Shakespeare: The Tempest — AQA GCSE English Literature Revision Notes

What you'll learn

• How Shakespeare compresses the whole play into a few hours on a single island
• Prospero's power, his manipulation of everyone on stage, and the choice he finally makes
• Caliban and Ariel as two kinds of servitude, and what the play says about ruling others
• The colonial reading, and how to write about it without abandoning the text
• The play's interest in illusion, theatre and its own artifice
• How to structure an answer for the AQA Paper 1 Shakespeare question, marked on AO1, AO2, AO3 and AO4

Key terms and definitions

Romance — a late Shakespearean form mixing danger, separation, magic and reconciliation, usually ending in restoration rather than marriage alone.

The unities — the classical principles of one action, one place and one day. The Tempest observes all three, almost uniquely in Shakespeare.

Masque — an elaborate courtly entertainment with music, dance and mythological figures. Prospero stages one for the lovers.

Usurpation — the seizing of a throne or position by force. It happens three times in the play.

Colonialism — the settlement and control of a territory and its inhabitants. The island plot maps onto it directly.

Epilogue — a closing speech addressed to the audience. Prospero's asks for release.

Soliloquy — a speech delivered alone, revealing private thought.

Foil — a contrasting character. Caliban and Ariel are foils to each other; Ferdinand and Caliban are foils in their treatment of Miranda.

Providence — the idea that events are shaped by a controlling design. Prospero repeatedly claims to be enacting one.

Core concepts

Structure: one island, one afternoon

The play observes the classical unities, and the compression is the point. Everything happens in a few hours on one island, and Prospero states the time remaining twice, which gives the action a countdown.

Act 1 raises the storm, wrecks the ship, and delivers the backstory: Prospero, once Duke of Milan, was deposed by his brother Antonio with Alonso's help and set adrift with his infant daughter. He tells this at length to Miranda, and the exposition itself is an exercise of control — he decides what she knows and when.

Act 2 separates the survivors into groups. Antonio persuades Sebastian to murder Alonso, repeating the original crime exactly; Ariel prevents it. Meanwhile Stephano and Trinculo find Caliban, who offers them the island.

Act 3 advances three plots in parallel: Ferdinand's labour and courtship, the drunken conspiracy, and the punishment of the nobles by a vanishing banquet and Ariel's accusation.

Act 4 is the betrothal masque, interrupted when Prospero remembers Caliban's plot. His abrupt breaking-off produces the play's most famous reflection on the insubstantiality of all things.

Act 5 brings everyone before him. Prospero forgives, renounces his magic, restores himself to Milan, frees Ariel, and asks the audience to release him.

Prospero

Prospero is the play's centre and its problem. Almost everything that happens is his doing.

He is a wronged man: deposed by his brother, exiled, and entitled to redress. His anger is justified.

He is also a controller. He raises the storm, terrifies the survivors, separates them, plants Ferdinand in Miranda's path and then manufactures obstacles so the love is not too easily won. He puts Miranda to sleep when her attention is inconvenient. He threatens Ariel with imprisonment and Caliban with cramps and pain. Very little in the play happens without his direction, and audiences frequently find him harder to like than the plot requires.

His decision to forgive is the play's climax and is genuinely hard-won. Ariel — a spirit — tells him that if he saw the nobles' suffering he would pity them, and Prospero replies that since a spirit can feel it, he, being human, must feel it more. Shakespeare makes the moral turn depend on a non-human character prompting a human one.

His renunciation follows: he breaks his staff and drowns his book, giving up the power the whole play has demonstrated. Whether he is redeemed or merely finished is a question the text leaves open, and answers that argue a position while acknowledging the other read best.

Ariel and Caliban

The two servants are constructed as a deliberate pair, and comparing them is the most productive single move in most questions.

Ariel serves willingly but not freely. Rescued by Prospero from imprisonment in a tree, Ariel performs magic in exchange for an eventually promised liberty, and asks about that promise more than once. The relationship is affectionate and unequal; Prospero calls Ariel by warm names and threatens him in the same breath. Ariel's final release is one of the few unqualified goods in the play.

Caliban serves resentfully. He is the son of Sycorax and the island's inhabitant before Prospero arrived. His grievance is stated plainly: the island was his, Prospero took it, and having first been treated kindly and taught language, he was enslaved after attempting to rape Miranda. The play gives him both a legitimate claim and a genuine crime, and refuses to resolve the contradiction.

Shakespeare gives Caliban some of the play's most beautiful verse — his speech about the island's noises is the loveliest thing in it — which makes reducing him to a brute impossible. He is also the figure most obviously deceived: he exchanges one master for a drunken butler and calls it freedom.

The colonial reading

The parallel is unmistakable and examiners expect it to be discussed. A European arrives on an inhabited island, takes it, enslaves the inhabitant, justifies this by his own cultural superiority, and eventually departs.

Anchor it in the text rather than asserting it. Caliban's claim that the island was his by inheritance; Prospero's account of teaching him language; Caliban's retort that his profit from the lesson is knowing how to curse; the settlers' talk of what they would do if they governed the island; and Stephano's immediate assumption that Caliban is a commodity to be exhibited.

Context supports it. Shakespeare wrote around 1610–11, shortly after reports reached London of the Sea Venture, wrecked in Bermuda in 1609 while carrying settlers to Virginia. Accounts of that wreck and of the island circulated widely. Montaigne's essay on cannibals, available in English translation, argued that so-called savages might be less barbarous than Europeans, and Gonzalo's speech about an ideal commonwealth borrows from it directly.

Hold the complications too: the play is not an anti-colonial tract, Caliban's attempted assault is not excused, and Prospero leaves rather than settles. An answer that notices the tension outscores one that flattens it either way.

Illusion, theatre and the epilogue

The play is unusually conscious of being a play. Prospero produces spectacles — the storm, the banquet, the masque, the hunting spirits — and every one is an illusion staged to produce an effect on an audience within the play.

When he interrupts the masque, his speech about the pageant fading and life being rounded with a sleep applies simultaneously to the vision he has just dissolved, to the theatre the audience is sitting in, and to mortality itself. It is the clearest moment in Shakespeare of a play discussing its own nature.

The epilogue completes it. Prospero, stripped of magic, tells the audience that only their applause can release him. A character asking to be freed by clapping collapses the distance between the stage and the house entirely, and since this is close to the end of Shakespeare's writing career, many readers hear a farewell in it. That reading is available but should be offered as interpretation rather than fact.

Themes

Power and its uses runs through every relationship: Prospero over Ariel and Caliban, Antonio over Milan, Alonso over his court, Stephano over Caliban. The play asks not whether power should exist but what it should be used for.

Freedom and servitude is the counterpart. Ariel wants liberty, Caliban wants his island, Ferdinand willingly carries logs for love. Shakespeare distinguishes chosen service from imposed service carefully.

Revenge and forgiveness is the moral spine. Prospero has the power to destroy his enemies for four acts and chooses not to in the fifth.

Nature and nurture is debated through Caliban, whom Prospero calls incapable of improvement despite having been taught — a claim the play allows him to make but does not obviously endorse.

Usurpation repeated structures the plot: Antonio's original coup, his and Sebastian's plan against Alonso, and Caliban's plot with Stephano are the same crime at three social levels.

Worked examples

Example 1: Character question

Starting with this extract, how far does Shakespeare present Prospero as a good ruler?

The phrase "how far" demands qualification. Establish his legitimate grievance and his care for Miranda, then set against it his manipulation, his threats to both servants, and the fact that he governs the island exactly as his brother governed Milan — by taking it. Use Ariel's prompting of his mercy to argue that his goodness is achieved rather than innate. Conclude that Shakespeare presents rule as a set of choices, and that Prospero's final one is to stop ruling.

Example 2: Theme question

Starting with this extract, how does Shakespeare explore ideas about freedom?

Distinguish three kinds: Ariel's promised liberty, Caliban's claim to his island, and Ferdinand's chosen servitude for love. Add the drunken conspirators, who mistake a new master for freedom. Then widen to Prospero, who is bound by his own power and asks to be released at the end. Argue that the play consistently defines freedom as something granted by another, which is what makes the epilogue's appeal to the audience so pointed.

Example 3: Extract-focused analysis

Spend about a third of the answer inside the extract, looking for shifts — verse to prose, a broken line, a change of address, an imperative. In this play, watch particularly for who commands and who obeys within a speech, since the grammar of instruction is everywhere. Then signal the move outward and follow one idea across the whole play.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

Treating Prospero as simply benevolent. He threatens, imprisons and manipulates. The forgiveness is a choice made against his own inclination, which is what makes it interesting.

Reducing Caliban to a monster. He has the play's most beautiful speech and a legitimate territorial claim, alongside a real crime.

Asserting the colonial reading without evidence. Anchor it in specific lines about the island, language and ownership.

Ignoring Ariel. The comparison with Caliban is the most productive structural feature in the play.

Forgetting it is a comedy of sorts. Stephano and Trinculo are funny, and the drunken plot parodies the noble one. Noticing the parallel is worth marks.

Forgetting AO4. The Shakespeare question carries four extra marks for vocabulary, spelling and punctuation — available here and nowhere else on the paper.

Exam technique for "Shakespeare: The Tempest"

On AQA Paper 1 this question is worth 30 marks plus 4 for AO4, and you should spend about 50 minutes on it.

Read the question twice and underline its focus before reading the extract.

Plan for five minutes: three or four points that build, each tied to a moment, with the most interesting last.

Learn short quotations you can embed mid-sentence — a few words from Caliban on the island, Ariel on liberty, Prospero on mercy and on renunciation, and a phrase from the epilogue will cover most questions.

Write about Shakespeare's choices: "Shakespeare has a spirit prompt Prospero's mercy so that" is analysis; "Ariel tells him to feel sorry for them" is plot.

Keep two minutes at the end to check spelling and punctuation, which carry marks here.

Quick revision summary

• One island, one afternoon — the play observes the classical unities and runs on a countdown
• Prospero controls nearly every event; his forgiveness in Act 5 is a hard-won choice, prompted by a spirit
• Ariel serves willingly for promised liberty; Caliban serves resentfully and claims the island by inheritance
• Caliban has both a legitimate grievance and a real crime — the play refuses to resolve it
• The colonial reading is well supported: land, language, ownership, exhibition — but the play is not a tract
• Usurpation happens three times: Antonio in Milan, Sebastian against Alonso, Caliban with Stephano
• Illusion and theatre: the storm, banquet and masque are all staged spectacles, and the epilogue asks the audience for release
• Themes: power, freedom and servitude, revenge against forgiveness, nature and nurture
• Context: the 1609 Sea Venture wreck, Montaigne on cannibals, the court masque
• Paper 1, roughly 50 minutes, 30 marks + 4 for AO4 — spelling and punctuation count here