The Tempest: Shakespeare’s Final Spell

Prospero, a deposed duke turned sorcerer, conjures the storm that strands his usurping brother on his island, and spends the play holding total magical power over everyone around him — before choosing, in the final act, to give it up entirely, break his staff, and drown his book of spells. It’s widely read as Shakespeare’s own farewell to the stage, written near the end of his career, though scholars still debate how deliberate that autobiographical reading was.

What’s less debated is how strange the play’s morality remains: Prospero’s magic is used for a genuinely uncomfortable mix of justice and casual cruelty, especially toward Caliban, the island’s original inhabitant, enslaved and mocked throughout — a subplot that has made The Tempest one of Shakespeare’s most fiercely reexamined plays in the last century, read now as much about colonization as about forgiveness.

It ends, unusually for Shakespeare, not with marriage or death but with a direct appeal to the audience for release — Prospero asking, in the epilogue, to finally be set free.

Read The Complete Works of William Shakespeare →