50 Fun Facts About The Tempest

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

His treacherous brother Antonio usurped him twelve years before the play begins, with help from the King of Naples.

Who is Prospero's treacherous brother?

On the island he conspires again, this time with Sebastian to murder the King of Naples.

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

The court party was sailing home from Tunis when Prospero's storm caught them.

Which airy spirit does Prospero free from a tree and bind into his service?

The name means 'Lion of God' in Hebrew, and the spirit later appears disguised as a harpy and as the goddess Ceres.

Which witch, banished from Algiers, imprisoned Ariel in a cloven pine before Prospero arrived?

She never appears on stage; she died before Prospero landed, leaving her son Caliban behind.

How many years was Ariel trapped in the pine before Prospero released him?

Prospero uses that rescue as leverage whenever the spirit asks for his freedom.

What is the name of Prospero's daughter, the play's only female character to appear on stage?

She was three when banished to the island and is fifteen by the time the play begins.

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

He is the King of Naples' son and heir, and Prospero deliberately steers the youth into the romance.

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

One is the king's jester and the other his drunken butler; they end up chased into a swamp by spirit hounds.

Prospero's loyal old counsellor, who helped him escape Milan, is called what?

His speech imagining an ideal commonwealth echoes a famous French essay on the New World.

Which three goddesses appear in the Act IV betrothal masque?

The masque is broken off when Prospero suddenly remembers the plot against his life.

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

The moment has often been read as Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage.

The Tempest is thought to have been written in which years?

It is one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote alone, though later collaborations followed.

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

Their lost play Cardenio also postdates The Tempest, so it was not truly Shakespeare's final work.

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

William Strachey's eyewitness account circulated in 1610, and Shakespeare knew members of the Virginia Company.

The ship wrecked on Bermuda in 1609 was the flagship of a supply mission to which struggling colony?

Her crew and passengers washed up on uninhabited Bermuda during the Third Supply of 1609.

Prospero's speech renouncing magic borrows from which sorceress's invocation in Ovid's Metamorphoses?

Many in Shakespeare's audience would have known the source, which complicates Prospero's claim to practise only 'white' magic.

The old counsellor's vision of an ideal society echoes an essay by which French writer, translated by Florio in 1603?

The essay 'Of the Canibales' praised the natives of the Caribbean for having no trade, letters or magistrates.

The Tempest's earliest printed text appears in which 1623 collection?

It is the very first play in the volume and is considered the cleanest printed text of all 36.

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

Of perhaps 750 copies printed, 235 survive, with 82 at the Folger Library in Washington.

The Folio text of The Tempest was based on a manuscript prepared by which scrivener of the King's Men?

He loved hyphens and apostrophes and may be responsible for the play's unusually elaborate stage directions.

A famous Tempest textual crux asks whether a word Ferdinand speaks after the masque is 'wise' or what?

A broken piece of type on the long 's' may have changed the word; Oxford prints one reading and Arden the other.

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

Modern critics created the label 'late romance' for it and Shakespeare's other final plays.

The earliest recorded performance of The Tempest, on 1 November 1611, was before James I at which palace?

It was played by the King's Men on Hallowmas night, and again at court during the 1612-13 wedding festivities of Princess Elizabeth.

Stage directions suggest the play was written with which indoor theatre in mind rather than the Globe?

John Dryden stated in 1669 that it had been performed there.

Dryden and Davenant's 1667 Tempest adaptation gave Prospero's daughter a sister named what?

They also gave Caliban a sister called Sycorax, and Pepys thought their version was Shakespeare's own.

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

George Bennett's Caliban in it was praised for showing resistance to tyranny.

Which actor, hailed as the 20th century's greatest stage Prospero, played the role at 87 in Prospero's Books?

He voiced every character in Peter Greenaway's 1991 film, which was famous for its nudity and digital imagery.

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

It was the first film of any genre with an entirely electronic score, and introduced Robby the Robot.

In the 1956 science-fiction version, the Prospero figure is a scientist named what?

He warns the starship C-57D not to land, and his household robot Robby became a screen icon.

Julie Taymor's 2010 film cast Helen Mirren as a female Prospero renamed what?

Sandy Powell earned her ninth Oscar nomination for the costumes, and Russell Brand played Trinculo.

Who played Ariel opposite Helen Mirren in the 2010 film?

Djimon Hounsou was Caliban and Felicity Jones played Miranda, filmed among Hawaii's volcanic landscapes.

Which director's 1979 film of the play showed Caliban's naked mother breastfeeding him?

Jarman used Shakespeare's language but was notable mainly for how far he strayed from the original.

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

The phrase is now tied to public debate about genetic modification.

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

The Martinican writer's version prefigured black independence movements.

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

Felix, ousted from his festival job, stages the play with inmates at Fletcher County Correctional Institute.

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

Its prose finale, 'Caliban to the Audience', reads Caliban as Prospero's libidinous secret self.

Robert Browning's 1864 poem shows Prospero's monstrous slave pondering theology; what is its title?

Setebos was a real deity of the Tehuelche people of Patagonia, recorded by Magellan's expedition.

Setebos, the god worshipped by Caliban and his mother, was originally a deity of which people?

Shakespeare probably found the name in a 16th-century English account of Magellan's circumnavigation.

The name Caliban is often read as an anagram of which Spanish word?

Others link it to the Romani word for black; the character is called a 'mooncalf' and a freckled monster.

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

Its named moons all come from Shakespeare or Pope's The Rape of the Lock; Miranda was found by Gerard Kuiper in 1948.

Which astronomer discovered the moon Ariel in 1851?

He found Ariel and Umbriel together; Herschel had spotted Titania and Oberon back in 1787.

Cheerful Ayres (1659) attributes 'Full Fathom Five' and 'Where the Bee Sucks' to which King's Men composer?

Marianne Faithfull and Pete Seeger both recorded versions of 'Full Fathom Five' in the 1960s.

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

At least forty-six operas or semi-operas based on the play exist.

Jean Sibelius wrote incidental music for a lavish 1926 production of The Tempest in which city?

His scoring used harps and percussion to capture Prospero's 'resonant ambiguity'.

The action of the play must be set on an island in which sea, given the court's voyage home from Tunis?

Yet Ariel's reference to the 'still-vexed Bermoothes' has led many critics to imagine a New World setting.

Which critic first suggested in 1838 that Prospero partly represents Shakespeare himself?

He later abandoned the idea when he came to believe The Tempest was an early play.

Millais's 1851 painting of Ariel luring the shipwrecked prince belongs to which artistic movement?

William Hogarth had painted A Scene from The Tempest around 1735, and Fuseli modelled his Prospero on Leonardo da Vinci.

In 2000 the Globe staged the play with which actress as a Prospero played as neither male nor female?

Critics praised her 'authority, humanity and humour' as a watchful parent to Miranda and Ariel.

Prospero says the whole world, an insubstantial pageant, will dissolve like what?

The line may pun on the Globe Theatre itself, and Ariel's shipwreck is described as a performed spectacle.