The Tempest

"Hell is empty, / And all the devils are here."

Ariel (reporting Ferdinand) — Act 1, Scene 2

Ariel reports Ferdinand’s terrified cry as he leapt from the burning ship. The line frames the play from the outset as a moral descent: hell is no longer an underworld but the very company of men newly arrived on the island. Shakespeare pointedly inverts the familiar “savage island” trope found in contemporary colonial pamphlets, suggesting that the human ship-load carries its own evil ashore rather than discovering it in Caliban or the place itself.

"My library / Was dukedom large enough."

Prospero — Act 1, Scene 2

Prospero explains to Miranda why he lost Milan: he preferred his books to the daily business of government, leaving a vacuum his brother filled. The quiet pun on “dukedom” captures both his intellectual vocation and his political failure, and Shakespeare uses the line to raise the play’s larger question of whether the magician-scholar, who once neglected rule for study, has now earned the right to reclaim his throne at the end of the play.

"This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak'st from me."

Caliban — Act 1, Scene 2

Caliban grounds his claim to the island on maternal inheritance, the only form of property available to him against Prospero’s superior magic. Since the second half of the twentieth century these lines have been treated as the play’s central colonial text, framing Prospero as an occupier rather than a rescuer and Caliban as a dispossessed native rather than a monster. It is the line most often cited in productions that want to foreground the politics of land and sovereignty.

"You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse."

Caliban — Act 1, Scene 2

Caliban turns the gift of European education violently against the giver. Shakespeare captures in two lines the paradox of colonial pedagogy: the subject acquires the master’s tongue and finds that the only use he can make of it is rage at his own oppression. Post-colonial writers from Aimé Césaire to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o have treated these lines as a founding statement of the problem of writing back against power in a language that is not one’s own.

"Full fathom five thy father lies. / Of his bones are coral made. / Those are pearls that were his eyes."

Ariel (song) — Act 1, Scene 2

Ariel’s song lures Ferdinand towards Miranda’s cell while falsely telling him that his father has drowned. The rich “sea-change” imagery — bones turned to coral, eyes into pearls — introduces the play’s defining motif of transformation: drowning becomes decoration, loss becomes beauty, grief is reshaped into art. The song is also the audience’s first sign that music on this island is a moral and magical instrument for reordering feeling, not simply atmospheric ornament.

"I might call him / A thing divine; for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble."

Miranda (of Ferdinand) — Act 1, Scene 2

Miranda’s first sight of a young man who is neither her father nor Caliban leads her to misread Ferdinand as supernatural. The line quietly prepares the ironic force of her later “brave new world” exclamation in Act 5 and shows how her sheltered upbringing has made ordinary humanity look miraculous to her. Shakespeare uses her wonder to let the audience see the familiar anew, while also gently warning how easily a first love can mistake a young man for a god.

"I' th' commonwealth I would by contraries / Execute all things."

Gonzalo — Act 2, Scene 1

Gonzalo’s utopian speech, drawn closely from John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals,” imagines a society without trade, labour or hierarchy. Antonio and Sebastian mock him as a fool, but Shakespeare sets the speech deliberately against their simultaneous plot to murder Alonso, implying that even a naïve utopian fantasy is morally preferable to the cynical, self-interested calculation of realpolitik. The passage also quietly roots the play in the New World debates of 1610–11.

"My strong imagination sees a crown / Dropping upon thy head."

Antonio (to Sebastian) — Act 2, Scene 1

Antonio tempts Sebastian to murder his sleeping brother Alonso, casually reproducing on the island the crime he committed against Prospero twelve years earlier in Milan. The phrase “strong imagination” makes naked ambition sound almost visionary, dressing up political crime as a kind of destiny. Shakespeare’s deliberate repetition of the original usurpation signals how easily history will repeat itself without intervention, and quietly sets up the moral test of whether Prospero can break the cycle through forgiveness.

"Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not."

Caliban — Act 3, Scene 2

Caliban calms the drunken Stephano and Trinculo with an unexpected description of the island’s music. The lyricism of the speech — its gentle “sweet airs,” its sleeping “riches ready to drop” — complicates Prospero’s claim that Caliban is irredeemably savage. The figure most abused by the play’s hierarchy turns out to have the deepest imaginative response to the place itself, and Shakespeare invites audiences to hear in his voice the sound of the island itself.

"You are three men of sin, whom Destiny... / Hath caused to belch up you."

Ariel (disguised as a harpy) — Act 3, Scene 3

Ariel materialises as a terrifying harpy at the vanishing banquet and names Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian as the “three men of sin” who drove Prospero into exile. The staged supernatural judgement begins Alonso’s repentance and shows Prospero using theatre as a moral instrument, not simply a punitive one: the spectacle is designed not to kill but to make the guilty confront what they have done. It also demonstrates Shakespeare’s confidence in the new scenic machinery of the Blackfriars stage.

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air."

Prospero — Act 4, Scene 1

Prospero breaks off the masque suddenly, remembering Caliban’s plot, and uses theatrical vocabulary — “revels,” “actors,” “melted into air” — to describe the dissolution of all apparently solid things. The speech brings the play’s magic and Shakespeare’s own craft into the same extended metaphor, so that the boundary between the stage spectacle, the island setting and ordinary life becomes suddenly porous. It is the clearest moment in which the play reflects on its own illusionism.

"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."

Prospero — Act 4, Scene 1

One of the most famous meditations on mortality in English, extending the “revels” image of the previous lines to human life itself. The play’s romance optimism is quietly qualified here: even the restoration of Milan and the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda take place inside a dream bordered by sleep and death. Shakespeare gives Prospero a vocabulary of breathtaking tenderness for the very impermanence his magic appears to deny, deepening the play beyond its comic surface.

"A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick."

Prospero (of Caliban) — Act 4, Scene 1

Prospero asserts in his most extreme language that Caliban is incurably evil by nature, a claim the play both voices and tests. The alliterative “nature / nurture” pairing is the clearest statement of one of the play’s central questions and has entered the wider English tradition. Crucially, Shakespeare does not endorse the judgement: the audience is invited to weigh it against Caliban’s lyrical “noises” speech and his final promise to “seek for grace,” so the line reveals as much about Prospero’s rage as about Caliban.

"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th' quick, / Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury / Do I take part: the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance."

Prospero — Act 5, Scene 1

The moral pivot of the play. Prompted by Ariel’s pity (“mine would, sir, were I human”), Prospero deliberately chooses mercy over revenge and formulates the ethical principle — that forgiveness is a rarer and greater act than punishment — that governs Shakespeare’s late romances as a group. Note the verb “take part”: Prospero presents reason as joining a faction against fury rather than simply overruling it, so the choice feels like a hard-won political decision rather than a spontaneous feeling.

"Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves..."

Prospero — Act 5, Scene 1

Prospero’s grand invocation of the spirits he has commanded, adapted closely from Ovid’s Medea as translated by Arthur Golding, introduces his abjuration of magic. Shakespeare pointedly lets the sorcerer catalogue his powers one last time — raising the dead, bedimming the sun, rifting the oak — before he formally lays them down, so that the renunciation carries real weight rather than feeling like the giving up of something trivial. The classical allusion also tells audiences to measure his magic on an epic scale.

"This rough magic / I here abjure... / I'll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I'll drown my book."

Prospero — Act 5, Scene 1

Prospero renounces his art in precise physical terms: staff broken, book drowned “deeper than did ever plummet sound.” The specificity is important, because it ties the play’s magic back to the material book and theatrical props on which it depends. The drowned book has long been read, perhaps over-read, as Shakespeare’s own farewell to the stage, though modern scholarship notes he continued to collaborate afterwards. Either way the action gives his renunciation unusual dramatic weight.

"O, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in't!"

Miranda — Act 5, Scene 1

Miranda greets the shipwrecked nobles with unguarded delight, seeing for the first time in her life people who are neither her father nor Caliban. Prospero’s dry reply — “’Tis new to thee” — lets the audience hear the irony: the “goodly creatures” before her include the usurpers Antonio and Sebastian. The line gave Aldous Huxley the title Brave New World in 1932 and has since become shorthand for innocent optimism that is about to meet the real world.

"I'll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace."

Caliban — Act 5, Scene 1

Caliban’s final line registers a moral development rarely granted to Shakespearean villains, and it is delivered after he has recognised Stephano and Trinculo as the fools they are. Whether the lines show genuine repentance, forced submission under Prospero’s power, or Shakespeare’s reluctance to leave Caliban simply as a monster is a central question for any production. The word “grace” pulls the colonial plot into the play’s larger religious vocabulary of forgiveness and mercy.

"To the elements / Be free, and fare thou well!"

Prospero (to Ariel) — Act 5, Scene 1

Prospero finally fulfils his twelve-year-old promise and dissolves the bond that has structured almost every scene of the play. Ariel has been promised freedom repeatedly — the audience has heard him ask for it in Act 1 — and the release placed here at the climax rather than at the beginning of the action gives freedom the weight of a reward. The short, unadorned line also makes a striking contrast with Prospero’s previous grand invocations of spiritual power.

"As you from crimes would pardon'd be, / Let your indulgence set me free."

Prospero — Epilogue

In the Epilogue the actor playing Prospero steps out of the magician’s role and asks the audience’s applause to release him from the stage, framing the theatrical contract itself in the same language of “pardon” that has governed the whole play. The final couplet makes the audience complicit in the drama’s economy of forgiveness: we are asked to grant to Prospero the mercy he has just extended to his enemies. It is one of Shakespeare’s most metatheatrical endings.