Prospero

Based on Wikipedia: Prospero

A desperate father clutches his three-year-old daughter as their rotting boat drifts across open water. His own brother has sentenced them to die at sea. But they don't die. They wash ashore on a mysterious island populated by spirits, and over the next twelve years, this exiled duke transforms himself into one of the most powerful sorcerers in all of literature.

This is Prospero, the protagonist of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, and quite possibly Shakespeare's final word on his own extraordinary career.

The Wronged Duke

To understand Prospero, you have to understand betrayal.

Before the play begins, Prospero was the Duke of Milan, one of the most powerful city-states in Renaissance Italy. But he was a scholarly duke, more interested in his books than in politics. His brother Antonio exploited this inattention ruthlessly. With help from the King of Naples, Antonio seized power and set Prospero and his infant daughter Miranda adrift in what Shakespeare memorably calls "a rotten carcass" of a boat.

The intended message was clear: die quietly at sea, and trouble us no more.

They didn't die. A kindly councilor named Gonzalo had secretly stocked the boat with provisions, clothing, and most importantly, Prospero's beloved books. These weren't ordinary books. They were grimoires, volumes of magical knowledge that would become the foundation of Prospero's new identity.

The Island Kingdom

The island where Prospero and Miranda land is no ordinary piece of land. It exists in a liminal space between the natural and supernatural worlds, inhabited primarily by spirits of various temperaments and powers. Before Prospero arrived, the island was ruled by a witch named Sycorax, who had been exiled there from Algiers.

Sycorax had imprisoned a spirit named Ariel inside a cloven pine tree. This is a fascinating detail that Shakespeare never fully explains. Ariel had refused to carry out Sycorax's "earthy and abhorred commands," so she trapped him in living wood for twelve years. When Sycorax died, Ariel remained imprisoned, his groans filling the island with otherworldly sound.

Prospero freed him. And in freeing him, bound him.

This is the moral complexity at the heart of The Tempest. Prospero liberates Ariel from one form of slavery only to impose another. The spirit serves Prospero faithfully throughout the play, but their relationship crackles with tension. Ariel constantly asks when he will be freed. Prospero constantly reminds him of the debt he owes.

Caliban: The Other Servant

If Ariel represents the ethereal, Caliban represents the earthly. He is Sycorax's son, born on the island, and his very name is an anagram (or near-anagram) of "cannibal." Shakespeare drew on contemporary accounts of New World exploration when creating this character, and centuries of scholars have debated whether Caliban represents colonized peoples, human nature in its "natural" state, or something else entirely.

What's clear is that Prospero treats Caliban with considerably less affection than he shows Ariel. Where Ariel receives promises of eventual freedom, Caliban receives threats and physical punishment. Prospero controls him through magic, causing cramps, pinches, and other torments when Caliban disobeys.

Caliban's grievance is worth hearing. He argues that he welcomed Prospero and Miranda when they first arrived, showed them the fresh springs and fertile patches of the island, and was repaid with subjugation. From Caliban's perspective, he is the rightful ruler of the island, and Prospero is the usurper.

Sound familiar? Prospero was usurped in Milan. Now he becomes the usurper himself.

The Sorcerer's Power

Prospero's magic is genuinely formidable. He can command the weather, summoning the tempest that gives the play its name. He can create illusions so convincing that characters cannot distinguish them from reality. He can put people to sleep, paralyze them, or drive them to madness.

Most remarkably, he claims the power to raise the dead.

"Graves at my command have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth, by my so potent Art."

This line has troubled scholars for centuries. Shakespeare's audience would have recognized necromancy, the summoning of the dead, as the darkest form of magic, explicitly forbidden by both church and state. Is Prospero confessing to genuine evil? Or is he exaggerating, lost in a moment of rhetorical excess? The play never makes this clear.

What Shakespeare does make clear is that Prospero's power comes at a cost. He is isolated, obsessive, and emotionally volatile. He snaps at Ariel. He terrorizes Caliban. He lectures Miranda endlessly. The magic that protects his daughter has also made him somewhat monstrous.

Shakespeare's Farewell

The Tempest was written around 1610 to 1611, and scholars believe it was the last play Shakespeare wrote alone. This timing has led generations of readers to see Prospero as Shakespeare's self-portrait, and his famous speeches as the playwright's own farewell to the stage.

Consider the "Our revels now are ended" speech, delivered after Prospero stages an elaborate magical pageant:

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind."

The "great globe" is simultaneously the Earth and the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare's company performed. The "insubstantial pageant" is both Prospero's magical show and the theatrical productions that had consumed Shakespeare's career. The speech works on two levels at once, addressing both the fictional situation and something far more personal.

Even more striking is Prospero's epilogue, delivered directly to the audience after the play proper has ended. He asks for applause, but frames it as a plea for release:

"Now my charms are all o'erthrown, and what strength I have's mine own, which is most faint... As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free."

If Prospero is Shakespeare, then Shakespeare is asking his audience to release him from the spell they've placed him under, the demand that he continue creating magic for their entertainment. It's a remarkably vulnerable moment from literature's most celebrated writer.

The Great Prosperos

Prospero is one of the most coveted roles in classical theater, typically reserved for actors in the later stages of their careers. The character's age, gravitas, and complex emotional journey make him a pinnacle of the repertoire.

Sir John Gielgud played Prospero three times at the Old Vic alone, spanning four decades from 1931 to 1974. His interpretations evolved as he aged, moving from a commanding sorcerer to a more reflective, weary figure. The role seemed to grow with him.

James Earl Jones brought Prospero to Central Park in 1962 for the New York Shakespeare Festival, lending his legendary voice to Shakespeare's poetry. Patrick Stewart played the role there in 1995, decades before he would portray Captain Picard, who himself would quote Prospero in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The role has also been played by women. Vanessa Redgrave portrayed Prospero at Shakespeare's Globe in 2000, a particularly poignant casting given that her father, Sir Michael Redgrave, had played the role decades earlier (with Vanessa herself as Ariel in a 1964 audio recording). Martha Henry took the role at Canada's Stratford Festival in 2018.

Christopher Plummer's 2010 Stratford performance was filmed for television, preserving one of the great classical actors in one of the great classical roles. William Hutt played Prospero at Stratford four separate times across more than forty years, from 1962 to 2005, making the character something like a lifelong companion.

Prospero's Long Afterlife

Great fictional characters have a way of escaping their original stories, and Prospero has proven remarkably portable.

Paul Mazursky's 1982 film Tempest relocated the story to a Greek island, with John Cassavetes as Philip Dimitrius, a disillusioned architect fleeing American cynicism for a simpler life. The magic becomes metaphorical, but the themes of exile, control, and eventual forgiveness remain.

A 1998 television movie set The Tempest in a Mississippi bayou during the American Civil War. Peter Fonda played Gideon Prosper, a plantation owner who had learned voodoo from enslaved people. This adaptation made the play's colonial undertones disturbingly explicit.

Edgar Allan Poe borrowed the name for "The Masque of the Red Death," his 1842 tale of a prince who tries to escape a plague by sealing himself in an abbey with a thousand friends. Prince Prospero's attempts to control his environment through wealth and isolation end in spectacular failure, a dark inversion of Shakespeare's character.

The Warhammer 40,000 universe, that sprawling science fiction war game setting, features a planet called Prospero, home to the Thousand Sons Space Marine legion and their primarch Magnus the Red. The citizens are versed in sorcery and psychic powers, earning them suspicion and eventual destruction by their own supposed allies. It's Shakespeare's island transformed into an entire doomed world.

Prospero in the Stars

Science fiction has proven particularly receptive to Prospero's story. The isolation of an island translates naturally to the isolation of space.

In the television series The Expanse, both novels and show, a research station called Prospero develops and controls human-alien hybrids nicknamed Calibans. The naming is deliberate: these creatures are the monstrous products of experiments conducted by those who believe they can control forces beyond their understanding.

Star Trek: The Next Generation paid direct homage in "Emergence," a seventh-season episode where the android Data performs Prospero's speeches on the Enterprise holodeck, seeking insight into the character from Captain Picard. The mobile game Star Trek Timelines later released a "Prospero Data" character based on this appearance.

The anime series Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury features a character named Prospera Mercury, a mother who has sent her daughter to a piloting school with a mobile suit called Aerial. The Tempest parallels are extensive: Prospera is an exile seeking to reclaim what was taken from her, using her daughter as an instrument of revenge.

And in Doctor Who, the Sycorax are an alien race who invade Earth at Christmas. They possess a science similar to witchcraft that allows them to control humans through blood samples. The name comes from Prospero's enemy, Caliban's mother, suggesting these aliens represent the dark magic that Prospero opposed.

Prospero in Games

Video games have found their own uses for Shakespeare's sorcerer.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a 2014 mystery game, features a protagonist named Paul Prospero, a detective with psychic abilities investigating disappearances in a rural American valley. The name signals his role as someone who sees beyond ordinary reality.

Life is Strange: Before the Storm has its characters rehearsing The Tempest at their school. The player character, Chloe Price, plays Ariel, while Rachel Amber, the mysterious object of Chloe's obsession, plays Prospero. The casting is significant: Rachel is the one with power in their relationship, the one who seems to control the very air around her.

In the strategy game Into the Breach, a mech pilot named Prospero can be unlocked. This robotic character grants flight capabilities to whatever mech it pilots, echoing both Ariel's airy nature and Prospero's command over spirits.

Project Wingman, a flight combat simulator, names a major city Prospero. It belongs to Cascadia, an allied nation to the protagonist. The name suggests civilization, culture, and something worth defending.

Books and Beyond

Novelists have returned to Prospero again and again.

John Bellairs's The Face in the Frost (1969) features a wizard protagonist named Prospero, though Bellairs playfully adds the disclaimer "and not the one you're thinking of." His Prospero lives in a medieval world of genuine, dangerous magic, and the joke is that the name has become synonymous with a certain kind of wise, scholarly sorcerer.

Erin Morgenstern's national bestseller The Night Circus features a stage magician named Hector Bowen who performs under the name Prospero the Enchanter. He is the father of the protagonist, Celia, and their relationship echoes Shakespeare's themes of paternal control and eventual release.

Dan Simmons's Ilium and Olympos, his ambitious science fiction retelling of both Homer and Shakespeare, features Prospero as an actual character. In Simmons's far-future Earth, the boundaries between fiction and reality have broken down entirely, allowing literary characters to walk alongside humans and posthumans.

Justin Cronin's 2023 dystopian novel The Ferryman takes place on an archipelago named Prospera, and Prospero's speeches are quoted throughout. The novel explores themes of memory, immortality, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, all concerns that Shakespeare's character shares.

Television's Prosperos

Television has produced several notable Prospero variations.

The Librarians, a fantasy adventure series, made Prospero its main antagonist for season two. This version, played by Richard Cox, is a Fictional, a character literally brought to life by magic, who has become bitter about the way his story was written. He feels Shakespeare created him without consent, and he's determined to rewrite reality to his own specifications. It's a clever inversion: Prospero, who controls others throughout The Tempest, discovers he was always being controlled himself.

In the New Zealand play Melon Cauliflower by Tom McCrory, Prospero is a man in his late sixties struggling with his wife's death and his mistreatment of his daughter Miranda. The magic is gone; what remains is guilt, grief, and the difficulty of change.

And in Endeavour, the prequel series to Inspector Morse, the final episode closes with Prospero's "our revels now are ended" speech, recited by Anton Lesser. It serves as farewell not just to the character but to the entire Morse franchise, three generations of television about a cultured Oxford detective. Shakespeare's words, written four centuries earlier, still fit perfectly.

Why Prospero Endures

What is it about this character that keeps artists returning to him?

Part of it is the fantasy of absolute power. Prospero can do almost anything on his island. He can punish his enemies, protect his daughter, and reshape reality through sheer will. In an uncertain world, there's something deeply appealing about a figure who has achieved total control over his environment.

But that's only half the story. The other half is that Prospero gives it up.

At the end of The Tempest, having achieved his revenge and secured his daughter's future, Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his book. He renounces the magic that has defined him for twelve years. He chooses to be merely human again.

This is astonishing. Characters who acquire great power almost never surrender it voluntarily. The corruption of power is one of literature's oldest themes. But Prospero suggests that wisdom lies in knowing when to let go.

"Now my charms are all o'erthrown..."

He becomes vulnerable. He becomes mortal. And he becomes, perhaps, finally free.

If Shakespeare was indeed saying farewell to his own magical powers, his own ability to conjure worlds from words, then he was modeling a lesson for all of us. Even the greatest gifts must eventually be released. Even the most powerful must eventually say: my work here is done.

That message resonates whether you encounter it in a Renaissance playhouse, a Mississippi bayou, a distant galaxy, or a video game about piloting mechs. Prospero's story is about the seduction of power and the grace required to surrender it. Four centuries later, we're still learning from him.