The Tempest – One of the last if not the last of the written plays, this one has always been among my favorites. It’s such a slight play in terms of plot, with really only a handful of scenes, a pretty straightforward plot in a lot of ways, and a small cast of characters. It’s also one of the plays (and there’s plenty of others) where the concept of plays and performance come up in the text itself. The plot, if you don’t know it: Prospero is the former Duke of Milan. He was wrongly ousted from power and sent into exile with his daughter Miranda. He lands on this mysterious island that is inhabited mostly by mystical beings. He battles the witch Sycorax, and enslaves her son Caliban. Another spirit, Ariel, also is in Prospero’s employ, but it’s more or less the same as enslavement (or more so indenturehood) as the conditions for his release keep changing. At the beginning of the play, Ariel spots a ship out to sea and tells Prospero is contains Antonio, the usurper to Prosero’s throne. He creates a giant storm that sinks the boat and causes the people aboard to land ashore. The different people on the boat land in different parts of the island, leading to several packs of characters moving toward the final showdown with Prospero. Our groups: Antonio and his retinue; his son Ferdinand who runs into Miranda; and Trinculo and Stephano, two attendants, who run into Caliban and immediately enslave him.
The plot of the play is of course about the restoration to the throne, with the love between Miranda and Ferdinand as the driving force. There’s a funny line of Miranda’s where she says something to her father like: “Look, I’ve three men in my life: Caliban, you, and Ferdinand, and he’s hot! So I am out of here”. And of course Caliban, who is ultimately a kind of minor character has the largest life outside of the play because of the symbolic value as a character (an original inhabitant to a space being ousted and enslaved by invading Europeans).