What is "real" and what is not in The Tempest?

The Tempestby William Shakespeare is a dramatic work of imaginative literature. It is not based on actual historical events. Thus nothing in the play is "real". When English actors stood in front of an audience in the Globe theater pretending to be Miranda, Ferdinand, Ariel, or Prospero, they were not actually the characters they pretended to be. Thus on the most basic level, nothing in the play is "real". One could also say, though,...

The Tempest by William Shakespeare is a dramatic work of imaginative literature. It is not based on actual historical events. Thus nothing in the play is "real". When English actors stood in front of an audience in the Globe theater pretending to be Miranda, Ferdinand, Ariel, or Prospero, they were not actually the characters they pretended to be. Thus on the most basic level, nothing in the play is "real". One could also say, though, that audiences understand that the nature of drama means that what is "really" happening on stage is actors dressing up and uttering words from fictional scripts, and that the performers and performances are no more or less real than people performing other roles in our society. A teacher giving a lecture, a car mechanic fixing a car, or a salesperson dealing with a consumer are performing social roles just as much as an actor is performing dramatic roles.

Within The Tempest, one can also separate "realistic" from supernatural elements. Although the story itself is fictional, some aspects of the fiction are closer to our ordinary experience than others, such as the young people (Ferdinand and Miranda) falling in love or the wealthy and powerful engaging in unscrupulous plots. These are events Aristotle in his Poetics would have characterized as unactual probables.

Prospero's magical abilities and the characters of Ariel and Caliban both belong to a different realm, those of unactual improbables. These are imaginative devices that work well within the logic of the story, but most viewers would not believe in the ability of a human to conjure or summon spirits or an air spirit to bewitch humans and control the weather. Caliban's mother's ability to control the moon, mentioned by Prospero, was similarly supernatural; Prospero states:

His [Caliban's] mother was a witch, and one so strong

That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs,

Ariel displays many magical properties, such as the ability to create a shipwreck, select survivors, and leave their clothing dry and unharmed.

On another level of reality, one can look at the relationship between the characters' perceptions and those of the audience. Caliban perceives Stephano to be a god, but the audience understands Stephano to be a drunken and somewhat ludicrous servant. Miranda in her innocence sees Ferdinand as an almost miraculous creature, but the audience perceives him as a relatively ordinary young man.