Miranda is amazed at seeing him and thinks that he is perhaps a spirit. Each thinks the other parties have drowned.Īs Ferdinand wonders about this strange island, he comes across Miranda. They are separated into three parties: Prospero’s brother and his friends, King Alonso’s son, Ferdinand, and Alonso’s butler and jester, landing on another part of the island. It is something of an illusion created to bring his errant brother and his friends – other Italian politicians – to the island. When the play opens we see that Prospero has used magic to effect a shipwreck off the island. When we first see him he is a fully-fledged magician. Miranda has been tutored by him and she is now an educated young woman, although she knows very little about the outside world. During the fifteen years on the island Prospero had studied so much that he had surpassed all knowledge of science and entered the realm of magic. A kindly courtier had filled the boat with Prospero’s books so he was able to continue with his studying in exile. As a scholar, obsessed with learning and knowledge, Prospero had taken his eye off the ball and his younger brother had taken advantage of that. Prospero had been overthrown as Duke of Milan by his brother. It seems like more than a coincidence that a man who lived for most of his adult life in London, and had much to do with the royal court, should be so strong on the theme of the relationship between a city man of the world and a girl growing up in the country.įelicity Jones as Miranda, The Tempest Miranda’s story The Tempest was first performed three years later. Shakespeare was writing those plays during the time he was enjoying the baby Elizabeth, his only grandchild, born 1608. Shakespeare’s late plays – The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles – have a common theme: an elderly man who has become the victim of the sophisticated world of politics and power is regenerated by a young daughter who has not experienced that world, having grown up in the countryside. The play’s action begins fifteen years later. She grows up without seeing any human being, apart from her father and a deformed man, Caliban, who was the only inhabitant of the island when the boat was washed up on its shore, and enslaved by Prospero. Prospero was banished to the island, placed in a little boat with his baby daughter, Miranda, and set adrift.
Miranda is a central character in Shakespeare’s late play, The Tempest. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.