his art from one of his slaves, Prosper uses his magic to protect his teenage daughter and to assist the Union Army. Director
Julie Taymor's 2010 adaptation
The Tempest starred
Helen Mirren as Prospera, a female Prospero character: with the text adapted to establish a different backstory between Prospera and Antonio. The film was praised for its powerful visual imagery used in place of Shakespearean language. "La stoffa dei sogni" (The Stuff of Dreams) is a 2016 Italian film directed by Gianfranco Cabiddu and starring Sergio Rubini and Ennio Fantastichini. The film is loosely based on Eduardo De Filippo's play L'arte della commedia (The Art of Comedy) and Eduardo De Filippo's Neapolitan translation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. The plot is as follows: A storm throws a motley crew of castaways onto the prison island of Asinara, in Sardinia: four Camorra members, the two guards who were escorting them to prison, and the four members of a traveling theater company. Three of the Camorra members decide to pose as theater actors playing The Tempest, with the (reluctant) help of the troupe's leader, Oreste Campese, to escape capture by the prison warden. But De Caro, the warden, is a suspicious man, and immediately suspects that Campese's troupe is harboring some of the prisoners who survived the shipwreck. De Caro's daughter is named Miranda, although the character of Prospero is split between Oreste Campese and De Caro. ==Citations==