1Forgiveness over vengeance
Prospero spends the whole play assembling his enemies for judgment—he scatters them, terrifies them with a harpy, and hunts conspirators with hounds. Every instrument points toward punishment. Then Ariel, a spirit of mere air, confesses that the prisoners' sorrow would move him to tenderness, and Prospero asks how flesh and blood could feel less. He names 'the rarer action' as virtue, not vengeance, and means it: he pardons Antonio, the brother who never repents. The play's point is that revenge is the easy, expected move; mercy is the rarer, harder art.
Characters:ProsperoArielAntonio
2Power, books, and renunciation
Prospero's magic lives in his books—Caliban knows it, telling the conspirators to seize the books first, since without them Prospero is 'but a sot.' The books once saved his life, smuggled into the adrift boat by Gonzalo, and they let him command storms and spirits. To return to the human world, he vows to drown his book deeper than ever plummet sounded and break his staff. Power that rescued him also imprisoned others; the play insists that reclaiming his dukedom requires giving up the art that made him more than a duke.
Characters:ProsperoCalibanGonzalo
3Language and enslavement
Caliban learned Prospero's language as payment for showing the newcomers the island's qualities—and uses it chiefly to curse: 'my profit on't is, I know how to curse.' Miranda taught him to speak and later pities him; Prospero calls him a 'poisonous slave' and 'thing of darkness.' The gift of language arrives bound to servitude, and Caliban's sharpest poetry—the isle 'full of noises'—comes from the dispossessed native. The play lets its colonized character speak most beautifully while denying him his island.
Characters:ProsperoMirandaCaliban
4The transience of art and life
Prospero interrupts his own betrothal masque—the goddesses Iris, Ceres, and Juno blessing the young couple—because a murder plot is closing in. The spectacle dissolves, and he draws the moral: the actors 'were all spirits and are melted into air,' and so are cloud-capped towers, gorgeous palaces, the great globe itself. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on.' The play about a playwright-magician keeps insisting its own wonders will leave 'not a rack behind'—and the epilogue hands the ending to the audience's applause.
Characters:Prospero
5Innocence and first sight
Miranda has seen no man but her father and Caliban, so Ferdinand's arrival makes her take him for a divine being—while he takes her for a goddess. Each sees the other as more than human, and Prospero deliberately slows the blaze by accusing Ferdinand of spying and setting him to log-hauling. The lovers' courtship runs through labor and obedience—Miranda offering to carry logs, proposing marriage outright—so that wonder is tempered into a vow. The play treats first love as real, but only survivable under a father's watchful test.
Characters:ProsperoMirandaCalibanFerdinand