Sibling Bonds and Bondage in (and beyond) Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Sibling relations in Shakespeare’s plays tend to receive less attention than parent-child relations, particularly father-child relations, given the influential presence of fathers and the absence of mothers in so many of the major plays. Certainly The Tempest has offered no obvious exception for such critical emphasis, given that Prospero serves in effect as a domineering father figure for every other character on the island at the start of the play, from his biological daughter Miranda to the spirit Ariel and the monster Caliban, in the striking absence of all the mothers. ¹ Even (and in some sense even more so) Ferdinand, the son of Prospero’s rival, finds himself subject to the mage’s paternal authority. And yet the ‘sibling relations’ among ‘Prospero’s children’ have not received much critical attention, for all that. ² Moreover the sibling dynamics among ‘Prospero’s children’ can prove all the more illuminating when examined in the context of the most crucial sibling relation of all for Prospero himself: his failed competition with his own brother, Antonio. The present chapter engages the topic of sibling relations in The Tempest, not in order to presume to offer a definitive analysis of the subject so much as to take the opportunity to consider some of the ways in which sibling bonds and bondage refract and/or contain wider social and familial conflicts.