John Gielgud as Prospero in Peter Greenaway's 1991 film adaptation, Prospero's Books.

This modern lithograph by Richard Caton Woodville is entitled Wrecked Upon the Bermudas, 1609. Included in a book called Hutchinson's Story of the British Nation (1923), it offers a romantic version of British maritime history—the fierce majesty of nature in the contrast between mountain and sea, the hard-working servingmen, the dejected courtier. Such a point of view also informed many early-twentieth-century productions of The Tempest.

Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library

This seventeenth-century drawing of a Vir Marinus, a fish-like man (dressed in this satiric image as a priest), represents the abiding European interest throughout the early modern period in monstrosities and strange creatures, especially from the new world.

Private Collection/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library

British pre-Raphaelite painter J. W. Waterhouse's "Miranda—The Tempest" (1916) depicts Miranda's pained response to the shipwreck. The painting captures the late-Victorian sentimentality associated with the character.

Private Collection/Photo ©The Maas Gallery, London/The Bridgeman Art Library

Hollywood produces Forbidden Planet, transporting the narrative of The Tempest into outer space. The conflict comes when a spaceship invading earth is destroyed by an invisible malevolent force, the psychic division felt by the Prospero figure. Ariel is turned into Robby the Robot.

In Derek Jarman's freely adapted film, The Tempest, the final moments are given over to the jazz singer Elisabeth Welch doing a rendition of Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather."

Igor Yasulovich as Prospero ordered Alexander Feklistov, playing Caliban, in Cheek by Jowl's 2011 production at the Chekhov International Theatre Festival. Images of the ocean projected against the back wall of the set were a constant reminder to the audience of the play's island setting. Directed by Declan Donnellan, the company's Russian ensemble performed the play in Russian with English subtitles.

ITAR-TASS/Ruslan Shamukov/Corbis