I.
I think my father is dead. When the ship wrecked, I saw him go under, and …
I never saw him again.
My memory is spotty, but I can still vaguely remember before. Tunis. Claribel’s marriage. Then, we were on that ship, and there was a storm.
My eyes might have been deceiving me, but I could swear that it was moving with us. It seemed to be alive – beyond the extent to which storms could usually be considered alive. There was an unnatural rhythm, too, to its operation; the rising swell of the waves, the booming percussion of the thunder all made the storm take on a strange musical quality unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
The island itself seems to take on this same property, as well. This sense of musicality which unites all the sounds of the island into a symphony. At least, it does so for some of the time here; there are times where I can so clearly hear the music that it is almost deafening, but at other times I can’t seem to make anything of the noise.
But with a symphony comes a composer, and some small part of myself is telling me that I might come across him while I’m here.
I think someone’s watching me.
II.
I heard the music again. I don’t know whether it was out of curiosity, desperation, or some combination of the two, but I decided to follow it. As I got closer, I heard a voice, and the voice sang of my drowned father. At first this seemed to reinforce the reality of his death, but I find myself somewhat doubting. Perhaps it instead reinforces my own lack of sanity instead, and my father is completely safe somewhere far away from here.
These doubts I had were only strengthened by what followed. There are people – a man and his daughter – living here on the island, as if they had been living here for years, possibly even decades. They didn’t appear too interested in helping me, though, and the old man seems to have made a point to not go near his daughter, as impossible as that is when they are the only other people on the island.
I wonder if I’m being manipulated. I know I heard the music when I walked in to meet the two, but neither of them appears to have sung the song I heard. I thought I saw a third conversing with them for a fraction of a second, but whatever it was vanished as quickly as it came. Despite the tragedy of the shipwreck, the rest of my time here has felt … too easy. I’m being handed one incredibly fortunate opportunity after the other, and the only punishment I’ve faced is a few stern words from the old man about his daughter.
I’m beginning to think I may never leave this place.
III.
As each day goes by, I find myself more attracted to Miranda. I can’t put my finger on exactly why; perhaps it simply arose from an overwhelming sense of loneliness. But despite that sense of loneliness, I don’t think I’ve ever been alone in this place. There is no one with me, but Prospero has almost certainly been watching me from the very beginning. I’ve learned that he has some sort of magic at his side, seemingly granting him control over all of nature in this place. It’s no coincidence, then, that the storm had come upon us so suddenly and strangely. I’m sure of it now; he’s intentionally stranded me here.
Why he has stranded me, though, is another matter. I’ve heard mention of my father and some sort of betrayal, but Prospero seems to have goals more ambitious than revenge. I wonder if he is intentionally pushing me towards Miranda through his role as the stern father, attempting to strengthen my affection for her through his resistance. The very possibility of this being true makes me question whether my affections are really my own; though, to be honest, I’ve begun to care less and less.
More unnerving than anything I’ve previously seen is that Prospero’s conversations seem to include others invisible to me. The third I’ve discovered to be Ariel, some kind of sprite who aids Prospero in his magic, but there is a fourth. I’ve seen him, in the middle of conversations, turn away from me and whisper to the air. I’ve never been able to make out any of what he says, but I know he does it, even though he pretends that he hasn’t when he turns back to me. He laughs with them sometimes, and I often wonder whether they’re laughing at me, as though I’m being paraded around like a pet that Prospero shows to someone.
Who is that someone, I wonder, who finds such enjoyment in my suffering?
IV.
I’ve managed to get off the island by playing along with Prospero’s plan. I do genuinely care for Miranda, I think, but I would be lying if I didn’t say that a part of me agreed to marry her out of desperation to get off that wretched island. I found my father alive, which further confirms my suspicions of Prospero’s manipulation. This is all some kind of twisted, narcissistic morality tale Prospero has constructed to please himself and remind everyone of how great and powerful he is. My mind can’t help but replay what I last saw of him before we set sail. He was once again talking to the air, congratulating himself on his successful manipulations. As he bowed to the empty room, I began to hear the music once more.
And now, as I sit here in Naples, I find that the music will never stop, as far away from that island as I am.
Analysis:
I have always found the end of The Tempest to be fascinating because it shows us that Prospero always gets his way. Despite the darker tone of the introduction and the use of a magical revenge plot, Prospero seemingly has no tragic flaw like so many of Shakespeare’s other characters. We, the audience, can certainly point to them – he is selfish, cruel, and incredibly manipulative – but Shakespeare seems to deny Prospero of receiving any sort of moral judgment for those actions, outside of a select few lines from Caliban. It is a morality tale, as Alonso and the other people shipwrecked in the story are evaluated by Prospero and rewarded or punished accordingly, but this never extends to Prospero himself. My suspicion is that it is due to Prospero also acting as a stand-in for Shakespeare, as evidenced by the “release me from my bands / with the help of your good hands” of lines 9-10 of the epilogue, in which he asks the audience for applause. Because Shakespeare is writing himself into the story, he was probably limited in what he could do with the character and how he wanted to present his own actions to the audience, and I think this is why Prospero gets everything he wants by the ending of the play.
I chose Ferdinand as the anchor for the story both because he was one of the first characters from the ship to appear post-shipwreck and because he was one of the characters closest to Prospero. The story also takes a cue from Caliban’s famous speech in the play, in which he refers to the noises of the island as “Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. / Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments,” telling Trinculo and Stephano that what he hears is a kind of music (3.2.136-137). My story further connects this music of the island to Prospero, insisting that this music could not occur naturally and is instead evidence of Prospero’s manipulation of nature. And as Ferdinand investigates further, he finds that Prospero is not alone while doing this; the audience, invisible to him, is also participating and reveling in Prospero’s acts. Rather than have Ferdinand shrug it all off and have the happy ending, I instead make a point of it having lasting effects on the way Ferdinand sees the world around him. The ending, in particular, is a way of showing that his eventual escape from the island is a hollow victory because he is still living in Prospero’s reality. And that existence isn’t a particularly fun or happy one; it is instead a horrifying one, in which one’s suffering is entirely determined at the whims of a stranger and enjoyed as entertainment by an audience he cannot see.