William Shakespeare
The Tempest
Cast
Alonso, King of Naples - Roger Hammond
Sebastian, his brother - John McAndrew
Prospero, Duke of Milan - Ian McKellen
Antonio, his brother, the usurping
Duke of Milan - Neville Jason
Miranda, daughter of Prospero - Emilia Fox
Ferdinand, son to the King of Naples - Benedict Cumberbatch
Gonzalo, an honest old councillor - David Burke
Adrian, a lord - Simon Treves
Francisco, a lord - Tim Bentinck
Caliban, a savage and deformed slave - Ben Onwukwe
Trinculo, a jester - Ian Talbot
Stephano, a drunken butler - John Hodgkinson
Master - Simon Treves
Boatswain - Tim Bentinck
Ariel, an airy spirit - Scott Handy
Juno - Elaine Claxton
Ceres - Laura Paton
Director John Tydeman
Recording and Editing Engineer Mike Etherden
Studio Manager Peter Novis
Producer Nicolas Soames
Recorded at RNIB Talking Book Studios, London
Synopsis
Act 1 Scene 1: Thunder. Lightning. A
tempest at sea drives a ship carrying Alonso,
King of Naples, Ferdinand, his son, and
Antonio, Duke of Milan, plus sundry
courtiers travelling from Tunis after the
marriage of the King’s daughter, onto rocks
and is wrecked with the loss, it is assumed,
of all aboard.
Act 1 Scene 2: On a nearby island,
Prospero, the usurped Duke of Milan, and
his daughter, Miranda, watch the storm
which he confesses to having caused by
magic with the help of his servant spirit,
Ariel, whom he has released from
imprisonment by Sycorax, the former ruler
of the island, and mother of Caliban, a
misshapen monster who is also in his
service. Prospero abates the tempest and
tells his daughter their past history, how his
brother ousted him with the aid of the King
of Naples and how he and his baby
daughter were put to sea in a small boat,
loaded with his magic books placed there
by a kindly courtier, Gonzalo, and how they
arrived on the island and ‘colonised’ it. Ariel
is despatched, invisible, to find Ferdinand,
the King’s son; Caliban is called and set to work; and Miranda is put to sleep. When
she awakes she sees Ferdinand, whom Ariel
has led to her by song, and they instantly
fall in love. Prospero (who has planned all
this) responds sternly and puts Ferdinand to
hard labour.
Act 2 Scene 1: Elsewhere on the island
the good Gonzalo tries to cheer up King
Alonso who is grieving for Ferdinand’s
supposed death. Ariel puts the two of them
to sleep during which Antonio persuades
the King’s brother, Sebastian, to kill Alonso
and grab the crown. At the point of murder
Ariel awakens the King and Gonzalo, who
become suspicious upon seeing drawn
swords, and the four men go off in search
of survivors of the wreck.
Act 2 Scene 2: Two survivors are
Trinculo, a jester, and Stephano, a butler,
who is drunk on salvaged wine. Caliban,
seeing Trinculo, thinks him to be a spirit
sent to haunt him and hides under a
gaberdine cloak. Trinculo, frightened by a
storm, hides under the same cloak.
Stephano, inebriated, sees what he takes to
be a monster of the island. He gives Caliban
a drink and he agrees to serve the two men
if they give him more drink and he’ll then be free of Prospero’s masterdom.
Act 3 Scene 1: Ferdinand appears
carrying heavy logs and Miranda expresses
her pity and love for him. Overheard by an
unseen and approving Prospero, they vow
to marry.
Act 3 Scene 2: Encouraged by an
invisible Ariel, Trinculo, Stephano and
Caliban quarrel in a comic fashion and they
agree to murder Prospero and set Stephano
up as King of the island with Miranda as his
consort and Caliban and Trinculo as
viceroys. Ariel, still unseen, leads them off
to a catch sung to pipe and tabor.
Act 3 Scene 3: Alonso and the hungry
courtiers behold a banquet laid out for
them by spirits. They are about to eat when
Ariel, as a harpy, makes the banquet
disappear and confronts them with their
crimes and sins. Full of guilt and remorse
and believing the death of his son to be a
judgement upon him, Alonso goes to find
Ferdinand’s corpse and to die beside him.
Gonzalo follows him, with the half-crazed
Sebastian and Antonio, to prevent selfharm.
Act 4 Scene 3: Prospero confesses that
Ferdinand’s servitude was to test his mettle
and consents to his marriage with his
daughter. In celebration of the engagement
Prospero’s spirits perform a masque, but
during a dance of nymphs and rustic reapers Prospero remembers Caliban’s plot
against him and abruptly ends the magical
proceedings. Ariel tempts the three drunken
would-be assassins on with glittering
frippery hanging on a line. Then he and
Prospero chase them away with spirits
disguised as hunting-hounds. Prospero
muses that all his enemies are now at his
mercy.
Act 5 Scene 1: Arrayed in his magic
robes, Prospero hears of the afflictions Ariel
has wrought on his enemies and shows
some compassion for them and, since they
are penitent, he will not seek vengeance on
them. In a trance Alonso and the others are
led in by Ariel. Prospero promises to
renounce his magic powers and disrobes as
a magus to reveal himself to the surprised
King and courtiers as the rightful Duke
of Milan and offers forgiveness and
reconciliation. Ferdinand is restored to his
father and Miranda introduced to him.
Caliban admits his foolishness in being
deceived by the drunken Stephano and
Trinculo. The Master and Boatswain appear
to declare that the ship is miraculously
intact, and Ariel will be freed once he has
provided a wind which will enable the
sailing-ship to catch up with the rest of
Alonso’s fleet. All leave for Italy and en
route Prospero will tell the whole story.
Caliban is left alone on the island.
In an Epilogue Prospero, as an actor,
asks for the indulgence and the liberating
applause of the audience.
Notes
When I was writing the synopsis of The
Tempest for these notes it was enforcedly
borne in upon me that the play, unlike all of
Shakespeare’s other dramatic works,
doesn’t really have a plot. It tells a story, it
has events, it even has plots within it—Antonio and Sebastian plot to kill King
Alonso and steal a brother’s crown; Caliban,
Trinculo and Stephano plot to kill Prospero,
establish Stephano as King of the island,
with Miranda as his consort and the jester
and the bully-monster as viceroys. Magic
overcomes motive and has mastery over
character.
It is magic which defines events, from
the raising of the storm in the first
act to the reconciliations of the last act
and the promised marriage of Ferdinand
and Miranda and the restoration of
his Dukedom to Prospero. He tells us
in narrative, after the dramatic and
naturalistic-seeming shipwreck, the story of
all that has happened in the past which
really is the main action and the dramatic
plot. From the moment we meet Prospero
with Miranda in Act 1 Scene 2 he is in
control of the present and we know that he can forsee the future after he has broken
his staff (wand), buried his books and
abandoned the practice of magic. Because
of Prospero’s control over events and people
there is no real danger, no dramatic conflict,
just a progression of controlled happenings
leading to a preordained conclusion.
Rarely for Elizabethan/Jacobean drama
The Tempest observes the three classical
Unities of Time (the events of the play occur
within a limit of three to four hours);
Place (the island); and Action (things
happen continuously). One has some
sympathy with the French critic who
observed that “Shakespeare finally
succeeded in preserving the Unity of Time
only by eliminating action altogether”.
The Tempest, which is the last play
Shakespeare wrote as sole author (Henry
VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen were
collaborations with John Fletcher), differs
from the rest of his dramatic work. To
anyone familiar with the canon it just ‘feels’
different. It has a different texture and
symmetry. It aspires to the discipline of
music and it is no accident that it has
inspired numerous musicians—Beethoven,
Purcell, Berlioz, Tippett and Tchaikovsky.
At the time of his death Mozart was
contemplating making it into an opera.
It has about it the qualities of a poem, a
‘sea-poem’ some have called it. It has inspired numerous other works of art—W.H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror,
Milton’s Comus, Shelley’s Ariel to Miranda,
Browning’s Caliban upon Setebos, Marina
Warner’s novel Indigo. It has inspired films
by David Jarman and Peter Greenaway—even the science-fiction film Forbidden
Planet. Dryden and Davenant rewrote the
original play, introducing new characters
and a changed ending, and called their
work The Enchanted Isle. It was in this form
that The Tempest was played for over 150
years into the 19th century—and even
afterwards many liberties were taken with
the text.
That text was first published in the
Folio edition of 1623, seven years after
Shakespeare’s death, and appeared as the
first play in the volume. There were no
problematic Quarto editions or pirate
editions and we can be assured that the
play comes down to us much as
Shakespeare intended. Whether he actually
meant the play to be taken as a kind of
personal statement, as a sort of farewell to
the theatre by the greatest poet–dramatist
of the age (and of all time—but he wasn’t
to know that!) is a moot point. Such was
taken to be the case by sentimentalists for
several centuries and there may well have
been some such stirring in the creative
subconscious of a successful man of the theatre who has made his money and
wishes to retire to the country from the
hurly-burly of London. I like to think so and
can easily read such an intention into the
script.
One fact is certain—the play is about a
magus, a practitioner of magic, who says
farewell to his Art. Shakespeare was
certainly such a one.
The play is unlike any other of
Shakespeare’s insofar as the story is
concerned. It is a tale entirely of his
own devising. All his other plays were
adaptations of other people’s work, be they
histories, romances, comedies or tragedies.
He was to the theatre of his day what
Andrew Davis is to television of today—a
dramatiser. But The Tempest is special. It is
original.
Of course there are references to the
works of others—Ovid’s Metamorphosis in
the 1567 Arthur Golding translation (which
he dipped into for many of his works),
Virgil’s Aeneid and John Florio’s translation
of Montaigne’s Essays. Most interestingly
and uniquely, the trigger for the play was an
actual incident that occurred in 1609,
accounts of which were published in 1610.
A ship, the Sea-Venturer, under Sir William
Gates, one of a small flotilla taking wouldbe
colonists to the brave New World, was
wrecked in the Bermudas and all aboard were considered lost. Then, months later,
passengers and crew miraculously (it
seemed) turned up on the coast of Virginia
unscathed. This dates the writing of the play
as being 1610/1611, for it was performed
at court before James I on 1st November
1611 and later as part of the celebrations
for the marriage of his daughter Princess
Elizabeth in 1613.
The fact that it was always performed
indoors affected the nature of the play’s
form and structure. The masque, with much
music and elaborate scenery, was the
Jacobean fashion and The Tempest
conformed to this fashion, which was more
restrictive than the boundless space offered
by the Elizabethan theatre in playhouses
such as The Globe or The Rose.
This was also a period of much new
colonisation, particularly in the Americas,
and a considerable amount of debate on
the subject was available in print. There
is no doubt that someone such as
Shakespeare was aware of the discussions
and made reference to them in this play.
Some have even suggested that the name ‘Caliban’ is an anagram of ‘cannibal’.
Whilst The Tempest may be short on
plot, in theme it follows the preoccupations
of Shakespeare’s last romance plays—Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale.
Vengeance turns to forgiveness, servitude to
freedom, peace and reconciliation are all.
The message is very much in line with
Christian philosophy and teaching and all
are given their freedom, even Prospero who
frees himself.
But what of the actor trapped within his
role? In the medium of sound alone he
and the writer have fired the listener’s
imagination, created visions within ‘the
kingdom of the mind’, and the actors too,
those spirits, need setting free. That is the
request made by Shakespeare in the
Epilogue when the ‘insubstantial pageant’
has faded. Your indulgent approbation as
audience creates its own form of liberation
and whilst we may not be able to actually
hear your response—we hope we will,
somehow, sense it.
Notes by John Tydeman
The music on this recording is taken from the NAXOS catalogue
Early Venetian Lute Music
8.553694
Christopher Wilson, solo lute / Shirley Rumsey, lute duettist
GIOVANNI Gabrieli
8.553609
London Symphony Orchestra Brass / Eric Crees
Ariel’s songs sung by Scott Handy
Recorder and percussion accompaniments by Scott Handy
Additional songs written and arranged by David Timson, copyright Naxos AudioBooks
Lute accompanist Dorothy Linell
