.......The Tempest is a comedy with an atmosphere resembling that of a fairy tale. It is among Shakespeare's most mature and most admired plays.

Key Dates
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Date Written: Probably 1611. 
First Performance: Probably November 1, 1611, at Whitehall (the English royal palace) by the Kings Players.
First Printing: 1623 as part of the First Folio, the first authorized collection of Shakespeare's plays. 

Sources

.......The main sources for the play have not been fully established. Possible sources include an account of the wreck of the Sea Venture in the Bermudas in 1609; A Discovery of the Bermudas (1610), by Sylvester Jourdain; A True Repertory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas (written in 1610 and published in 1625), by William Strachey; Comedy of the Beautiful Sidea (circa 1600-1605), a German drama by Jacob Ayer; New and Large Discourse of the Travels of Sir Anthony Shirley, Knight (1601), by William Parry; essay by Montaigne (1533-1592).

Settings
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.......The Tempest begins at sea on a foundering ship. The rest of the action takes place on an island. Strong evidence suggests that the island Shakespeare had in mind was a fictionalized Mediterranean version of an island in the Bermudas. 
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Characters

.......As a strange, fiery light illumines the ship, the king and his company jump overboard. All except Ferdinand wash ashore at the same location on an enchanted island. Ferdinand lands on another part of the island. Alonso thinks Ferdinand has drowned, and vice versa, and both mourn their losses. The ruler of the island is the magician Prospero. It was Prospero who caused the tempest. Aware of who was on the ship, thanks to his magical powers, he commanded the sea to deliver to him the king and his company to settle some unfinished business. Twelve years before, Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, had been set adrift to die at sea with his three-year-old daughter, Miranda, after his brother, Antonio, seized his dukedom with the connivance of King Alonso. However,  the kindly counselor Gonzalo sneaked food and drink to Prospero, along with his books of magic. So it was that Prospero and his daughter survived and landed on the island to live in a cave. 

                                I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dash’d all to pieces. O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish’d.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallow’d and
The fraughting souls within her. (1. 2. 6-14)

Lingering perdition—worse than any death
Can be at once,—shall step by step attend
You and your ways. . . .” (3. 3.93-95)

All three of them are desperate: their great guilt, 
Like poison given to work a great time after, 
Now ’gins to bite the spirits.” (3. 3. 124-126)

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Themes
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Forgive and forget. Though Prospero has been wronged, he reconciles with his wrongdoers. 
Repent your sins. All of Prospero's wrongdoers repent at the end and achieve redemption. 
The New World (America) is a raw, untamed wilderness. Prospero's island may have symbolized America, or the islands off the coast of America, with Caliban representing the uncivilized native population. 
Exploration of new lands often results in mistreatment of native populations. It has been suggested that Caliban represents indigenous peoples exploited by Europeans during the Age of Discovery. 
The storms of life are followed by peace and calm.
Friends in need are friends indeed. Thanks to his friend Gonzalo, Prospero and his daughter survive their ordeal at sea.
Freedom must be earned. Everyone in The Tempest is a slave or a captive—socially, emotionally, geographically or otherwise. For example, Prospero and Miranda, victims of treachery, are captives of their environment. The shipwrecked adversaries of Prospero are captives of guilt, ambition or desire for revenge. Ariel, a free spirit of the air, is Prospero's slave. Caliban, a misshapen half-human, is a prisoner of unruly instincts. Only through ordeal, tribulation, and demonstrations of humanity do these characters redeem and liberate themselves. 
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Shakespeare's Musicality

......The Tempest is among Shakespeare’s finest plays in terms of its musicality. Shakespeare scholar G. B. Harrison has written the following appraisal of the language of the play:

Shakespeare, like all Elizabethan dramatists, used four kinds of speech in his plays: blank verse, rhymed verse, prose and song. Each kind has its uses, and the whole play, especially in his maturity, is conceived as a kind of verbal symphony, each scene or episode being composed as part of a complete harmony. The Tempest in its poetical scenes is the finest example of the musical use of words in all Shakespeare’s plays.” (Major British 53)

Full fathom five thy father lies; 
Of his bones are coral made: 
Those are pearls that were his eyes: 
Nothing of him that doth fade, 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange. 
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: 
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell. (1.2.456) 
Ariel, while invisible, sings this poem to Ferdinand, telling the lad that his father lies under thirty feet of water. The poem has a rhyme scheme of ababccdd.

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free. (epilogue)

......Following are examples of figures of speech from the play.

Antithesis

Good wombs have borne bad sons. (1. 2. 141)
Contrast of good wombs and bad sons. The statement is also a paradox.

................ Hast thou forgot
The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy
Was grown into a hoop? (1.2.259-260)

Full fathom five thy father lies (.2.394)

He that dies pays all debts. (3.2.143)

Your tale, sir, would cure deafness. (1.2.106)
This line also contains a metaphor comparing the tale to a remedy.

My library 
Was dukedom large enough. (1.2.128)
Comparison of a dukedom to a library.

................. The king's son, Ferdinand, 
With hair up-staring,—then like reeds, not hair,
Was the first man that leap'd; cried, 'Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.' (1.2.213-216)
Comparison of Prospero's island to hell

You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. (1. 2. 430-431)
Comparison of knowledge to profit. 
 

The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.(3.3.97-99)
Metaphor (and personification) comparing the winds to a singer
Metaphor comparing thunder to the sound made by an organ pipe

No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow. (4.1.18-19)
Comparison of heaven's approval to rain (aspersion) that promotes the growth of a seed

We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.168-170)
Comparison of humans to the immateriality of a dream

What's past is prologue. (2.1.261)

Shakespeare's Name Game

.......Did you notice in your reading of The Tempest that the name of the beast-man, Caliban, is an anagram for cannibal (except for a missing n)? Did you also notice that name of Prospero’s servant, Ariel, sounds like aerial, meaning in the air, of the air, high flying, ethereal, and fanciful—words which all describe Ariel? Other characters also have names suggestive of their qualities and lot in life: Prospero (a name that derives from the Latin prosperare, meaning to cause to prosper), who prospers through his magic and intelligence; Miranda (a name that derives from the Latin mirandus, meaning strange, wonderful, miraculous), who is wonderful to behold and is indeed strange—that is, exotic; and Ferdinand (a name that derives from Germanic words meaning bold traveler), who has traveled on the high seas and survived a roaring tempest.

Character Habitats

.......Shakespeare's plays frequently present characters in settings far removed from urban centers. However, they generally are creatures of the city, the court, the vibrant life where people throng. Consider the following observation: 

Shakespeare's characters are . . . dubious of rusticity. Valentine [in The Two Gentlemen of Verona] does not rejoice in his woodland life as head of an outlaw band; the lovers of A [Midsummer Night's] Dream find their woodland adventure unnerving, and mountain life seems rude to the characters in Cymbeline who are forced to endure it. Although Florizel [in The Winter's Tale] dreams of spending his life with Perdita in a cottage, she knows that pastoral bliss is only a dream; true content lies in Leontes' court, to which all the characters . . . return. Even Prospero [in The Tempest], who has no great desire to see Milan again, knows that he and Miranda must leave their island, which is as much prison as refuge to them. Although critics can idealize the pastoral experiences of Shakespeare's characters as renewing contacts with nature, that experience is often somewhat harrowing.—Shakespeare's Comedies From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery. Newark: U of Delaware, 1986 (Page 144).

Shakespeare is perhaps the perfect expression of Renaissance humanism. His profound sympathy for humanity enabled him to pierce to the very core of his characters; his unexcelled gifts as a poet made his men and women unforgettable creatures of flesh and blood. This may be said as much of the best of his earliest plays as of The Tempest, where Prospero is himself a kind of incarnation of the best of what the Renaissance had extended to mankind. (Grebanier, Bernard D., et al. English Literature and Its Backgrounds. New York: Holt, 1950, page 242)

.......Shakespeare sets the scene in a far-off, isolated island. Whether he intended the setting to symbolize the New World is arguable, but it certainly resembles it. Like America, it is wild and undeveloped, with strange sights, sounds, and creatures. It has a “colonial” overseer, Prospero, who exploits the native population—the savage beast-man, Caliban, and the sprite, Ariel—turning them into servants, or slaves. Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, knows no other world but her father’s island. In this respect, she is like the real-life Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas (on Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina). 

Shakespeare's Grab Bag of Marvels

.......To give his play a wondrous, fairy-tale atmosphere, Shakespeare set it on a remote island with an exotic landscape, then populated the island with a sorcerer (Prospero), a monster (the beast-man Caliban, son of a witch), a mischievous sprite, a beautiful maiden (Miranda), a young prince who loves her (Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples), and mythological deities--including Ceres, goddess of agriculture; Iris, goddess of the rainbow; and Juno, queen of the gods. Perhaps Shakespeare was capitalizing on stories about the New World across the seas--a world that was mostly terra incognita to the English and therefore a ripe subject for speculation about wonders there that awaited discovery. .......There were, of course, published reports about the Americas and the islands near the mainlands. These reports included several about Bermuda, including an account of the wreck of the Sea Venture in the Bermudas in 1609; A Discovery of the Bermudas (1610), by Sylvester Jourdain; A True Repertory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas (written in 1610 and published in 1625), by William Strachey. The Spanish navigator Juan Bermúdez is credited with discovery of the Bermuda Islands, and they first appeared on Spanish maps in 1511. It may well be that the wreck of the Sea Venture inspired Shakespeare to write about the wreck of King Alonso’s ship. 

Caliban as an Exploited Native

.......In The Tempest, Caliban suffers the same fate as many New World natives: He loses control over a domain he thought he ruled, becoming a virtual slave of Prospero. Although Prospero teaches him language, Caliban complains that the only benefit of this experience is that he learned how to curse. Caliban’s encounter with Prospero resembles the encounter of real-life native Americans with Europeans seeking riches in the New World wilds while spreading their culture. The natives learned bad habits, acquired alien diseases, and lost control of their domains. Of course, The Tempest centers on the wrong done to Prospero by his brother, who usurped Prospero’s dukedom. But did not Prospero usurp Caliban’s domain?

Study Questions and Essay Topics

• Write an essay explaining how closed, isolated environments like Prospero’s island in The Tempest, Elsinore Castle in Hamlet, and the forest of Arden in As You Like It affect the characters.
• Shakespeare uses allusions to mythology in The Tempest. What is an allusion? Where do allusions take place in Acts 3 and 4?
• Lust for power, a theme in other Shakespeare plays, manifests itself in The Tempest in two independent conspiracies? What are these conspiracies and who is involved in them? 
• Would you consider Prospero’s island an example of a microcosm? Write a short essay that explains your answer. In the essay, be sure to define microcosm as a literary device. 
• To whom does Shakespeare address the epilogue at the end of the play? 
• What was Prospero’s wife like? (See lines spoken by Prospero in Act I.) 
• Do you despise or pity Caliban. Explain your answer. 
• Do you approve of the way Prospero treats Miranda?