Prospero

Character

Twelve years before the play begins, Prospero is usurped from his position as the rightful Duke of Milan by his brother Antonio, who puts Prospero and his three-year-old daughter Miranda to sea on a "rotten carcass" of a boat to die. Prospero and Miranda survive and find exile on a small island inhabited mostly by spirits. Prospero learns sorcery from books, and uses it to protect Miranda.

Before the play begins, Prospero freed the magical spirit Ariel from entrapment within "a cloven pine". Ariel is beholden to Prospero after he is freed from his imprisonment inside the pine tree. Prospero then takes Ariel as a slave. Prospero's sorcery is sufficiently powerful to control Ariel and other spirits, as well as to alter weather and even raise the dead: "Graves at my command have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth, by my so potent Art." - Act V, scene 1.

On the island, Prospero becomes master of the monster Caliban, the son of a malevolent witch named Sycorax, and forces Caliban into submission by punishing him with magic if he does not obey.

Prospero's speech

The Tempest is believed to be the last play Shakespeare wrote alone. In this play there are two candidate soliloquies by Prospero which critics have taken to be Shakespeare's own "retirement speech".

One speech is the "Our revels now are ended" or "Cloud-capp'd towers..." speech:

The final soliloquy and epilogue is the other candidate.

Portrayals

Stage

Portrayals of Prospero in Royal Shakespeare Company productions include:

Portrayals of Prospero at the Old Vic include:

Sir John Gielgud (1931, 1940, 1974)

Max von Sydow (1988)

Sir Derek Jacobi (2003)

Stephen Dillane (2010)

Portrayals of Prospero for the New York Shakespeare Festival include:

James Earl Jones (1962)

Raul Julia (1981)

Sir Patrick Stewart (1995) at the Delacorte Theater, later moved to Broadway's Broadhurst Theater.

Sam Waterston (2015)

Portrayals of Prospero for the Globe Theatre include:

Vanessa Redgrave (2000); she also played "Ariel" to her father Sir Michael Redgrave's "Prospero" in the 1964 Caedmon recording.

Roger Allam (2013), videotaped and later broadcast as part of their Live Cinema broadcasts.

Portrayals of Prospero for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival include:

William Hutt (1962, 1976, 1999, 2005)

Len Cariou (1982), videotaped and broadcast on television in 1983

Alan Scarfe (1992)

Film and television

Prospero-esque characters have included:

Paul Mazursky's film Tempest (1982) starring John Cassavetes as "Philip Dimitrius", who is an exile of his own cynical discontent, ego and self-betrayal and who abandons America for a utopian "kingdom" on a secluded Greek isle.

The 1998 TV movie The Tempest, set in a Mississippi bayou during the American Civil War, based on Shakespeare's play and starring Peter Fonda as "Gideon Prosper", a Prospero-esque plantation owner who has learned voodoo from his slaves.

Audio

Audio portrayals of Prospero include:

In popular culture

In the TV series The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and Allan Heinberg, Prospero serves as a proxy for Dream in Shakespeare's final play as a part of a deal he struck with Morpheus.

In the comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, Prospero appears as a founding member of the first such grouping in 1610, alongside his familiars Caliban and Ariel.

Paul Prospero, the protagonist of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014), is named after Prospero.

In John Bellairs's novel The Face in the Frost (1969), one of the protagonists is a wizard named Prospero ("and not the one you're thinking of") .

In Warhammer: 40,000 and further fleshed out in The Horus Heresy series, several books take place on a planet called Prospero, home of Magnus the Red and his Thousand Sons Space Marine legion. The citizens of the planet are versed in sorcery and psychic powers, earning them the suspicion and ire of the rest of the Imperium of Man.

Melon Cauliflower, by New Zealand playwright Tom McCrory, is about a man Prospero, in his late sixties, who struggles to come to terms with the death of his wife and has mistreated his daughter Miranda.

"The Masque of the Red Death", by Edgar Allan Poe, is set at the manor of a Prince Prospero

In the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation by Gene Roddenberry and CBS / Paramount Pictures, Prospero appears briefly played by Lt. Cmdr. Data (Brent Spiner) during the beginning of Season 7 Episode 23 entitled "Emergence". He recites some lines of Prospero's speech before asking Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) to provide some insight into the character of Prospero and Shakespeare's The Tempest in general.

In the mobile game Star Trek Timelines a character was released in February 2017 called Prospero Data, recalling the character's appearance in the previously mentioned Star Trek: The Next Generation episode.