Context: Colonialism & Jacobean Power
Shakespeare’s World in 1611
The Tempest was written around 1610–1611, near the end of Shakespeare’s career. It is one of his final plays and belongs to a group known as the late romances. These plays share a pattern: older characters who have suffered loss find resolution through the younger generation, and the endings offer forgiveness rather than destruction. Understanding this context is essential for AQA’s AO3 — the play was shaped by the political anxieties, colonial ambitions, and theatrical fashions of Jacobean England.
The Tempest was almost certainly inspired by real events. In 1609, the ship Sea Venture, carrying colonists to Virginia, was wrecked in a storm off Bermuda. The survivors’ accounts — William Strachey’s True Reportory and Silvester Jourdain’s Discovery of the Bermudas — described a magical island of strange noises and abundant food. Shakespeare drew directly on these reports.
Colonialism and the New World
England in the early seventeenth century was gripped by excitement about the New World. The Virginia Company had established Jamestown in 1607, and investors were pouring money into colonial ventures. The relationship between European colonisers and indigenous peoples is central to The Tempest. Prospero arrives on an island already inhabited by Caliban, claims ownership of it, and forces Caliban into servitude. This mirrors the pattern of European colonisation: arrival, displacement, and exploitation.
Gonzalo’s speech in Act 2, Scene 1, where he imagines an ideal commonwealth with no property, work, or government, draws directly from Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” (1580). Montaigne argued that supposedly “savage” peoples were morally superior to corrupt Europeans — an idea that Shakespeare both explores and complicates through Caliban.
Montaigne’s essay challenged European assumptions about civilisation. He argued that indigenous peoples lived in a natural state free from the corruption of European society. Gonzalo echoes this directly: “I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries / Execute all things.” He imagines no magistrates, no riches, no poverty. However, Shakespeare undercuts Gonzalo’s idealism — Antonio and Sebastian mock him throughout, and the play itself shows that even on a remote island, power struggles and treachery persist. The question of whether “civilisation” corrupts or improves people runs through the entire play.
The Jacobean Court and Masques
The Tempest was performed at court for King James I on 1 November 1611, and again in 1613 for the marriage of James’s daughter Princess Elizabeth. The play’s use of spectacle — the storm, Ariel’s transformations, the disappearing banquet, and the wedding masque in Act 4 — reflects the Jacobean fashion for lavish court masques. These were expensive entertainments that celebrated royal power through allegory and spectacle.
Prospero’s masque in Act 4 features the goddesses Iris, Ceres, and Juno blessing Ferdinand and Miranda’s marriage. This mirrors real masques performed for James I. But Prospero abruptly ends the masque when he remembers Caliban’s conspiracy, and his speech — “Our revels now are ended” — has been read as Shakespeare’s own farewell to the theatre. The masque-within-a-play structure creates layers of illusion: we watch an audience (Ferdinand and Miranda) watching a performance staged by a director (Prospero) within a play written by Shakespeare.
The Tempest was performed at the court of King James I in 1611. Act 4’s wedding masque with Iris, Ceres, and Juno directly mirrors the Jacobean court masque tradition. Prospero’s role as the director of spectacle on the island parallels Shakespeare’s own role as playwright — both create illusions that ultimately dissolve.
Power, Legitimacy, and Kingship
James I was deeply concerned with legitimate authority. He had written Basilikon Doron (1599) to instruct his son in the duties of kingship. The Tempest explores legitimate versus illegitimate power at every level: Prospero was overthrown by his brother Antonio; Antonio and Sebastian plot to murder Alonso; Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo plot to murder Prospero. Every conspiracy in the play mirrors the others, suggesting that the desire to seize power by force is a universal human failing — not limited to any one class or race.
The late romances — Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest — share key features: fathers separated from children, sea voyages, apparent loss followed by miraculous reunion, and endings that favour forgiveness over revenge. Unlike the tragedies (where flawed protagonists die), the romances allow their central figures a second chance. Prospero chooses mercy over vengeance: “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance.” This pattern of reconciliation through the younger generation defines the genre.
For the exam, this generic context matters: The Tempest deliberately avoids tragedy. Prospero could destroy his enemies but chooses not to. This choice is the play’s moral centre, and it reflects the romance genre’s emphasis on restoration and renewal.
The Tempest is also notable for observing the classical unities of time, place, and action — the events unfold in roughly real time, on one island, with interconnected plotlines. This tight structure gives the play an unusual intensity and makes it feel like a carefully controlled experiment by Prospero (and by Shakespeare).