No play of Shakespeare's is more strongly focused on the matter of service and on the master–servant relationship than is The Tempest. Service interested Shakespeare throughout his career, but from the period of Hamlet on, the aspect of this topic that most concerned him was the need for servants, subjects, and subordinates of all kinds to resist immoral commands. King Lear can be seen as culminating this development, and in the three Romances prior to The Tempest, it is taken as axiomatic that “Every good servant does not all commands” (Cymbeline, v.i.6). The Tempest, however, does not seem to fit into this picture. Its focus seems to be on proper obedience rather than on proper disobedience, and it seems to be much more conservative than the plays that precede it. In earlier work, I opined that the explanation for the conservatism of The Tempest “was probably to be found in its colonial context.” The chapter that follows tries to sort out these puzzlements. It will show that while the “virtuous disobedience” theme does not entirely disappear from The Tempest, the focus of the play with regard to masters and servants is on the extent and possibilities of human power – of power conceived of as pure coercion, as the capacity to force the bodies and, as far as it turns out to be possible, the minds of rational beings.