The Art of Tale-Telling in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

The author draws attention to the fact that in William Shakespeare’s plays characters tell their stories and tales with varying degrees of credibility. In his paper he makes an attempt to reconstruct the actual circumstances of both the storm and shipwreck in The Tempest by analysing all the relevant accounts in the play. While investigating the reliability of the characters’ narratives, the author suggests that Ariel is a spirit whose report of the raised tempest and subsequent shipwreck is partly a trustworthy account and partly a fictitious and misleading tale, which is demonstrated in the course of comparing his words with the other characters’ assertions of what happened in the initial storm.