Read The Tempest by email.
Two weeks, and the last email is twenty lines long.
A ship comes apart in 584 words, and then a man on an island explains why. Fifteen mornings: the storm, the backstory, three sets of castaways wandering the same island, and Prospero’s twenty-line farewell arriving on its own at the end.
Four or five minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Two weeks from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
15 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1611
- Installments
- 15
- Each installment
- 4–5 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 17,543
- Reading time
- 1 hour 13 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 2 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 7 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 4 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read The Tempest?
The Tempest keeps looking at the clock. Prospero asks the time in the second scene, is told it is past the mid season, and sets a deadline — everything has to be done by six. Nine scenes cover that single afternoon, which gives the serial an odd and pleasant tension: two weeks spent on an afternoon that is in a hurry. It also means nothing is ever far away. No subplot leaves the island, and every morning is another part of the same day.
Verse arrives as verse, speakers in small capitals, stage directions in italics — and this play leans on the directions harder than the others, because so much of it happens without anyone saying so: Ariel entering invisible, a banquet vanishing under a harpy’s wings, spirits in the shape of dogs and hounds. Four of the nine scenes are too long for one email; Act I Scene 2, the longest at 4,296 words, arrives in three parts. Every cut falls at an entrance or an exit, taking the combination that makes the longest part shortest.
Installment 1 is the playbill — twenty-two persons of the play, the setting given as a ship at sea and an island — then the shipwreck itself: 584 words of sailors shouting at noblemen who are standing in the way. Two weeks later the last email is not a scene at all. It is the Epilogue — 133 words, twenty lines, Prospero alone, asking to be let go — and it arrives by itself, which is the only sensible way to send it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read The Tempest?
Just over an hour straight through (17,543 words). By email, it’s 15 daily installments of four to five minutes — just over two weeks, or about a week at a premium pace of two scenes a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — all nine scenes in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, including the wedding masque with Iris, Ceres and Juno, and the Epilogue, which arrives as its own final installment. Nothing is trimmed or modernized.
How does a play work as email?
One scene per email, in play formatting: speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse lines kept as verse. The median installment is 1,142 words, four or five minutes. Four of the nine scenes arrive in more than one part, and the fifteenth and last email is the twenty-line Epilogue on its own.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
Each recap covers only the previous scene, so nothing arrives before the play delivers it — though Prospero does most of the spoiling himself. He spends the second scene explaining the past and the rest of the play arranging the future, so what is actually in doubt is whether he will go through with it.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous scene at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.