Prospero. Prospero is a fictional character and the protagonist of William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan, whose usurping brother, Antonio, had put him to sea on a rotten carcass of a boat to die, twelve years before the play begins. Prospero and Miranda had survived and found exile on a small island. He has learned sorcery from books, and uses it while on the island to protect Miranda and control the other characters. Before the play has begun, Prospero frees the spirit Ariel from entrapment within a cloven pine, about which Prospero states: It was mine Art, When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape The pine and let thee out., The Tempest, Act 1, scene 2. 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 and forces Caliban into submission by punishing him with magic if he does not obey. Ariel is beholden to Prospero after he is freed from his imprisonment inside the pine tree. At the end of the play, Prospero intends to drown his book and renounce magic. In the view of the audience, this may have been required to make the ending unambiguously happy, as magic was associated with diabolical works; he will drown his books for the same reason that Doctor Faust, in an earlier play by Christopher Marlowe, promised in vain to burn his books. 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 person's speech is the Cloud-capp'd towers. Our revels now are ended: These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind: we are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep., The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1 The final soliloquy and epilogue is the other candidate. Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's mine own, Which is most faint: now, 'tis true, I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands: Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please.