The Tempest

In Act II, Antonio convinces Sebastian to overthrow King Alonso, much as Antonio overthrew Prospero, and Caliban finds new friends in the drunkards Trinculo and Stephano.

Alonso’s sea voyage began in Italy and, until it met with a storm, was supposed to head directly to and from Tunis on the northern coast of Africa, where the city’s king married Alonso’s daughter Claribel. Tunis rose from the ashes of Carthage, which in classical times was the capital of the Phoenician empire and rival to Rome for control of the Mediterranean area. Gonzalo and Adrian argue over this history; their talk is meant by Shakespeare to make fun of bureaucrats and how they sometimes squabble over trifles during a crisis.

When Ariel makes the king’s entourage fall asleep, Antonio and Sebastian remain awake so that Prospero, who watches invisibly from nearby, can see what they’ll do. Antonio promptly suggests that Sebastian kill the sleeping king and take his power. Antonio has already usurped his brother Prospero, so naturally he believes Sebastian should take power from his own brother. Prospero doesn’t want this turn of events, so he orders Ariel to wake the king. The plotters make an excuse for their drawn swords and escape detection, but now the audience knows that Antonio has an evil soul, and that Sebastian is weak-willed and easily controlled.

Also during Act II’s first scene, Gonzalo tries to cheer up Alonso: He proposes ways that the island can provide for them. He also suggests how the king might make a fresh start at governance and perhaps even establish a paradise. In crafting this passage, Shakespeare borrows directly from Michel de Montaigne’s late-1500s utopian essay on the wisdom of faraway Indigenous peoples, “Of Cannibals.” The counselor declaims on a proper Eden for humankind in words closely similar to Montaigne’s: “no name of magistrate; / Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, / And use of service, none; contract, succession, / Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none” (2.1.143-45). (Madeleine Cox. “Montaigne and ‘The Tempest’.” Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 5 Nov 2010, shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/montaigne-and-tempest.)

Shakespeare also knew Thomas More’s book Utopia, with its fantasy of a perfect society on an island somewhere in the Western Hemisphere. Utopia contained ideas similar to those of Montaigne. (Varughese, Vinisha. “Hidden Utopianism in The Tempest.” Cedar Crest College, www2.cedarcrest.edu/academic/eng/lfletcher/tempest/papers/vvarughese.htm, 2012. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.)

Gonzalo’s speech, then, is Shakespeare’s sly way of inserting into his play ideas about social and political reform that skirt direct criticism of the English monarchy.

Shakespeare extends his borrowings from commedia dell’arte when he adapts the Italian stock characters the Fool and his sidekick into the comic dolts Trinculo and Stephano. They encounter Caliban in a burst of low-comedy slapstick that brings to mind the physical comedy of 20th century American film stars Charlie Chaplin, the Three Stooges, and Laurel and Hardy. It’s the kind of humor that also became a feature of England’s late-1800s Music Hall theatre and, in the US, the vaudeville circuit of the early 1900s.