100 Fun Facts About The Tempest

Prospero, the magician at the centre of The Tempest, was formerly the duke of which city?

Milan. He lost it through his own neglect: wrapped up in his books, he handed the running of the state to his brother, who decided to keep it.

Who is Prospero's treacherous brother in The Tempest?

Antonio. He never says sorry: Prospero forgives him aloud in the last scene and Antonio makes no reply, saving his only remaining line for a joke about Caliban.

In The Tempest, Alonso, who helped depose Prospero, is king of which realm?

Naples. The play ends by tying the old enemies together: Alonso's son is to marry Prospero's daughter, so the exiled duke's grandchildren will inherit this crown.

According to Prospero in The Tempest, 'we are such stuff as' what 'are made on'?

Dreams. Prospero says it moments after halting the wedding masque in alarm, having just remembered that Caliban and his drunken allies are on their way to kill him.

Which witch, banished from Algiers, ruled the island and enslaved Ariel before Prospero arrived in The Tempest?

Sycorax. She never appears on stage: she died before Prospero landed, and it is her son Caliban who insists the island is his by inheritance from her.

In The Tempest, what was Ariel trapped inside for twelve years?

A pine. Prospero treats the rescue as a debt to collect: when Ariel asks for his freedom, he threatens to peg him inside an oak for twelve more winters.

What is the name of Prospero's daughter in The Tempest?

Miranda. She was not yet three when they were cast adrift, so the first young man she meets at fifteen is only the third man she can remember ever seeing.

Which shipwrecked prince falls in love with Prospero's daughter in The Tempest?

Ferdinand. Prospero wants the match but fakes hostility, calling the prince a spy and setting him to haul logs, for fear that a prize won too easily would be valued too lightly.

Which two comic characters join Caliban in a failed 'rebellion' against Prospero?

Trinculo and Stephano. A jester and a drunken butler: Caliban takes Stephano for a god once he has tasted his wine, and all three end up hunted by spirits in the shape of hounds.

In The Tempest, which old counsellor stocked the exiled Prospero's boat with food, clothes and his beloved books?

Gonzalo. He was the man put in charge of casting the duke adrift, yet twelve years later Prospero still greets him as 'my true preserver'.

Which three goddesses appear in the Act IV betrothal masque of The Tempest?

Juno, Ceres and Iris. Venus and Cupid are pointedly kept away, because the show is a lesson for the young couple in waiting until the wedding night.

In the epilogue of The Tempest, Prospero asks the audience to set him free with what?

Their applause. 'Release me from my bands with the help of your good hands,' he says: his magic is gone, and it is now for the audience to let him leave the island.

In The Tempest, Ariel takes the shape of which monster to make a banquet vanish?

Harpy. Ariel calls the king and his two companions 'three men of sin' and tells them the storm was payback for casting Prospero and his child out to sea.

Which playwright collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen after The Tempest?

John Fletcher. He went on to take Shakespeare's place as the King's Men's house playwright, and the third play the two wrote together, Cardenio, has been lost.

The wreck of which ship on Bermuda in 1609 is widely thought to have inspired the opening of The Tempest?

Sea Venture. Survivors' reports reached England the following year, among them an eyewitness letter by William Strachey that Shakespeare is thought to have read before it was printed.

The 1609 Bermuda shipwreck behind The Tempest happened on a supply mission to which struggling colony?

Jamestown. All 150 aboard got ashore alive, and after some nine months on Bermuda they finished the voyage in two small ships they had built on the island.

In The Tempest, Prospero's speech renouncing magic borrows from which sorceress's invocation in Ovid's Metamorphoses?

Medea. Shakespeare follows Arthur Golding's English Ovid closely, with one telling difference: the witch is boasting of her powers, while Prospero uses her words to give his up.

The old counsellor's dream of an ideal commonwealth in The Tempest borrows from which French writer, in Florio's 1603 translation?

Montaigne. He had praised a people of the Americas with no trade, no letters and no magistrates, and the old lord repeats the list almost item by item while the courtiers jeer.

Which book contains the earliest printed text of The Tempest?

The First Folio. The Tempest had never been printed before, so without this book it might have been lost, and it is the play that opens the volume.

Which two colleagues of Shakespeare gathered and edited the plays for the 1623 collected edition?

John Heminges and Henry Condell. They were fellow actors in his company, and Shakespeare's will left each of them money to buy a mourning ring.

In The Tempest, Caliban says his only profit from being taught language is that he knows how to do what?

Curse. Things began kindly: Prospero taught him words and Caliban showed him the island's springs, until an attack on Prospero's daughter ended with Caliban enslaved.

Editors of The Tempest disagree over whether one line reads 'so rare a wondered father and a wise' or which other word?

Wife. In 1623 type a long 's' and an 'f' differ only by a tiny crossbar, so the page can be read either way: the Folger edition prints 'wise' where others print 'wife'.

In which category does the 1623 collected edition list The Tempest, despite its tragic themes?

Comedies. The 1623 volume has only three sections, comedies, histories and tragedies; the label 'romance' for this play and three others was coined by a critic in the 1870s.

The Tempest was acted at court in 1612–13 to celebrate what?

A royal wedding. The king's daughter Elizabeth was marrying a German prince, the Elector Palatine, and this play, with its betrothal masque, was among those staged for the festivities.

Stage directions suggest The Tempest was written with which indoor theatre in mind rather than an open-air playhouse?

Blackfriars. The King's Men had recently taken over the hall, a small candlelit room far more intimate than an open-air stage, a good fit for a play so full of songs and spirit music.

Which poet co-wrote the 1667 Tempest that gave Prospero's daughter a sister?

John Dryden. He and William Davenant added a sister, Dorinda, and a young man who has never seen a woman for her to fall for; their love story stayed in stage versions into the 19th century.

Whose 1838 production of The Tempest finally restored Shakespeare's own text over the adapted versions?

William Charles Macready. Until then audiences had mostly seen a Restoration rewrite with extra lovers and operatic spectacle, which had filled theatres for about 150 years.

Which actor played Prospero on film at 87 in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books?

John Gielgud. He voices the other characters too, because the film imagines Prospero as the author, speaking every line aloud as he writes the play.

Which 1956 sci-fi film transplanted The Tempest to Altair IV?

Forbidden Planet. Its Caliban is an invisible 'monster from the id', unknowingly conjured from the mind of the Prospero figure himself.

In the 1956 science-fiction film based on The Tempest, which famous screen robot stands in for Ariel?

Robby. Built by the film's Prospero figure as a servant, he proved so popular that he went on appearing in other films and television shows long afterwards.

Which actress played a female Prospero, renamed Prospera, in Julie Taymor's 2010 film of The Tempest?

Helen Mirren. Taymor rewrote the backstory to fit: Prospera is a duchess denounced as a sorceress so that her own brother can take her place.

Who played Ariel in Julie Taymor's 2010 film of The Tempest?

Ben Whishaw. A male Ariel was once the exception: for some two centuries, until about 1930, the part was almost always given to actresses.

Which director's 1979 film of The Tempest climaxes with Elisabeth Welch singing 'Stormy Weather'?

Derek Jarman. He shot it in a decaying English country abbey rather than on an island, keeping Shakespeare's words but cutting and reordering them freely.

Aldous Huxley took the title of which novel from an exclamation by Prospero's daughter in The Tempest?

Brave New World. She says it in wonder at the first crowd of strangers she has ever seen, several of them would-be murderers, and her father answers drily, ''Tis new to thee'.

Aimé Césaire's 1969 play Une Tempête reset the story in what context?

A colony suffering unrest. Césaire makes Prospero a white master, Caliban a black slave who demands his freedom at once, and Ariel a mulatto who still hopes to win it by persuasion.

Margaret Atwood's 2016 novel Hag-Seed retells The Tempest through a theatre director teaching where?

A prison literacy programme. Felix waits twelve years, then stages the play with the inmates on the day the rival who had him sacked comes to inspect the scheme.

W. H. Auden's long poem responding to The Tempest is titled what?

The Sea and the Mirror. Auden begins where the play stops and gives the supporting characters speeches in a variety of verse forms, before Caliban lectures the audience on art in extravagant prose.

Which Victorian poet's 'Caliban upon Setebos' has Shakespeare's monster brooding on the nature of his god?

Robert Browning. His Caliban sprawls on his belly in the mud and decides his god must be as spiteful and bored as he is, often read as a dig at theologians who picture God in their own image.

Caliban's god Setebos was a real Patagonian deity that Shakespeare probably met in an English account of whose voyage?

Magellan. His chronicler described captured Patagonian 'giants' roaring to Setebos for help, and the story reached Shakespeare through an English anthology of travel writing.

Caliban's name in The Tempest is most often traced to a word for what?

Cannibal. 'Canibal' was the Spanish form of the name Columbus brought back for the Caribs, and Caliban swaps two of its letters, though some scholars prefer a Romani word for blackness.

Ariel, Prospero and Caliban are all names of moons orbiting which planet?

Uranus. When its first moons were named in 1852 the choice fell on spirits from English literature rather than Greek myth, and every moon named since has kept to Shakespeare and Pope.

In The Tempest, a jester under Caliban's cloak says what 'acquaints a man with strange bedfellows'?

Misery. The jester crawls in to escape a storm, and a drunken butler takes the heap for one four-legged monster; the line may be the origin of 'strange bedfellows', now often said of politics.

Which Tempest song survives in a setting by Robert Johnson, composer to Shakespeare's own company?

Full Fathom Five. Johnson wrote songs for the King's Men, so his tune may be the very one Ariel sang to the first audiences.

Which composer's 2004 opera The Tempest stretches its Ariel to the top of the soprano register?

Thomas Adès. His opera does not set Shakespeare's lines at all: the librettist Meredith Oakes rewrote the play in short rhyming couplets for him.

Which Nordic composer wrote incidental music for a lavish 1926 Copenhagen staging of The Tempest, among his last major works?

Jean Sibelius. Written for a Danish-language production at the Royal Theatre, it was almost his last big score: after one more tone poem he produced no major work in his remaining thirty years.

In The Tempest, the shipwrecked court was sailing home from the marriage of the king's daughter in which North African city?

Tunis. The king had just married his daughter Claribel to its ruler, which puts Prospero's island in the Mediterranean, for all the play's echoes of Bermuda and the Americas.

In the last scene of The Tempest, Prospero reveals the young lovers quietly playing which game?

Chess. She at once accuses him of cheating, 'Sweet lord, you play me false', then adds that she would let him get away with it for a score of kingdoms.

Millais's painting of Ariel luring the shipwrecked prince of The Tempest belongs to which artistic movement?

Pre-Raphaelite. Millais painted the setting outdoors, 'every blade of grass and leaf distinct', and the grotesque green bats around Ariel put off the buyer who had agreed to take it.

In 2000 which actress played Prospero in The Tempest on the London stage as neither male nor female?

Vanessa Redgrave. A decade later a film version went a step further and rewrote the part as a woman outright, a duchess called Prospera.

In Prospero's 'Our revels now are ended' speech, what dissolves along with towers, palaces and temples?

The great globe. Prospero has just waved away a masque acted by spirits, and he tells the young couple watching that the earth itself will one day vanish the same way.

Which Romantic poet, lost at sea off Italy in a storm, has lines from Ariel's song in The Tempest on his gravestone?

Percy Shelley was lost when a storm sank his boat in 1822, and his ashes lie in Rome under the Latin words Cor Cordium, 'heart of hearts'.

Which phrase for a profound transformation comes from a song Ariel sings to the shipwrecked prince in The Tempest?

Sea change began literally: the song pictures the sea turning a body's bones to coral and its eyes to pearls, 'into something rich and strange'.

At the end of The Tempest, the shipwrecked king asks his drunken jester how he came to be in this what?

Pickle is a pun here, since the jester is soaked in drink, and he answers that he has been in such a pickle that it will never leave his bones.

Which composer's Piano Sonata No. 17 is nicknamed The Tempest, supposedly because he told a friend to read the play?

Beethoven never used the nickname himself: it rests on his associate Anton Schindler, who claimed the composer told him to read Shakespeare's play.

Which actor, dressed as the engineer Brunel, recited Caliban's speech from The Tempest at the London 2012 Olympics?

Kenneth Branagh took the part three weeks before the ceremony, and a line from the speech was inscribed on the 23-tonne Olympic Bell.

Although a real Bermuda wreck helped inspire The Tempest, Prospero's island lies in which sea?

Mediterranean waters carry the rest of the royal fleet home, since the court was sailing back to Italy from Africa; Bermuda is named once, as a far-off place Ariel was sent to for dew.

What does the king's butler in The Tempest say he floated ashore on after sailors heaved it overboard?

A cask of wine, a 'butt of sack', brought him to shore, and he has since made a bottle out of tree bark so he can keep drinking from it.

When the jester in The Tempest first stumbles on Caliban, he wonders aloud whether he has found a man or what?

A fish is his first guess, going by the smell, and he daydreams of charging English holiday crowds a piece of silver each to look at it.

In The Tempest, Prospero says even which animals had abandoned the rotten boat he and his child were set adrift in?

Rats 'instinctively had quit it', he tells her: the boat had no rigging, sail or mast when the two of them were pushed out to sea.

Which monarch watched The Tempest at Whitehall Palace on Hallowmas night, the play's earliest recorded performance?

James I saw it on 1 November 1611; his own book Daemonologie had declared that practising magic should be punished by death.

Which back-breaking chore does Prospero force on the shipwrecked prince in The Tempest, a job normally left to Caliban?

Hauling logs, 'some thousands' of them, is the test, and Prospero's daughter is so upset to watch that she offers to carry them for him.

How does Prospero finally deal with the brother who stole his dukedom, once he has him in his power in The Tempest?

He forgives him, 'thy rankest fault' and all, while demanding his dukedom back; the rarer action, Prospero decides, is in virtue than in vengeance.

For most of The Tempest, what does the shipwrecked king wrongly believe has happened to his son and heir?

He has drowned, the king is sure, and the grief breaks him: he gives up the search, while his son sits elsewhere on the island believing the same of his father.

What does Ariel tell Prospero has become of the king's ship after the storm in The Tempest?

It is safe in harbour, tucked in a deep nook with the sailors charmed asleep below deck, and nobody aboard lost so much as a hair.

By Prospero's own account in The Tempest, what was he absorbed in while his brother quietly took over the dukedom?

His studies left him 'rapt' and a stranger to his own state, he admits, so he handed the running of government to the brother who then stole it.

What does the spirit Ariel demand from Prospero early in The Tempest, earning a furious lecture in reply?

His freedom, or 'my liberty' as Ariel puts it, is promised within two days if all goes well, and Prospero keeps his word in the last moments of the story.

When Prospero first meets the shipwrecked prince in The Tempest, he pretends to suspect him of being what?

A spy come to steal the island is the charge, an act put on because Prospero fears that a prize won too easily will be valued too lightly.

In The Tempest, Prospero and Ariel chase off Caliban's fellow plotters by setting spirits on them in the shape of what?

Hunting dogs with names like Mountain, Silver, Fury and Tyrant drive the three thieves away, while Prospero orders his goblins to rack them with cramps.

In The Tempest, the drunken butler convinces an awestruck Caliban that he was once which figure?

The man in the moon is his boast, and Caliban swallows it whole: his mistress, he says, once pointed the figure out to him, complete with dog and bush.

What does the boatswain order the king and his nobles to do during the storm that opens The Tempest?

Stay in their cabins, he snaps, because on deck they only help the storm: the raging waves, he points out, care nothing for the name of king.

In the storm that opens The Tempest, an old counsellor jokes that the cheeky boatswain looks destined to die how?

On the gallows, he reckons, and takes comfort from it: a man born to hang cannot be lost at sea, so the rope of his destiny is the passengers' best cable.

Caught with swords drawn over the sleeping king in The Tempest, two would-be assassins claim they heard what?

Roaring lions, 'a whole herd' of them, is the excuse, invented on the spot after Ariel sings in a sleeper's ear to wake the camp just in time.

What do the castaway nobles in The Tempest find strange about their clothes after being washed ashore?

They look brand new, 'rather new-dyed than stained with salt water', as crisp as on the day the court first put them on in Africa.

At what moment do Caliban and his drunken allies plan to murder Prospero in The Tempest?

During his afternoon nap, Caliban urges, when a nail could be knocked into his head, though he insists the magician's books must be seized first.

How does the invisible Ariel start a quarrel among Caliban and his two drunken companions in The Tempest?

By calling one a liar, three times over: the others take the unseen voice for the jester's, and the butler ends up beating him for it.

Why, according to Prospero in The Tempest, did the men who seized his dukedom not dare to kill him outright?

His people loved him too dearly, he says, so the plotters dressed up the crime: they hurried him and his child aboard a vessel in the dark and cast them adrift.

What is the one thing Prospero's daughter can dimly recall from her life before the island in The Tempest?

Women who tended her, four or five of them, are all she remembers, and only as something 'far off': she was not yet three when the two were exiled.

What does Prospero send Ariel to fetch near the end of The Tempest so the court will recognise their duke?

His hat and rapier turn the magician back into a nobleman: he strips off his magic robes to show himself, as he puts it, as he once was in his dukedom.

How does Caliban respond at the end of The Tempest once the drunkard he has worshipped is exposed?

He vows to be wiser and 'seek for grace', calling himself a thrice-double ass for ever mistaking such a dull fool for a deity.

Modern critics usually group The Tempest with Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale under which label?

Romances is a label from the critic Edward Dowden in the 1870s, who saw in these late plays the sprawling journeys of medieval romance tales.

Prospero's daughter holds which distinction among all the characters who appear on stage in The Tempest?

The only human woman seen on stage (the masque's goddesses are spirits in disguise), she tells the prince she cannot remember any woman's face except her own in the looking-glass.

The name Shakespeare gave Prospero's daughter in The Tempest comes from a Latin word meaning what?

Worthy to be admired is what the Latin root means, and the prince puns on it as soon as he learns her name, hailing her as the top of admiration.

A 1930s sculpture of Prospero and Ariel from The Tempest stands above the entrance to which London building?

Broadcasting House, the BBC's headquarters, commissioned it, and the sculptor carved much of it in the open air on scaffolding above the street in 1931 and 1932.

Which Hollywood star made her West End debut as Prospero in Jamie Lloyd's 2024 staging of The Tempest?

Sigourney Weaver took the role at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where the production ran from December 2024 to February 2025.

Which future star of The Breakfast Club made her film debut as the teenage daughter in Paul Mazursky's 1982 Tempest?

Molly Ringwald played opposite John Cassavetes as her architect father, in a loose modern update that moves the story to a remote Greek island.

In the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2016 Tempest, which technology projected Ariel as a live digital sprite?

Motion capture let the actor's movements drive an avatar in real time, in a collaboration with Intel and The Imaginarium, opposite Simon Russell Beale's Prospero.

Which Russian composer wrote a symphonic fantasia on The Tempest, similar in structure to his own Romeo and Juliet?

Tchaikovsky called it a symphonic fantasia 'after Shakespeare', and Nikolai Rubinstein conducted its premiere in December 1873.

Ariel's trick of blazing on the masts and bowsprit of the king's ship in The Tempest matches which real phenomenon?

St Elmo's fire, a glow sailors long saw on masts in storms, is what Ariel describes: he 'flamed amazement', burning in many places at once before joining into one.

Which brother of the shipwrecked king in The Tempest is talked into drawing his sword to murder him as he sleeps?

Sebastian is urged on by Prospero's own usurping brother, who offers his coup as the model to copy, and only Ariel's song in a sleeper's ear stops the blow.

Which daughter of the shipwrecked king in The Tempest is never seen on stage, having just married an African ruler?

Claribel's marriage is the reason for the whole journey, and her uncle taunts the king for losing her to Africa when he could have blessed Europe with her.

What does Caliban say he showed Prospero on the island in The Tempest, back when the two were on good terms?

The fresh springs, along with the salt pits and the fertile ground, were his gift in return for kindness, he says, and he bitterly regrets having shared them.

What last errand does Prospero give Ariel in the closing lines of The Tempest, just before the epilogue?

Smoothing the voyage home, with calm seas and winds fair enough to catch the rest of the fleet, is the final charge laid on the spirit who raised the storm in the first place.

What rank does the drunken butler in The Tempest promise his two followers once he is king of the island?

Viceroys is the title he hands out, after deciding to kill Prospero and take the magician's daughter as his queen.

Which instruments does the invisible Ariel play in The Tempest to lead the three drunken plotters away?

Tabor and pipe, a little drum and whistle, do the trick: Ariel later boasts that the three followed the sound like calves, straight into a filthy pond.

Which two groups dance together at the close of the spirits' betrothal show for the young lovers in The Tempest?

Reapers and nymphs join in a graceful dance until Prospero suddenly starts, and the whole vision vanishes with a strange, hollow noise.

Whose eyewitness letter about the 1609 Bermuda wreck is generally thought to be a source for The Tempest?

William Strachey survived the wreck himself, and his report was so critical of how the settlement was run that its backers suppressed it; it reached print only in 1625.

Which Gregory Peck western, set in a desert ghost town, is believed to be loosely adapted from The Tempest?

Yellow Sky puts a gold prospector and his granddaughter alone in the ruins, until a gang of bank robbers staggers in off the salt flats of Death Valley.

Which English composer wrote incidental music for The Tempest as his student graduation piece in Leipzig?

Arthur Sullivan was an unknown when the Crystal Palace performed the score in 1862; it was an immediate success, with five numbers encored.

What bait does Prospero have hung on a line in The Tempest to distract the drunken plotters from murder?

Glittering garments work at once on the butler and the jester, who start trying them on while Caliban begs them to leave the trash and do the killing first.

Which humbling gesture does Caliban offer the drunken butler in The Tempest when swearing to be his subject?

Kissing his foot is the pledge, made twice over, while the watching jester mutters that the monster will rob his new master's bottle the moment he sleeps.