The Tempest
William Shakespeare (1611)
“Shakespeare's final solo play: a magician who controls everything finally chooses to give it all up — and asks the audience to set him free.”
Why This Book Matters
The Tempest is the first play in the First Folio (1623), placed there by Shakespeare's fellow players — suggesting they considered it either his last play, his best, or both. It is the primary source text for postcolonial literary criticism in the Anglophone tradition, with Caliban becoming one of the most politically analyzed characters in world literature. The play introduced 'brave new world' and 'what's past is prologue' into the English language.
Firsts & Innovations
First major work of English literature to feature colonial dispossession as an explicit subject — Caliban's claim to the island precedes Defoe's Robinson Crusoe by a century
One of the earliest uses of a spirit servant as theatrical device that asks the audience to question the master's right to command
The Epilogue's direct appeal for applause as moral mercy is unique in Shakespeare's canon and rare in world drama
Cultural Impact
'Brave new world' — from Miranda's speech — became Aldous Huxley's title and common English idiom
'What's past is prologue' — Gonzalo's speech — engraved on the National Archives building in Washington, D.C.
Caliban became the central figure in postcolonial rewritings: Aimé Césaire's 'Une Tempête' (1969) retells the play from a Black Caribbean perspective; Roberto Fernández Retamar's 'Calibán' (1971) made Caliban the symbol of Latin American resistance to cultural imperialism
The play inspired Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden (his 'The Sea and the Mirror'), T.S. Eliot (echoes in The Waste Land), and directly the film Forbidden Planet (1956)
Taught at virtually every level of the curriculum in English-speaking countries; one of the five Shakespeare plays appearing most frequently on AP and IB examinations
Banned & Challenged
Not formally banned, but The Tempest has been the subject of sustained controversy in postcolonial contexts. In some Caribbean and African curricula, it has been challenged for presenting colonialism sympathetically. Caliban's character has been at the center of debates about whose perspective the play validates — and whether assigning it without postcolonial context is itself a pedagogical problem.