Referenced By / The Tempest

Anime & Manga

• Blast of Tempest references a lot of Shakespeare's work with the title alone being a reference to this play.
• Lucy May Of The Southern Rainbiw: The Princeton's cat is named Prospero.
• The plot of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury takes a lot of cues from the play, featuring a character named after Prospero who makes use of a machine known as the Aerial to carry out a revenge against a man who ruined their life. Part of the revenge plot is to have Lady Prospera's daughter marry the daughter of the man who ruined their lives.

Comic Books

• X-Men: one of the Morlocks, Caliban, was romantically obsessed with Kitty Pryde, who at one point had taken on the code-name Ariel. Unlike his counterpart in the play, Caliban could be gentle and kindly.
• The Sandman (1989): Dream of the Endless commissions this play be written in exchange for Shakespeare's skill as a playwright. He later implies that it is an allegory for his planned suicide.

Film — Animated

• In Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, when Bonk gets angry at the Joker and calls him a fake, the Joker replies, "Ah, brave new world...that has such [putzes/yutzes] in it." This is a parody of a line spoken by Miranda: "O, wonder!/How many goodly creatures are there here!/How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world/That has such people in't" (V, i).

Film — Live Action

• Daughters of the Dust: As the boat Viola's in approaches the island, where she grew up but moved away from years ago, Viola says "What's past is prologue."
• Forbidden Planet takes the basic exile structure.
• In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), Zaphod wants to trip the light fantastic with Questular.
• In It's Always Fair Weather, Jackie Leighton, to put Ted Riley off (as well as to comment on how Riley's reunion with two old army friends didn't go well), tells him, "Most friendship is fading, most loving mere folly." She claims it's from The Tempest, but Riley points out it's actually from As You Like It, which impresses her.
• In Lady Bird, the school puts on a production of The Tempest.
• Prospero's "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" was paraphrased by Humphrey Bogart's character for his iconic final line in The Maltese Falcon: "The stuff that dreams are made of".
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: Among the many, many Shakespeare quotes Chang rattles off, he gets out a "our revels now have ended". Chancellor Gorkon drops a "brave new world" in an earlier conversation, and given he's also an aficionado of the bard (the Trope Namer for In the Original Klingon), it's probably a deliberate reference from him.
• In the movie Time After Time, time-travelling H. G. Wells says "O brave new world that hath such people in it" as he observed 1980s Los Angeles.

Literature

• Isaac Asimov's Words of Science and the History Behind Them: The entry for "Umbra" explains the use of Umbrial as a name for a sad and gloomy spirit contrasting with William Shakespeare's Ariel from The Tempest. Umbrial first appeared in Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock", and both Umbriel and Ariel are names given to Uranus's moons.
• Miranda's speech appears in Brave New World as the a Title Drop. The Savage really knows his Shakespeare.
  • Arguably, "Brave New World" is almost the opposite of "To thine own self be true" nowadays. Whereas "to thine own self be true" was meant as ironic (in context), it is now used seriously. Whereas "brave new world" is meant to be said seriously, but chances are, if something's described as a "brave new world" in fiction, something is—or will soon be—Gone Horribly Wrong (most likely because Huxley's dystopian novel has become more well-known than the play it got its title from.
• The Collector: The main female character is called Miranda, and she gets kidnapped by Frederick who sees himself and introduces himself as Ferdinand, because he would like to invoke a romance between them, based on the couple. Miranda thinks of him as monster and calls him Caliban.
• Discworld: Octarine, which can only be seen by magic-capable creatures (such as wizards and cats), is described as The Colour of Magic and the light fantastic — the latter being a quote from The Tempest.
• In the Doctor Who/Sherlock Holmes crossover All-Consuming Fire, Watson uses the "brave new world" line straight, to describe a future "that has such people" as Bernice Summerfield.
• In Galaxy of Fear, a long-dead witch went by the name of Sycorax.
• The seventh Longmire mystery, Hell Is Empty, is titled after a well-known line from The Tempest (a line which Sheriff Walt, naturally, has to quote in dialogue). An episode of the TV adaptation was based on this book, although they changed the title to "Unquiet Mind."
• Moby-Dick: The sailors are discussing whether they will drown sooner or later, or live long enough to get hanged.
• Rain of the Ghosts, by self-described "Shakespeare nut" Greg Weisman, is set in the fictional Prospero Keys, with important characters named Miranda^note Both meaningfully and ironically: she's an outsider because she's only recent come back to the island after years away, Ariel^note Fittingly, who works for Miranda's father, Alonso, Iris, Sebastian, and even a villain named "Silas Setebos." There's a company on the islands named Sycorax, and recurring antagonist "Callahan" is probably a reference to Caliban. The second book also mentions that the characters are going to see The Tempest on a field trip; one wonders how they'll react to all the parallels.
• In the novel Ready Player One, a clue to the Crystal Key is "I must uneasy make, lest too light winning make the prize light". Parzival recognises this as "a quote from Shakespeare" and reckons that it simply implies that getting the Crystal Key won't be easy, but Art3mis corrects him, pointing out that it is a quote from The Tempest and is a clue that to earn the Crystal Key, players have to play Tempest.
• The Relativity villain, Phanthro, is a big fan of Shakespeare. In his introductory story, "Pressure Cooker", all of the clues he gives the heroes are in the form of "Tempest" quotes. His outfit even indirectly references the play.
• In Eye of a Fly, Ernest's favorite Shakespeare play is The Tempest. He relates to Prospero, who loves to study and defeats his enemies with magical powers. Annie tells him that she memorized a bunch of audiobooks, including The Tempest, and that she thought "O brave new world that has such people in it!" when she saw Ernest.
• My Dark Vanessa: In college, Vanessa's class is told to pair off for an activity after reading The Tempest. Vanessa's partner admits that she hasn't done the reading. Vanessa's read The Tempest twice, but pretends she's only skimmed it.
• The Schizogenic Man: In one of the alternate timelines, Heron watches a play on TV, where an actor sings a version of "Ariel's Song" with many of the words changed.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: The episode "The Christmas Invasion" features an alien race called the Sycorax who use Magic from Technology. Two seasons later, in "The Shakespeare Code," the Doctor meets Shakespeare himself and mentions the incident with the Sycorax, implying that Shakespeare used the name because of this.
• The Firefly universe has planets named Ariel and Miranda. Moreover, Miranda's most famous line in The Tempest is "O brave new world, that hath such people in it!", and the planet Miranda was at one time a Brave New World-like dystopia.
• Twice on Qi:
  • In the Shakespeare-themed "I" season episode, "Immortal Bard", before giving the scores, Stephen Fry announced, "Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air."
  • At the beginning of the "K" series Christmas episode, "Kris Kringle", Fry announced, "Hell is empty, all the devils are here!"
• Prospero appears as the major antagonist in The Librarians 2014, where-in he is a Fictional, a fictional character who was so iconic and well-written that he literally came to life.
• The Outer Limits (1963): In "The Architects of Fear", scientist Allen Leighton undergoes Sanity Slippage while his colleagues transform him into a fake alien, leading to this line:
  Allen: I am Callahan... uh, Cal... Caliban... with a Ph.D!

Music

• The Decemberists' epic song "The Island" is a retelling of The Tempest In the Style of Emerson, Lake & Palmer (well, Progressive Rock more generally, too).

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000: The Primarch Magnus was found on the planet Prospero, known these days as the Planet of the Sorcerers, while Lion'el Jonson was found on Caliban. There is also a planet named Sycorax, a psychic storm-plagued Death World that serves as Training from Hell for psykers.

Theatre

• In On the Verge, Alex does the "O brave new world" line straight, only to be immediately lampshaded as a plagiarist by Fanny.

Video Games

• Call of Duty: Black Ops: while the player is being led into the inner sanctum of the Pentagon by Robert McNamara, the clearance codes he gives at the checkpoints are "Sycorax" and "Prospero".
• Fahrenheit: Lucas Kane is shown reading an assortment of books, one of these happens to be Tempest.
• The final zone of Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers is a seabed area named The Tempest. The areas within include Caliban Gorge and the Trinculo Shelf, and its background music is titled "Full Fathom Five".
• Heavily referenced throughout Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, starting from the episode names ("Awake", "Brave New World", and "Hell is Empty") all being quotes from the play. It comes up most directly with Blackwell's production of the play in "Brave New World", starring Rachel as Prospera and Chloe as Ariel (after Juliet cannot make it in time due to the fire).
• The map "Havana" in Overwatch has posters for a film/play called "La Tempestad".

Web Original

• Chapter Sixteen of the original Web Animation Broken Saints is called "Tempest".
• Luke Westaway of Outside Xbox has a recurring... problem with a frost troll in the Skyrim video game. When a "rocket boots" game mod randomly sent him to its lair for yet another showdown, he angrily responded with "Hell is empty and all the demons [sic] are here!"

Western Animation

• Big Hero 6: The Series: A plot point in "Big Problem". A monster who was attacking various locations in the city growled out such cryptic comments as "All the Devils are here", "This thing of darkness I acknowledge as mine" and "What's past is prologue." Honey Lemon realized these were quotes from The Tempest, which helped the team uncover the monster's identity and the reasons for his attacks.
• The Simpsons: In "Three Men and a Comic Book", Martin Prince also paraphrases Prospero's line when he touches the pages of the comic book "Radioactive Man # 1":
  Martin Prince: [clearly moved and respectful] This is the stuff that dreams are made of.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Crisis Point", Vindicta quotes The Tempest before invading the Cerritos.
  Vindicta: Hell is empty and all the devils are here. [...] Our revels now are ended.
  Ransom: Is she quoting "The Tempest"?

Real Life

• The moons of Uranus include Miranda, Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Trinculo, Francisco, and Ferdinand. And Ariel, but technically that one's named after the character from Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, not the character from The Tempest.
• The opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games were packed with references to The Tempest, including Kenneth Branagh quoting at length.

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