Who is Ariel?
Ariel is an air spirit in William Shakespeare‘s play The Tempest (c. 1611). Flying invisibly through the sky, Ariel has mysterious powers to raise storms and thunder and to play beautiful music.
Ariel in The Tempest
The play is set on a lonely island where the magician Prospero lives with his daughter Miranda. Ariel had been imprisoned in a cleft pine by the witch Sycorax, who once lived on the island, and after being freed by Prospero came to serve him. At Prospero’s command, Ariel raises a storm that wrecks the ship of his old enemies and guides them to the island. At the end of the play, Ariel is granted freedom as promised and departs into the sky.
A name that lives on
Ariel has often appeared in literature, music and painting as a representative spirit of wind and air. Ariel, one of the moons of Uranus discovered in 1851, is also named after this spirit. Ariel is different from the sylph, the air spirit among the four elementals, but the two are sometimes mentioned together as spirits of the air.
