Scene I
The play opens amidst a storm at sea "A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightening is heard", signalling from the outset the turmoil and conflict present. Just as Hamlet opens in ghostly darkness and a sense of foreboding that foreshadows the unrest in the state of Denmark, so too the tempest exemplifies changing states and ruptures, reflecting the tumultuous times (the most famous example of this 'pathetic fallacy' can be seen in the storm in King Lear). This is soon followed up by the boatswain's harsh commands to the nobles to get to their cabins:
"What care these roarers for the name of the king? To cabin:
silence! Trouble us not."
This represents a disturbance in the normal hierarchy of power relations: the elements themselves incite social transgressions as the boatswain ignores Antonio's question "Where's the master?" This microcosm of the boat and the breach of power lines within it connote the macrocosm of the play, which is built on a network of achieved and attempted usurpations of authority and legitimate power. By retrospective narrative we are presented with Antonio's successful revolution against his brother, Prospero, and Caliban's attempted violation of Miranda. The play circulates around these events as Prospero is motivated to play out and manipulate affairs on the island in a comedy of restoration. So the story begins in the middle and the play is filled with a series of further conspiracies as Antonio and Sebastian plot against Alonso's life and Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo plot against Prospero's control of the island. Thus the prehistory of the play is repeated, and the audience is shown examples of larger and pettier instances of intrigue as nobles and clowns plot rebellions and treacheries alike.
Scene 2
This scene takes place in front of Prospero's cell on the island and the audience along with Miranda listens to the prehistory of the play. It is a scene that makes up an indispensable prologue to the comprehension of Act I, conveying essential information. We learn that, twelve years earlier, Prospero was Duke of Milan but was so immersed in his studies and his books ("my library/ Was dukedom enough") that he neglected his duties ("I thus neglecting worldly ends..."). As such he allowed his evil, power-hungry brother to usurp him gradually. Thus, we are presented with models of government and political organisation. This introduces us to one of the main themes explored throughout the play: see, for example, Gonzalo's later speech on the ideal state and note the workings of the master-slave relations and king-subject relations throughout the play. Antonio, Prospero's brother appealed to the King Alonso for help in his rebellious quest, offering to pay an annual tribute to the king in return for his help and so Prospero was illegitimately dislodged. In this tale of expropriation we notice a mirroring of both the biblical and the historical, as it follows the lines of the Cain and Abel and the usurping of Richard III's throne by Henry VII, the grandfather of Elizabeth I.
Father and daughter survived execution through their popularity with the Milanese people and the aid of Gonzalo who "furnish'd" Prospero with books and food, and so Prospero narrates their history and casts them in the role of the unjustly persecuted outcasts as nature and the elements sympathise with their plight:
"there they hoist us,
To cry to the sea that roar'd to us: to sigh
To the winds, whose pity sighing back again,
Did us but loving wrong."
So, nature and man's plight become inextricable and, again, there is a sense of pathetic fallacy (of the outside world reflecting emotions); in the Bible this has spiritual significance since in Psalm 107 the Lord calms the waters:
"28 Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
29 he maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still."
Therefore Prospero's control of the elements could incite us to allegorical readings of the play as he assumes the quality of a deity and the machinations of the play echo the biblical patterns of sin, guilt, treachery, revenge, forgiveness and resolution. The shipwreck could prefigure disaster, but Prospero's conjuring trick of the only 'seeming' shipwreck constitutes a rebirth for the survivors, who believe themselves rescued, and also entails their moral education. They find themselves alive and ashore, dazed and amazed, bewitched and they "pursue their old courses in a country new, but this time under a monitoring eye, and wand." ("Subtleties of the Isle" by Ruth Nevo, in Shakespeare's Other Language, pp.130-60)
Prospero controls with magic and the supernatural as the entire island seems enchanted and dream- like (see Caliban's speech in Act 3, Scene 2: "the isle is full of noises/ Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not"); characters are sent to sleep, made to slip out of consciousness, intoxicated by the island and Prospero's necromancy which allows him omnipotence on the island. Thus in this scene Miranda is put into a deep sleep to allow Prospero to converse with the spirit Ariel:
"Thou art inclined to sleep: 't is a good dullness,
And give it way: I know thou canst not choose."
It is through the conversation with Ariel that the audience learns of Prospero's intricate plots and use of his magic: the party of the ship has been split up and each party suspects the other dead, the crew have been sent to sleep. Ariel asks Prospero for his freedom and it is at this point that we are faced with the ambivalent nature of his power. He appears less benign but rather tyrannical and imperial in his retort accusing Ariel of ingratitude and unfolds the story of the crucial early days on the island. We learn for the first time the presence of others before Prospero and Miranda: Sycorax (a witch who had, when pregnant, been banished to the island) and her son Caliban "A freckled whelp, hag- born". Ariel had been confined in a cloven pine by the witch ("This blue-eyed hag"). Ariel's pleas for liberty to his master are met then with refusal and threats of violent punishment:
"If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak,
And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till
Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters."
We can see here perhaps an abuse of his power that is further compounded by the appearance and treatment of Caliban as a slave:
"Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself
Upon thy wicked dam, come forth!"
Prospero's labelling of Caliban as the devil's offspring, whilst hyperbolic, resounds with mythical significance: signifying the production of bestial and slavish races. Caliban is born and reared in the bestial state without 'nurture', culture or language. To Renaissance audiences this would strike a chord with ideas of ideas of sorcery, isolation and degeneracy as this "savage and deformed slave" would strike fear of the uncivilised and would seem to prove the value of the status quo: assumed hierarchical superiority. In Caliban and his mother Sycorax we are presented with nature at its rawest, wild and bestial, a "vile race".
With the entrance of the former Duke and his daughter comes the colonial movement as former power structures are re-laid in the context of the island; the island is worked, nurtured, territorialised, commodified and appropriated. Caliban is taught the master's language in order to ensure his subjection. Caliban's retort, "The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!" takes the master's tool out of his command; Prospero's own language is then turned against him in uses unintended, and allows the slave to articulate his curses against his colonisers.
Caliban in return for Prospero's commands curses father and daughter insisting that Prospero is not only ruthless but hypocritical as he showed them the island when they first arrived, shared his knowledge but then was enslaved by him:
"the fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place, and fertile:
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own King: and here you sty me...." (I.2.340-4)
This powerful speech then of defiance accuses Prospero of breaking an initial trust of friendship between them and illegitimate assumption of political control made possible by abuse of the power of magic. Caliban's claims to original sovereignty,
"This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother
Which thou tak'st from me" (I.2.333-4)
Are met with a point blank refusal, "Thou most lying slave", from Prospero and counter- accusation of attempted rape (signifying sexual transgression and excess passion) of his daughter. The magician offers this as justification for the arbitrary rule he exercises over the island and its inhabitants. Here, then, we are presented with Prospero's own act of usurpation as Barker and Hulme point out in "Discursive Contexts of The Tempest" (Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis p.191-205). This argument then opens up post-colonial readings of the text as relations on the island serve as an allegory of master- slave relations of colonial and imperialist empire. Ania Loomba in "Seizing the Book" sees texts like The Tempest as complicit in the colonising process (Gender,Race, Renaissance Drama, p.142-58).
We can see in Prospero's enslavement and subjection of Caliban the repression of 'Otherness': that which is exotic, bestial and unfamiliar. Therefore in the restraint of Caliban we are presented with a model of stifling of cultures, effectively a model of colonialism's erasure of customs and native cultures. However, to say that, in writing The Tempest, Shakespeare was 'complicit' in the colonising process is to imply that he is uncritical of Prospero's attitude towards Caliban. This is not true, and Prospero is something of a figure of fun for Shakespeare throughout the play. His point elsewhere (Twelfth Night, King Lear etc.) is that the servant is wiser than the master, so we should be cautious in our acceptance of Loomba's theory.
It is in this scene that Ferdinand, King Alonso's son, who has been separated from the rest of the ship's crew is lured by Ariel's song to Prospero's cave. There, he meets Miranda and her father, and in keeping with conventions of pastoral, idyllic, romantic tradition they fall in love immediately. This of course adheres to Prospero's transcendent design for the resolution of all problems, moral and practical: he will marry his daughter to the son of the King of Naples, undoing and outdoing Antonio's treachery. It is both bountiful in consequence but also executes suitable revenge on Antonio. However, he will not give up his daughter that easily and decides to test Ferdinand by imprisoning him and enforcing manual labour upon him, and like Caliban he is forced into "wooden slavery" as Ferdinand punningly calls it. Where Caliban curses at his tasks Ferdinand nobly bears his burden hoping for plentiful compensation in sights of his beloved Miranda:
"this man's threats,
To whom I am subdued, are but light to me,
Might I but through my prison once a day
Behold this maid"