The Tempest is probably the last of all Shakespeare’s works. It starts with a tempest and a shipwreck, develops through strange situations and crucial encounters and ends positively.
After a shipwreck, Alonso (duke of Milan), his son Ferdinand, and Antonio (king of Naples) reach an island in the Mediterranean sea full of magic and music. The storm had been created by Prospero to punish his brother Alonso who had exiled him from Milan 12 years before, in order to become the new duke. Prospero came to the island with his daughter Miranda to start a new life. Here he found Caliban, a strange native creature, and Ariel, a magic spirit: he exploited them as slaves. Throughout the story, the characters meet and start relationships and their lives are intertwined between love, revenge, pain and justice, ending happily and restoring peace.
The atmosphere in this play is always harmonious and through reconciliation and forgiveness evil is transformed into good. One of the most interesting themes in the play is the representation of colonization: in fact, through Prospero’s power over Caliban and Ariel, Shakespeare seems to refer to the English colonization that was starting in those times, questioning the role of the colonizers who were using the natives as slaves.
With the quotation “Thought is free”, Shakespeare seems to say that a person is free as long as he/she has the freedom to think: this makes us understand that slavery can be not only physical, but also mental. This is an important message even for us today. Even nowadays many people are victims of “mental slavery” such as gaslighting and manipulation, sometimes by people they believe are important to them. In these situations, the person loses his/her freedom, as his mind becomes confused and his/her thinking corrupted.
Freedom is the most important thing we have, and we need to fight for it and to protect it at all costs.
Gaia Marchi, Sara Giacomelli, Arianna Zenti