Ariel

Ariel

Ariel is a spirit that is servant to Prospero, who rescued Ariel from a tree that he was imprisoned within a tree by the witch Sycorax. Ariel is most often considered a male character, but this is not indisputable and changes often depending on the director of the play. Ariel is most often compared to to Caliban within the play as the characters bear the most similarities. In his liking for mischievousness, Ariel is also similar to Puck.  Although we see at the beginning and throughout the play that Ariel is affectionate towards his master, we soon learn that he his not a servant by nature, and that he is working towards his freedom by aiding Prospero in his amoral plot.

Over the years, Ariel has been (and still is) played by both male and female characters. In Shakespeare's time, there were now actresses on stage, meaning that young male characters would often play the parts of female characters which was seen as perfectly acceptable to an Elizabethan audience. Which means that the character of Ariel would have to have been played by a boy, regardless of the original sex of that character, which could have blurred the sex of the character in the many future adaptations to come, although Ariel has been sexed in two scenes of the play :

1. A stage direction refers to Ariel with a male pronoun:  "Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table" 

2. Ariel refers to himself with the male pronoun: "All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come.. to thy strong bidding task Ariel and all his quality"