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A Modern Perspective: The Tempest

By Barbara A. Mowat

Somewhat past the midpoint of The Tempest, King Alonso and his courtiers reach a temporary still point in their journey on Prospero’s island. Shipwrecked, they have searched for the lost Prince Ferdinand; now, exhausted, they give up the search. Into this moment of fatigue—and, for Alonso, despair—at the center of what Gonzalo calls their “maze,” enters the maze’s monster: a Harpy who threatens them with lingering torment worse than any death. For Alonso, the Harpy’s recounting of his long-ago crimes against Prospero is “monstrous”; maddened, he rushes off to leap (he thinks) into the sea, to join (he thinks) his drowned son Ferdinand.

King Alonso’s confrontation with the Harpy ( 3.3.23 –133) brings together powerfully The Tempest ’s intricate set of travel stories and its technique of presenting key dramatic moments as theatrical fantasy. The presentation of dancing islanders, a disappearing banquet, and a descending monster is the first big spectacle since the play’s opening tempest. The unexpected appearance of these island “spirits,” combined with the power of the Harpy’s speech, gives the Harpy confrontation a solidity within the story world that seems designed to rivet audience attention. At the same time, audience response to the scene is inevitably colored by curiosity about the “quaint device” that makes the banquet vanish and by awareness of Prospero looking down on his trapped enemies from “the top,” commenting on them in asides, and obtrusively turning the Harpy/king encounter into make-believe, first by telling us that the Harpy was only Ariel reciting a speech and, second, by reminding us, just before Alonso’s desperate exit to join Ferdinand in the ocean’s ooze, that Ferdinand is, at this moment, courting Miranda.

The double signals here—to the powerful moment within the story and to the deliberate theatricality with which the moment is staged—reflect larger doublenesses in this drama. They reflect, first of all, major differences in the temporal and spatial dimensions of the drama’s “story” and its “play.” The Tempest ’s “story” stretches over more than twenty-four years and several sea journeys; it embeds elements of the mythological voyages of Aeneas and of Jason and the Argonauts, of the biblical voyages of St. Paul, and of actual contemporary voyages to the new world of Virginia. The “play” that The Tempest actually presents is, in contrast, constricted within a plot-time of a single afternoon and confined to the space imagined for an island. 1 Through this particular doubling, Shakespeare creates in The Tempest a form that allows him to bring familiar voyage material to the stage in a (literally) spectacular new way.

The “story” that The Tempest tells is a story of voyages—Sycorax’s journey from Algiers, Prospero and Miranda’s journey from Milan to the island in the rotten carcass of a butt, Alonso’s voyage from Naples to Tunis across the Mediterranean Sea and thence to the island—and, on the island, a set of journeys (Ferdinand’s journey across yellow sands; Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo’s through briers and filthy-mantled pools, and Alonso and his men’s through strange mazes) that lead, finally, back to the sea and the ship and to yet another sea journey. This complex narrative, with its immense span of chronological time, its routes stretching over most of the Mediterranean, its violent separations and losses and its culmination in royal betrothals and restorations, is the kind of story told in the massive novels, popular in Shakespeare’s time, called Greek Romances. The Tempest ’s story could have filled one or more such romance volumes or could have been presented in a narrative-like drama such as Shakespeare himself had created in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale . Instead, within the brief period of The Tempest ’s supposed action, the narrative of the twenty-four or more years preceding the shipwreck of King Alonso and his courtiers on the island—worked out by Shakespeare in elaborate detail—is told to us elaborately. The second and third scenes of The Tempest —that is, 1.2 . and 2.1 —contain close to half the lines in the play, and close to half of those lines are past-tense narration. Through Prospero, through Ariel, through Caliban, through Gonzalo, through Sebastian, through Antonio, characters in our presence (and our present) tell us their pasts.

If we take the sets of narratives embedded in 1.2 and 2.1 and roll them back to where they belong chronologically, the first story (and the most fantastic) is that of the witch Sycorax, her exile on the island, her “littering” of Caliban there, and her imprisoning of Ariel ( 1.2.308 –47)—twelve years before Prospero is thrust forth from Milan. That thrusting-forth is the subject of the next story (next chronologically, that is): the narrative of Antonio’s betrayal of Prospero and of Prospero and Miranda’s sea journey and arrival on the island ( 1.2.66 –200). Then comes the story of what happened on the island during the next twelve years, a story in which narratives that tell of Caliban ( 1.2.396 –451), of Ariel ( 1.2.287 –306, 340 –47), and of Miranda and Prospero ( 1.2.205 –8) overlap and intersect. Finally comes the story from the most recent past—the story of the Princess Claribel and her “loathness” to the marriage arranged by her father ( 2.1.131 –40), of Claribel’s wedding in Tunis ( 2.1.71 –111), of the return journey of Alonso and his courtiers ( 2.1.112 –17), and of the shipwreck as described by Ariel ( 1.2.232 –80).

One of the most powerful features of the form Shakespeare crafted in The Tempest is that this detailed, complex narrative, told us in the first part of the play, keeps reappearing within the play’s action. The story of the coup d’état that expelled Prospero “twelve year since,” for example, is made the model for the Antonio/Sebastian assassination plot (“Thy case, dear friend,” says Sebastian to Antonio, “shall be my precedent: as thou got’st Milan, I’ll come by Naples” [ 2.1.332 –34]); the story appears at the center of the Harpy’s message ( 3.3.86 –93); and it is told yet once again by Prospero when, in the play’s final scene, he attempts to forgive Antonio ( 5.1.80 –89). Caliban’s story—“this island is mine”; “I serve a tyrant”—is told by him again and again. The story of Sycorax, who died years before the dramatic “now,” is alluded to so often—her powers described one last time by Prospero even as the play is ending ( 5.1.323 –26)—that she seems to haunt the play, as does the absent, distant, unhappy Claribel.

As the play reaches its conclusion, each of the stories recounted in the early narrative scenes is conjured up a final time, though the pressure now is toward the future—toward the nuptials of the royal couple, toward a royal lineage with Prospero’s heirs as kings of Naples. As that virtual future is created, the structuring process of the opening scenes is reversed: where narrative was there incorporated into the play, now the play opens back out into the next pages of the narrative from which it had emerged. As we watch and listen, the play we have been experiencing moves into the past, becomes a moment in the tale Prospero promises to tell to the voyagers—“such discourse as . . . shall make [the night] / Go quick away: the story of my life / And the particular accidents gone by / Since I came to this isle” ( 5.1.361 –64). As Alonso notes, this is a “story . . . which must / Take the ear strangely” ( 5.1.371 –72).

By folding the story into the play and then unfolding the play into its own virtual narrative future, Shakespeare creates a form in which past and future press on the present dramatic moment with peculiar intensity. We sense this throughout the play, but see it with special clarity in the confrontation between Alonso and the Harpy. The Harpy brings the past to Alonso as a burden Alonso must pick up—an intolerable burden for Alonso, who goes mad under the simultaneous recognition of his guilt and its consequences, given to him as Time Past, Time Present, and Time Future. In Time Past: “you . . . / From Milan did supplant good Prospero, / Exposed unto the sea . . . / Him and his innocent child” ( 3.3.87 –90); in Time Present: “for which foul deed, / The powers . . . have / Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures / Against your peace. Thee of thy son, Alonso, / They have bereft” ( 90 –94); and finally, in Time Future: “Ling’ring perdition . . . shall step by step attend / You and your ways, whose wraths to guard you from— / Which here, in this most desolate isle, else fells / Upon your heads—is nothing but heart’s sorrow / And a clear life ensuing” ( 95 –101). This pressure of past and future on the present moment—a pressure that is created in large part by the way Shakespeare folds chronological time into plot-time, and that we feel throughout the play in Prospero’s tension, in Ariel’s restiveness, in Caliban’s fury—makes believable in The Tempest that which is normally suspect: namely, instant repentance, instant inner transformation. Because the dramatic present is so permeated with the play’s virtual past, so pressured by the future—the six o’clock toward which the play rushes, after which Time as Opportunity will be gone—that Alonso’s anguished repentance, his descent into silence, madness, and unceasing tears, his immediate surrender of Milan to Prospero and the reward of being given back his lost son—can all take place in moments, and can, even so, seem credible and wonderful.

The interplay between The Tempest ’s elaborate voyage story and its tightly constricted “play” is not the only doubleness toward which the drama’s Harpy/king encounter points us. It points as well to two kinds of travel tales embedded in the drama: ancient, fictional voyage narratives and contemporary travelers’ tales buzzing around London at the time the play was being written. The Harpy/king encounter is shaped as a sequence of verbal and visual events that in effect reenact and thus recall ancient confrontations between harpies and sea voyagers. In each of these harpy incidents—from the third century B.C. Argonautica through the first century B.C. Aeneid to The Tempest itself—harpies are ministers of the gods sent to punish those who have angered the gods; they punish by devouring or despoiling food; and they are associated with dire prophecies. The Tempest ’s enactment of the harpy encounter is thus one in a line of harpy stories stretching into the past from this island and this set of voyagers to Aeneas, and through Aeneas back to Jason and the crucial encounter between the terrible harpies (the “hounds of mighty Zeus”) and the Argonauts. 2 In replicating the sequence of events of voyagers meeting harpies, combining details from Jason’s story and from the Aeneid, Shakespeare directs attention to the specific context in which such harpy confrontations appear and within which The Tempest clearly belongs—that of literary fictional voyages.

At the same time, he surrounds the encounter with dialogue that would remind his audience of present-day voyages of their own fellow Londoners. Geographical expansion, around-the-world journeys, explorations of the new world of the Americas had heightened the stay-at-homes’ fascination with the strange creatures reported by travelers. Real-world creatures like crocodiles and hippopotami, fantastic creatures like unicorns and griffins, reported monstrosities like the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders—all were, at the time, equally real (or unreal) and equally fascinating. The dialogue preceding the Harpy’s descent in The Tempest centers on such fabulous creatures. When the supposed “islanders”—creatures of “monstrous shape”—appear, bringing in the banquet, Sebastian says: “Now I will believe / That there are unicorns, that in Arabia / There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne, one phoenix / At this hour reigning there.” “Travelers ne’er did lie,” says Antonio, “Though fools at home condemn ’em.” Gonzalo adds, “If in Naples / I should report this now, would they believe me? / If I should say I saw such islanders . . . ” ( 3.3.26 –36). It is into this dialogue-context that the Harpy descends—that is, into a discussion of fantastic travelers’ tales and fabulous creatures.

When the Harpy—one of these creatures—actually appears, claps its wings upon the table, and somehow makes the food disappear ( 3.3.69 SD), she is very real to Alonso and his men—as real as the harpies were to Jason and to Aeneas; as real as the hippopotami and anthropophagi were to fifteenth-century explorers; as real as is Caliban, the monster mooncalf, to his discoverers Stephano and Trinculo. The attempts to kill the Harpy are classical responses—that is, they are the responses of Jason and Aeneas when confronted by the terrible bird-women. The response of Stephano and Trinculo to their man-monster is a more typically sixteenth-century response to the fabulous. When, for example, Stephano finds Trinculo and Caliban huddled under a cloak and thinks he has discovered a “most delicate monster” with four legs and two voices, he responds with the greed that we associate with Martin Frobisher and other sixteenth-century New World explorers who brought natives from North America to England to put on display: “If I can recover him,” says Stephano, “and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather. . . . He shall pay for him that hath him, and that soundly” ( 2.2.69 –81). Trinculo had responded with equal greed to his first sight of the frightened Caliban:

What have we here, a man or a fish? . . . A strange fish. Were I in England . . . and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.

( 2.2.25 –34)

While the finding and subjugating of “wild men” was a feature that ancient and new-world voyage stories held in common (for example, Jupiter promises that Aeneas, as the climax of his sea journeys, will “wage a great war in Italy, and . . . crush wild peoples and set up laws for men and build walls” 3 ), Prospero’s subjugation of Caliban has a particularly New World flavor. The play itself, no matter how steeped it is in ancient voyage literature and no matter how much emphasis it places on its Mediterranean setting, is also a representation of New World exploration. While it retells the stories of Aeneas and of Jason, it also stages a particular Virginia voyage that, in 1610–11, was the topic of sermons, published government accounts, and first-person epistles, many of which Shakespeare drew on in crafting The Tempest . The story, in brief, goes as follows: A fleet of ships set out in 1609 from England carrying a new governor—Sir Thomas Gates—to the struggling Virginia colony in Jamestown. The fleet was caught in a tempest off the coast of Bermuda. All of the ships survived the storm and sailed on to Virginia—except the flagship, the Sea-Venture, carrying the governor, the admiral of the fleet, and other important officials. A year later, the exhausted and dispirited colonists in Jamestown were astounded when two boats sailed up the James River carrying the supposedly drowned governor and his companions. The crew and passengers on the flagship had survived the storm, had lived for a year in the Bermudas, had built new ships, and had made it safely to Virginia. News of the happy ending to this “tragicomedy,” as one who reported the story called it, soon reached London, and many details of the story are preserved in The Tempest .

Among the details may be the disturbing picture of the relationship of the “settlers” and the “Indians” in Jamestown, represented perhaps in Caliban and his relationship with Prospero. In one of the documents used by Shakespeare in writing The Tempest, William Strachey describes an incident in which “certain Indians,” finding a man alone, “seized the poor fellow and led him up in to the woods and sacrificed him.” Strachey writes that the lieutenant governor was very disturbed by this incident, since hitherto he “would not by any means be wrought to a violent proceeding against them [i.e., the Indians] for all the practices of villainy with which they daily endangered our men.” This incident, though, made him “well perceive” that “fair and noble treatment” had little effect “upon a barbarous disposition,” and “therefore . . . purposed to be revenged.” The revenge took the form of an attack upon an Indian village. 4

As we read Strachey’s account today, we find much in the behavior of the settlers toward the natives that is appalling, so that the account is not for us simply that of “good white men” against “bad Indians,” as it was for Strachey. In the same way, whether or not this particular lieutenant governor and these treacherous “Indians” are represented in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s decision to include a “wild man” among his island’s cast of characters, and (as Stephen Greenblatt notes) to place him in opposition to a European prince whose power lies in his language and his books, 5 raises a host of questions for us about the play. The Tempest was written just as England was beginning what would become massive empire-building through the subjugating of others and the possessing of their lands. European nations—Spain, in particular—had already taken over major land areas, and Shakespeare and his contemporaries had available to them many accounts of native peoples and of European colonizers’ treatment of such peoples. Many such accounts are like Strachey’s: they describe a barbarous people who refuse to be “civilized,” who have no language, who have a “nature” on which “nurture will never stick” (as Prospero says of Caliban). Other accounts describe instead cultural differences in which that which is different is not necessarily inferior or “barbarous.” When Gonzalo says (at 2.1.157 –60), “Had I plantation [i.e., colonization] of this isle . . . And were the King on ’t, what would I do?” he answers his own question by describing the Utopia he would set up ( lines 162 –84), taking his description from Montaigne’s essay “Of the Cannibals.” In this essay, Montaigne (“whose supple mind,” writes Ronald Wright, “exemplifies Western civilization at its best” 6 ) argues in effect that American “savages” are in many ways more moral, more humane people than so-called civilized Europeans.

As with so much of The Tempest, Caliban may be seen as representing two quite different images. Shakespeare gives him negative traits attached to New World natives (traits that seem to many today to smack of racist responses to the strange and to the Other) while giving him at the same time a richly poetic language and a sensitive awareness of nature and the supernatural. He places Caliban in relation to Prospero (as Caliban’s master and the island’s “colonizer”), to Miranda (as the girl who taught Caliban language and whom he tried to rape), and indirectly to Ferdinand (who, like Caliban, is made to carry logs and who will father Miranda’s children as Caliban had wished to do). Shakespeare thus creates in the center of this otherworldly play a confrontation that speaks eloquently to late-twentieth-century readers and audiences living with the aftereffects of the massive colonizing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and observing the continuing life of “empire” in the interactions between the powerful and the formerly colonized states. 7 As many readers and audiences today look back at the centuries of colonization of the Americas, Africa, and India from, as it were, Caliban’s perspective, The Tempest, once considered Shakespeare’s most serene, most lyrical play, is now put forward as his representation, for good or ill, of the colonizing and the colonized. 8

This relatively new interest in the colonization depicted in The Tempest has had a profound impact on attitudes toward Prospero. For centuries seen as spokesman for Shakespeare himself, as the benign, profound magician-artist who presides like a god over an otherworldly kingdom, Prospero is now perceived as one of Shakespeare’s most complex creations. He brings to the island books, Old World language, and the power to hurt and to control; he thus figures an early form of the colonizer. But he carries with him other, complicating associations. He is, for example, a figure familiar in voyage romances popular in Shakespeare’s day. The hermit magician (or exiled doctor, or some equivalent) in Greek Romance tales comes to the aid of heroes and heroines, protects them, heals them, often teaches them who they really are. In such stories, the focus is always on the lost, shipwrecked, searching man or woman—that is, on the Alonso figure or the Ferdinand or the Miranda figure. In The Tempest, Prospero, the hermit magician, is center stage, and the lost, shipwrecked, and searching are seen by us through him and in relation to him. Prospero thus carries a kind of power and an aura of ultimately benevolent intention that complicates the colonizer image.

Prospero is also the creator of the maze in which the other characters find themselves—“as strange a maze as e’er men trod,” says Alonso ( 5.1.293 )—and thus carries yet other complicating associations. The scene of the Harpy/king encounter opens with Gonzalo’s “Here’s a maze trod indeed through forthrights and meanders,” a statement that picks up suggestively Ovid’s description of that most infamous of mazes, created by Daedalus to enclose the Minotaur. The Daedalus story has unexpected but rich links with The Tempest . Daedalus, the quintessential artist/engineer/magician, built the maze to sty the monstrous creature that he had helped to bring into being. (It was sired by a bull on King Minos’ queen, but it was Daedalus who had lured the bull to the queen, encasing her, at her urgings, in the wooden shape of a cow.) Having built the maze, Daedalus (in Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis ) “scarce himselfe could find the meanes to wind himself well out / So busie and so intricate” was the labyrinth he had created (Book 8, lines 210–20).

The story of the maze and its Minotaur is a familiar one, involving the sacrifice of Greek youths to the bloodthirsty Minotaur, an annual horror that stopped only with Theseus’ slaughter of the Minotaur and his escape from the maze through the aid of King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, whom Theseus marries and then abandons. Less familiar is the connection between the story of the maze and that of Daedalus and his son Icarus’ flight from the island of Crete:

Now in this while [when Theseus was overcoming

the Minotaur] gan Daedalus a weariness to take

Of living like a banisht man and prisoner such a time

In Crete, and longed in his heart to see his native

But Seas enclosed him as if he had in prison be.

Then thought he: though both Sea and land King

Minos stop fro me,

I am assured he cannot stop the Aire and open

It is at this point that Daedalus turns to “uncoth Arts” (i.e., magic), bending “the force of all his wits / To alter natures course by craft”—and he constructs the famous wings that take him home, at the cost of the life of his son, who falls into the sea and drowns.

When Prospero stands “on the top,” looking down and commenting on the trapped figures below him, he to some extent figures the magician/artist Daedalus. Throughout the play he, like Daedalus, is almost trapped in his own intricate maze, an exile who “gan . . . a weariness to take / Of living like a banisht man and prisoner such a time,” who “longed in his heart to see his native Clime,” and who thus bent “the force of all his wits” and his magic powers to find a way to get himself and his child home. The associations of Prospero with Daedalus, his maze, and his magic flight are less accessible to us today than they would have been to a Renaissance audience. But the sense of Prospero’s weariness, of his hatred of exile, of the danger facing him as he heads back to Milan having abjured his magic—these complicating emotional factors, even without a specific awareness of the Daedalus parallels, are available to us. We notice them especially in Prospero’s epilogue, where he begs our help in wafting him off the island and safely back home.

Like The Tempest itself, then, Prospero is complicated, double. He, like the play, is woven from a variety of story materials, and like the play he represents a particular moment, the moment at which began a period of colonizing and empire-building that would completely alter the world, leaving a legacy with which we still live. But he, like the play, also embodies ancient stories of travel and exile and the emotions that accompany them. And The Tempest ’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century retellings and sequels (Browning’s “Caliban on Setebos,” Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror,” and such film versions as Forbidden Planet and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, to name but a few) suggest that those stories and emotions have continued to intrigue. The magician fascinates, the journey and the maze still tempt, despite the near certainty that magic—like all power—tends to corrupt and that islands and labyrinths hold as many monsters as they do “revels.”

I am using the word “story” here both in its general sense of a narration of events and in the more particular sense that translates the Russian formalists’ term “fabula”—that is, the events sequenced in chronological order. The formalists contrast the “fabula” with the “szujet”—the fiction as structured by the author (a term I translate as “play”). See Keir Elam’s The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), pp. 119–26.
See Barbara A. Mowat, “‘And that’s true, too’: Structures and Meaning in The Tempest ,” Renaissance Papers 1976 , pp. 37–50. The pertinent sections of the Argonaut stories are Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2:178–535, and Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 4:422–636; Virgil’s account of the Harpies as encountered by Aeneas and his men is found in the Aeneid 3:210–69.
Aeneid , Book I, lines 261–64 (Guildford trans.).
“A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight,” in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609 , ed. Louis B. Wright (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1964), pp. 1–101, esp. pp. 88–89.
“Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 23–26.
Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993).
See Edward W. Said, “Empire, Geography, and Culture” and “Images of the Past, Pure and Impure,” in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 3–14, 15–19.
For example, in “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest ,” Alternative Shakespeares , ed. John Drakakis (pp. 192–205), Francis Barker and Peter Hulme state that “the discourse of colonialism” is the “dominant discursive con-text” for the play.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 26, 2020 • ( 1 )

Many commentators agree in the belief that The Tempest is the last creation of Shakespeare. I will readily believe it. There is in The Tempest the solemn tone of a testament. It might be said that, before his death, the poet, in this epopee of the ideal, had designed a codicil for the Future. . . . The Tempest is the supreme denouement, dreamed by Shakespeare, for the bloody drama of Genesis. It is the expiation of the primordial crime. The region whither it transports us is the enchanted land where the sentence of damnation is absolved by clemency, and where reconciliation is ensured by amnesty to the fratricide. And, at the close of the piece, when the poet, touched by emotion, throws Antonio into the arms of Prospero, he has made Cain pardoned by Abel.

—Victor Hugo , Oeuvres complètes de Shakespeare

It is inevitable, given the position of The Tempest as William Shakespeare’s final solo dramatic work, to hear in Prospero’s epilogue to the play, Shakespeare’s farewell to his audience:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. . . . . . Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.

Prospero bows out on a note of forgiveness, the tone that finally rules the play along with an affirmation in the essential goodness of humanity. It has been tempting, therefore, to view Prospero’s sentiment and his play as Shakespeare’s last word, his summation of a career and a philosophy, what critic Gary Taylor has called “the valedictory culmination of Shakespeare’s life work.” First performed at court on November 1, 1611, before the playwright’s exit to Stratford, The Tempest , however, is technically neither Shakespeare’s finale nor requiem. Two years later Shakespeare was back in London, collaborating with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII, and the lost play Cardenio. As intriguing as the biographical reading is, it is only one of The Tempest ’s multiple layers of meaning and significance. Called by critic T. M. Parrot, “perhaps the best loved of all Shakespeare’s plays,” and by William Hazlitt as among the “most original and perfect of Shakespeare’s productions,” The Tempest continues to be one of the most performed and interpreted plays in the canon, generating (and withstanding) autobiographical, allegorical, religious, metaphysical, and more recently postcolonial readings. The play’s central figure has likewise shifted from Prospero, who fascinated the romantics, to Miranda, who has claimed the attention of feminists, to Caliban, who is exhibit A in the reading of the play as “a veritable document of early Anglo-American history,” according to writer Sydney Lee, containing “the whole history of imperialist America,” as stated by critic Leslie Fiedler. The Tempest has served as a poetic treasure trove and springboard for other writers, with allusions detectable in John Milton’s Comus , T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, and countless other works. Based on its popularity, persistence, and universality, The Tempest remains one of the richest and most fascinating of Shakespeare’s plays.

The Tempest is a composite work with elements derived from multiple sources. Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals,” whose romantic primitivism is satirized in Gonzalo’s plan for organizing society on Prospero’s island in the second act, is a possible source. So, too, are a German play, Comedy of the Beautiful Sidea, by Jacob Ayrer, about a magician prince whose only daughter falls in love with the son of his enemy, and several Italian commedia dell’arte pastoral tragicomedies set on remote islands and featuring benevolent magicians. Accounts of the Sea-Venture, the ship sent to Virginia to bolster John Smith’s colony that was wrecked on the coast of Bermuda in 1609, may have furnished Shakespeare with some of the details for the play’s opening storm. However, the most substantial borrowing for the plot of The Tempest comes from Shakespeare’s own previous plays, so much so, that scholar Stephen Greenblatt has described The Tempest as “a kind of echo chamber of Shakespearean motifs.” The complications following a shipwreck revisits Twelfth Night ; the relocation of court society to the wilderness is featured in As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which also employs spirits and the supernatural to teach lessons and settle scores. The backstory of The Tempest —Prospero, the former duke of Milan, usurped by his brother—recalls Hamlet and King Lear . Miranda’s being raised in ignorance of her past and status as well as the debate between nature and nurture echo Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. Like both, The Tempest mixes light and dark, tragic and comic elements, yet compared to their baroque complexity, the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays after Macbeth obeys the Aristotelian unities of place and time (the only other Shakespearean play to do so is The Comedy of Errors ), with its action confined to Prospero’s island, taking place over a period roughly corresponding to its performance time.

The Tempest begins with one of the most spectacular scenes in all of Shakespeare: the storm at sea that threatens the vessel whose passengers include King Alonso of Naples, his son Ferdinand, and Prospero’s hated brother Antonio, the usurping duke of Milan. Their life-and-death struggle enacted on stage is subjected to a double focus as Prospero reassures his daughter, Miranda, distraught over the fate of the passengers and crew, that he controls the tempest and that their danger is an illusion. The disaster, which he calls a “spectacle,” is artifice, and the play establishes an analogy between Prospero’s magic and the theatrical sleight of hand that initially seemed so realistic and thrilling. Prospero stands in for the artist here: Both magician and playwrights are conjurors, able to manipulate nature and make others believe in a reality without substance. The contrast between illusion and reality will be sounded throughout the play, suggesting that The Tempest is a metadrama: a play about playwriting and the power and limitations of the imagination. Prospero finally tells his daughter how they arrived on the island; how his brother, Antonio, joined in a conspiracy with Alonso to usurp his place as duke of Milan; how 12 years before Prospero and Miranda were set adrift at sea, provisioned only by a compassionate Neapolitan, Gonzalo. Friend and foes, aboard the vessel Prospero has seemed to wreck, are now under his control on the island where Prospero intends to exact his vengeance. Prospero, therefore, will use his long-studied magical arts to stage a reckoning for past offenses. The play proceeds under Prospero’s direction with a cast that either cooperates or complicates his intentions. Serving him are the ethereal Ariel, whom Prospero promises to free after completing his bidding, and the contrasting earthly and brutish Caliban, a witch’s son, whom Prospero says he has “us’d thee / (Filth as thou art) with human care, and lodg’d thee / In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate / The honor of my child.” Prospero, therefore, controls symbols of both sides of human nature: aspects of the imagination and fancy and baser instincts that come in conflict on the island as the play progresses.

As playwright Prospero must juggle three subplots: Miranda’s relationship with Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, who mourns his loss at sea; the plotting of Prospero’s brother, Antonio, and the king’s brother, Sebastian, to murder Alonso and seize his throne; and Caliban’s alliance with the jester Trinculo and butler Stefano to kill Prospero and reign in his stead. The first goes so well—Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love at first sight—that Prospero tests Ferdinand’s fidelity by appearing to punish him by making him his servant. Ferdinand, however, proves his devotion by gladly accepting his humiliation to be near Miranda. Prospero ends Ferdinand’s penance and testing in the first scene of act 4, declaring: “All thy vexations / Were but my trials of thy love, and thou / Hast strangely stood the test.” To seal the nuptial vows a ritual masque is performed by various mythological goddesses and pastoral figures. In the midst of the dance Prospero stops the performance to deliver one of the most celebrated speeches in all of Shakespeare’s plays:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Jaques in As You Like It asserted “All the world’s a stage,” and Macbeth described life as “a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” Prospero’s speech suggests the transience of both human life and art, with its reference to “the great globe,” the name of Shakespeare’s theater, that, along with towers, palaces, and temples, “shall dissolve . . . like this insubstantial pageant.”

Made aware by Ariel of Caliban’s conspiracy with Trinculo and Stefano, Prospero distracts them from their purpose of murder by rich attire, which Trinculo and Stefano put on before being set upon by spirits. Their comic rebellion is matched by the more serious plot of Antonio and Sebastian to kill Alonso. An assassination attempt is halted by the appearance of spirits providing a banquet for the hungry men. Just as they try to satisfy their hunger the food disappears, replaced by Ariel, “like a harpy,” who accuses Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio of their crimes against Prospero and delivers their sentences:

. . . But remember, For that’s my business to you, that you three From Milan did supplant good Prospero; Exposed unto the sea, which hath requit it ,Him, and his innocent child; for which foul deed The powers, delaying not forgetting, have Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures, Against your peace. Thee of thy son, Alonso, They have bereft; and do pronounce by me Ling’ring perdition, worse than any death Can be at once, shall step by step attend You and your ways; whose wraths to guard you from— Which here, in this most desolate isle, else fall sUpon your heads—is nothing but heart’s sorrow, And a clear life ensuing.

Prospero, approving of Ariel’s performance, declares, “They now are in my pow’r,” and the play turns on how he will decide to use that power.

At the start of the fifth act Prospero announces the climax of his plan: “Now does my project gather to a head,” with his victims now imprisoned to confront their guilt and fate. It is Ariel who shifts Prospero from vengeance to forgiveness by saying, “Your charm so strongly works ’em / That if you now beheld them your affections / Would become tender.” Ariel’s suggestion of what should be the reaction to human suffering shames Prospero into compassion:

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art? Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick, Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel; My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore, And they shall be themselves.

Prospero turns away from revenge and the pursuit of power that had formerly ruled the destinies of so many Shakespearean heroes, including Hamlet, Macbeth , and many more. Prospero changes the plot of his play at its climax and then turns away from his art to reenter the human community:

. . . But this rough magic I here abjure. And, when I have required Some heavenly music—which even now I do— To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.

The end of Prospero’s plot, his art, and the play conjoin. Ariel returns with the prisoners, and Prospero pardons all, including his brother, before reclaiming his dukedom and reuniting father and son. Miranda, overcome by so many nobles on their formerly deserted island, declares:

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in’t!

Prospero, more soberly and less optimistically, responds to her words: “’Tis new to thee.” Finally, Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo are brought in. The lowly status and ridiculousness of the latter two are exposed, prompting Caliban to assert:

I’ll be wise hereafter, And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass Was I to take this drunkard for a god, And worship this dull fool!

Having reestablished order and a harmonious future in the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand, Prospero delivers on his promise to free Ariel before turning to the audience to ask for the same compassion and forgiveness he has shown. As Prospero has released the spirit Ariel, we are asked to do the same for Prospero. We now hold the power and the art to use it as we will:

. . . Now ’tis true I must be here confined by you Or sent to Naples. Let me not ,Since I have my dukedom got, And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands.

If the play is not Shakespeare’s last will and testament, there scarcely can be a better: a play that affirms essential human goodness while acknowledging the presence of human evil, written in the full powers of the imagination, while conscious of its limitations and responsibilities.

The Tempest Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

The Tempest Ebook PDF (1 MB)

The Tempest

William shakespeare, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

During the time when The Tempest was written and first performed, both Shakespeare and his audiences would have been very interested in the efforts of English and other European settlers to colonize distant lands around the globe. The Tempest explores the complex and problematic relationship between the European colonizer and the native colonized peoples through the relationship between Prospero and Caliban. Prospero views Caliban as a lesser being than himself. As such, Prospero believes that Caliban should be grateful to him for educating Caliban and lifting him out of "savagery." It simply does not occur to Prospero that he has stolen rulership of the island from Caliban, because Prospero can't imagine Caliban as being fit to rule anything. In contrast, Caliban soon realizes that Prospero views him as a second-class citizen fit only to serve and that by giving up his rulership of the island in return for his education, he has allowed himself to be robbed. As a result, Caliban turns bitter and violent, which only reinforces Prospero's view of him as a "savage." Shakespeare uses Prospero and Caliban's relationship to show how the misunderstandings between the colonizer and the colonized lead to hatred and conflict, with each side thinking that the other is at fault.

In addition to the relationship between the colonizer and colonized, The Tempest also explores the fears and opportunities that colonization creates. Exposure to new and different peoples leads to racism and intolerance, as seen when Sebastian criticizes Alonso for allowing his daughter to marry an African. Exploration and colonization led directly to slavery and the conquering of native peoples. For instance, Stephano and Trinculo both consider capturing Caliban to sell as a curiosity back at home, while Stephano eventually begins to see himself as a potential king of the island. At the same time, the expanded territories established by colonization created new places in which to experiment with alternative societies. Shakespeare conveys this idea in Gonzalo's musings about the perfect civilization he would establish if he could acquire a territory of his own.

Colonization ThemeTracker

Colonization Quotes in The Tempest

The Tempest

By william shakespeare, the tempest essay questions.

To what extent can Prospero can be considered the protagonist of the play?

Many would agree that Prospero is the protagonist of the play, given that he starts out as a sympathetic character who has been robbed of his station and betrayed by his brother. However, Prospero is not a straightforward or traditional hero. Instead, he relies on his magic to control and manipulate others on the island while also maintaining control over his young adult daughter, Miranda. While audiences are likely to sympathize and root for Prospero's success, the play presents a rather nuanced portrait of its protagonist, leading many to compare Prospero to the playwright whose dedication to their craft outweighs their sense of social or filial duty. When Prospero renounces his magic at the end of the play, he is in many ways restored to hero status, having recognized that his ability to control others is a dangerous power to wield.

In what ways is Caliban a representation of colonization?

Caliban is the only character in the play who is native to the island on which The Tempest takes place. As such, he has long been interpreted as a figure of the effects of colonization and specifically of English imperialism. Caliban is treated by Prospero and Miranda as both a monster, a pupil, a son, and a servant: he is grateful to be able to curse Miranda in her own language, but later uses that same language with mastery and eloquence. The play stops short of expressing a direct judgement of English colonization, instead using the relationship between Prospero and Caliban to explore the complex social and filial dynamics that arise from imperial pursuits.

How does Miranda change over the course of the play?

One quality of Miranda's that is stressed throughout the play is her purity and innocence. Both Prospero and Ferdinand appear interested in preserving her virginity, if for different reasons (Ferdinand for assurance that any children they have will be biologically his, and Prospero for continued control over his surroundings). However, as the play develops, Miranda starts to show signs of budding autonomy – specifically sexual autonomy. She all but demands that Ferdinand marry her, and in so doing makes a choice on her own that reflects her growth from a girl to a woman. Prospero's preoccupation with Miranda's continued purity is therefore challenged by Miranda's own expression of love for Ferdinand, showcasing how even Prospero's magic cannot prevent his daughter from maturing.

Why must Prospero relinquish his powers at the end of the play?

At the end of the play, Prospero renounces his magical powers in order to restore his dukedom. However, he does not do so simply to return to power. Instead, Prospero comes to realize that it was his commitment to his magic that led to his usurpation and exile in the first place. When he agrees to renounce his books, he is really agreeing to be a more committed leader and to relinquish false power – his ability to control his surroundings and the experiences of others – for real and meaningful power in the form of political leadership.

Why do many see Prospero as a representative of Shakespeare himself?

Prospero is often compared to the William Shakespeare because of his dedication to his craft – specifically, the craft of creating whole worlds out of nothing, a task that parallels the role of the early modern English dramatist. Shakespeare wrote The Tempest toward the end of his career, and many see Prospero as the manifestation of the Bard's own reckoning with his departure from the theater. Indeed, Prospero's final speech – in which he asks for applause from the audience in order to be set "free" – is frequently understood as Shakespeare's personal farewell to the English stage.

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The Tempest Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Tempest is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

I'm not sure how you felt. Prospero is simply winding up his plan. I think Prospero has tempered both his anger and his revenge. I think he is ready to grant mercy to those that have wronged him. He is also ready to give Ariel her promised...

significance of the storm in the Opening act

In The Tempest, the storm at sea serves as the plot's inciting event. The storm washes Prospero 's enemies onto the island's shore, placing them at his mercy. In this sense the tempest or storm represents a disturbance of the social order. It also...

The Tempest, Act 1

She feels that she is on the boat herself. She has empathy, a trait that defines her through the play.

Study Guide for The Tempest

The Tempest study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About The Tempest
The Tempest Summary
The Tempest Video
Character List

Essays for The Tempest

The Tempest literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Tempest.

Similarities Between Principal Characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest
A Post-Colonial Interpretation of The Tempest
The Fierce and Mighty Sea; The Dramatic Function of the Powerful and Ever Present Ocean in The Tempest
The Sensitive Beast: Shakespeare's Presentation of Caliban
Love and Magic Intertwined

Lesson Plan for The Tempest

About the Author
Study Objectives
Common Core Standards
Introduction to The Tempest
Relationship to Other Books
Bringing in Technology
Notes to the Teacher
Related Links
The Tempest Bibliography

E-Text of The Tempest

The Tempest E-Text contains the full text of The Tempest

List of Characters

The Tempest Themes

Theme is a pervasive idea, belief, or point of view presented in a literary work. Themes in The Tempest, a masterpiece of William Shakespeare , present the issue of freedom and confinement, including themes of betrayal, compassion, and love. Some of the major themes in The Tempest have been analyzed below.

Themes in The Tempest

The Illusion of Justice

Prospero is expelled from his own dukedom when his elder brother rises against him and usurps his powers. The rest of the play is about Prospero plotting on taking the powers back from Alonso. This shows that justice is done if Prospero gets back his throne. However, he keeps Caliban and Ariel his slaves and does not release Ariel despite promises. Prospero uses exploitation and manipulates the situations in his favor, which is contrary to his idea of justice. He uses Ariel against his enemies, as well. When he becomes a merciful monarch, he releases slaves, forgives his enemies, and even abandons using magic. It shows that justice means the happy ending that Prospero establishes by the end of the play.

Superiority of Human Beings

The play revolves around the happy ending and shows the superiority of human beings in a bleak way. When Prospero and his daughter Miranda are stranded on the island, they live there for almost twelve years. Yet, they know how to exploit other humans and creatures for their ends. Ariel is at the beck and call of Prospero, while Miranda deals with Caliban, who tries to attack her. Though Ariel remains faithful, Prospero does not trust him. He believes that he should keep him until they have the means to escape or leave the island.

Allurement of Rule

Human nature loves the romance of allurement in the shape of barren land for adventure as well as an island for the allurement of infinite power . Prospero finds it very easy to rule the island when he has magical powers. Prospero has infinite possibilities of ruling the island all by himself without having resisting subjects . He successfully educates Miranda, his daughter, and exploits Ariel. Caliban protests against Prospero, but this allurement of the rule does not happen. Gonzalo also imagines setting up a utopia over the island for his own rule. Caliban’s proposals lights imaginations of Stephano to set up his own government, having full power too. Even his wishful thinking of marrying Miranda brings laughter when he states Trinculo as his future viceroy, along with Caliban.

Power and Exploitation

In the first instance, Antonio exploits power given by Prospero. When Prospero delegates him Milan to him, he uses it to expel the same person from the dukedom. Prospero goes into exile to save his life. When Prospero learns about Ariel, a sprite, he starts exerting his own power on him. This unique magical power gives him opportunities to take revenge from his enemies. This is another show of power and exploitation. With Ariel, Prospero, also becomes the master of Caliban, the son of a witch, having subhuman nature. Prospero continues exploiting both of these spirits with his magical powers until he changes his heart and learns to forgive his enemies.

Prospero uses magic to keep himself and Miranda safe using magic. He also controls sprites like Ariel and half-witch, Caliban. The incident of tempest and ship tossed during the storm shows is also magic. In the end, he leaves magic as he learns to forgive and sets Ariel free.

Revenge and Forgiveness

At first, Prospero is shown ruling an island, keeping Ariel and Caliban as a slave. He learns magic from books to exact revenge on his enemies. He is determined to seek justice by taking the rightful place of the duke from which he was overthrown by his brother. This revenge takes him too far as he exploits sprite, Ariel, and witch’s son, Caliban. Prospero succeeds in exacting revenge, and he finally forgives his brother. Similarly, when Caliban, too, follows the same path for wrongs and maltreatment by swearing allegiance to Stephano as his new master. Although Prospero shows him the way by the end. Almost all the characters either have conscience or remorse.

Power of Language

Most characters in the play use the power of language to seize power, confuse, confound, convince or manipulate. Prospero stands tall among other characters as he uses superior language. He is good at speaking because he reads books. Through his wit and words, he uses Ariel for his ulterior motives. This even becomes prominent in the case of Caliban, who has not only learned the language but also tries to use it against the mentor Prospero. He clearly curses Miranda telling her that he understands; her father as well as the daughter. When Prospero and Caliban battles for power using language, their speech becomes rhythmic. Caliban tells Prospero that all others hate him for his power of language.

Colonization

When Prospero and his daughter Miranda lands on the island after they are exiled, Caliban and Ariel are the real inhabitants. However, Prospero uses his power and knowledge to display his superiority on the original inhabitants. Due to this colonization, Ariel laments losing his freedom, and Caliban curses that he has learned language from Prospero. They consider Prospero and his daughter as settlers who have colonized their land. Prospero does not see Caliban fit to rule his island. Caliban also conspires to throw him out of his land to end his rule.

The Supernatural

The existence, power, and use of supernatural powers and supernatural entities are seen in the play. The first sign of the power of the supernatural emerges when Prospero is exiled to the island, and he finds magic. He uses magic to enslaves a sprite, Ariel, and then the son of a witch, Caliban. Ariel’s presence is entirely supernatural. First, when he brings tempest in the sea, and second is when he causes Ferdinand to fall in love with Miranda at the request of Prospero.

Slavery is shown in two ways in the play. At first, Ariel is shown working as a slave under Prospero. He is promised freedom once Prospero achieves justice. He bears through the discomfort and helps Prospero to cause havoc on his enemies. Caliban is also a slave doing other chores for him and Miranda.

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The Tempest as a Post-Colonial Text: Exploring Power, Identity, and Oppression

William Shakespeare's play "The Tempest" has been widely regarded as a post-colonial text due to its themes and portrayal of power dynamics, colonialism, and the effects of colonization on both colonizers and the colonized. This essay aims to delve into the post-colonial elements present in the play, examining how it challenges traditional narratives of colonialism and explores themes of power, identity, and oppression.

Related Papers

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation (IJLLT)

The twentieth century brought about a new form of understanding, producing and living art that has become a mean to react against the oppression that different groups suffered for centuries. Post-colonial criticism is an approach of analysis that questions racial identity and gender equity. This study investigates how Shakespeare's plays relate to the social codes and the more recent history of the reception of Shakespearian drama within decolonization movements. The Tempest by Shakespeare is defined as a postcolonial text because the colonised is represented in regarding cultural hybridity in which the Self and the Other enlace the colonial experience. Literature has naturally given a voice to these omitted groups and this play is thought to be an early post-colonial work by some scholars. Shakespeare had intended to criticise the European attack of the new lands to the West, and the theme of colonialism is outrightly presented in The Tempest. Post-colonial reading of the text examines the projection of the colonial experience back to Europe. Slavery, colonialism, and the power of changing other civilisations by the West are themes to make inferences.

SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH

Prabha gour

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is indubitably the best playwright of all time. He acquired an unique place in the world of literature. His plays earned international commendation and acceptance as the finest dramatist in the entire history of English literature. His play, The Tempest has been decoded differently by critics as a postcolonial text. In1611 when William Shakespeare wrote the play The Tempest, colonization was a recent concept in Britain. This paper is an attempt to inspect the postcolonial issues such as subjugation, dominance language, power and knowledge etc. and conjointly converse about the complex relationship that exist between the master and slave in The Tempest.

Talent Development & Excellence

Thamir R . S . Az-Zubaidy

William Shakespeare's The Tempest is both created in and influenced by an era when colonialism was coming into being. It begins with the arrival of a European coloniser, Prospero, to an island in the Mediterranean Sea where he imposes his colonial domination, norms and culture on its natives. In addition to exploring these issues, this paper examines questions of racism, slavery, suppression, and the role of language in consolidating the process of colonisation and maintaining the colonisercolonised politics. It also critiques the coloniser's involvement in the exchange of women as gifts for political gains as he does with his daughter Miranda. Moreover, while highlighting the discursive practices of othering the native, Caliban, the paper investigates his attempts to resist cultural and political European colonisation through Caliban's linguistic and political appropriation of Prospero's power.

Zahra Sadeghi

Colonization and imperialism are of those interesting critical conversation throughout the world and this study examines how English theater addressed, promoted, and at times challenged ideologies of colonization and notions of civility and civilization. The Tempest in regarded as a New World drama by many critics because of colonization and civilization debates presented on the London stage and depiction of the colonizers and the colonized to present and, at the same time, question those colonial debates. Shakespeare depicts the New World’s indigenous cultures in an ambiguous way to both present and question the ideologies of empire. This dramatization of the “other” helped sixteenth and seventeenth century audiences to recognize New World indigenous peoples as different rather than uncivilized and reevaluate what they have read or heard of these native peoples. Shakespeare presented the contemporary rhetoric through the medium of the theater and helped audience to visualize the process of conquest and colonization. He helped to civilize audiences about the reality of colonization, civility, and the New World. This theatrical medium makes audiences to challenge those established stereotypes of the New World natives and understand them as different, not inhuman or monster, and ignorant of European language and cultures, but no incapable of being civilized. Shakespeare, in dramatization of the New World, neither support nor oppose the process of colonization but he tries his best to show both sides of the issues and let the audiences to decide whether it is legitimate or not. This ambiguous representation of both colonizers and the colonized encourages the audience to examine colonial debates in as objective manner.

Md. A M I R Hossain

In this paper, my purpose is to focus on the underlying reading of The Tempest in the 21st century attempt with a view to revealing the colonizing attitudes of human psychology and embittered experiences of nations, ethnic groups and race. Shakespeare’s The Tempest during the late 20th century and early 21st century has been influenced by “post-colonialism” from the point of view of either Prospero or Caliban. Post-colonial criticism is dealt with Western colonialism of different nations, creed, and caste with the colonial relations of hegemony and submission, especially with regard to race and gender. Shakespeare has drawn upon the language of prayer and religion as a storehouse of emotion and symbol for which his audience and reader are readily responsive as a mode of intensified expression for the feelings and values. Shakespeare’s curses are the language of fury, hatred, helplessness, and despair wrought to its uttermost. The language of prayer is used in expressions of love, kindness, and gratitude, in outbursts of joy and wonder, and in countless eloquent pleadings for mercy, forgiveness, and compassion. The discourse of prayer, elegant and artful thought is an attempt to euphemize the 21st post-colonial domination of the island. Prospero’s ideas and thoughts extend the discourse of prayer into the life of audience. Caliban’s curses are regarded as an integral part to the dialectical structure and the discourse of prayer in the play for which they belong as cataplectic threats of Prospero. Ariel is being held to his side of a bargain at a time of desperate need; Ferdinand is being tested in self-control and in his respect for Miranda; Prospero’s enemies are subjected to corrective punishments designed to bring them through suffering to self-knowledge and a change of heart. Keywords: Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand, Post-colonialism, Prospero, The Tempest

Deborah I K E O L U W A Jayeoba

This study seeks to explore and enunciate the characteristics of and pointers to the presence of colonialism which validates the events of colonialism in these three plays: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Aime Casaire’s A Tempest and Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest exposes a Western view and political indifference to colonialism; neither invalidating nor justifying. Aime Casaire’s A Tempest and Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax presents a writing back and questioning as it restructures the narrative of colonialism in its adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Rituparna Paul

The objective is to present a critical study of discursive practices of ‘othering’. The post colonial critics have referred to Caliban as the ‘other’ and this makes ground for us to delve into the politics of unsaid, or things that have been omitted. Hence, the chief focus of a post-colonial investigation of The Tempest is through the character of Caliban, seen not as the ‘deformed slave’ of the dramatis personae but as a native of the island over whom Prospero has imposed a form of colonial domination.

Ramayana Lira

Taking on assumptions about oppression, identity and representation as they are developed in contemporary postcolonial theory, this study proposes the analysis of the 1993 theatrical production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest by The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). It aims to discuss the role of Caliban's monstrosity in the production and how it pertains to issues such as power relations and spectacle. The main benefit of doing an analysis of a performance of a Shakespearean text seems to be the possibility of seeing the play's meaning as contingent, as a result of a series of elements (actor's body, visual clues, the theatrical institution, spectatorship) that release it from the burden of being considered as the work of a single, universal, non- contradictory mind that contemporary criticism has pointed out as the 'Shakespeare Myth'. I conclude that the 1993 RSC production presents a Tempest that, in many ways, reinforces traditional positions about th...

International Review of Humanities Studies

amir mohammad

The paper focuses on how the colonizers who in this play are Prospero and Miranda in particular, endeavor to inflict their own socio-cultural precept including their language to make the colonized fully unprotected in The Tempest as a colonial play, but eventually fail to fulfill this attempt. In addition, the high importance of learning the language of the colonizer by the colonized gets illuminated which finally contributes to Caliban so as to undermine the roots of the colonizer in the colony. This article fully evaluates affected literary works by The Tempest, the importance of transferring the colonizer's language to the colony, and the main colonizer and his manners and attitudes towards the colonized; it also brings forth postcolonial concepts including Mimicry, Orientalism, the double consciousness of the colonized and his unhomeliness. Furthermore, it features the dirge situation of mimic men who come across a disappointing dead end from both colonizers and the colonized. After all, this article reflects on the ever-presence of ambivalence and mimicry in colonial discourse and also the vital importance of violence as an inseparable part of the decolonization.

Injamamul Hoque

Book Review: Memoirist Lilly Dancyger’s penetrating essays explore the power of female friendships

This cover image released by Dial Press shows “First Love” by Lilly Dancyger. (Dial Press via AP)

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Who means more to you — your friends or your lovers? In a vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays, Lilly Dancyger explores the powerful role that female friendships played in her chaotic upbringing marked by her parents’ heroin use and her father’s untimely death when she was only 12.

“First Love: Essays on Friendship” begins with a beautiful paean to her cousin Sabina, who was raped and murdered at age 20 on her way home from a club. As little kids, their older relatives used to call them Snow White and Rose Red after the Grimm’s fairy tale, “two sisters who are not rivals or foils, but simply love each other.”

That simple, uncomplicated love would become the template for a series of subsequent relationships with girls and women that helped her survive her self-destructive adolescence and provided unconditional support as she scrambled to create a new identity as a “hypercompetent” writer, teacher and editor. “It’s true that I’ve never been satisfied with friendships that stay on the surface. That my friends are my family, my truest beloveds, each relationship a world of its own,” she writes in the title essay “First Love.”

The collection stands out not just for its elegant, unadorned writing but also for the way she effortlessly pivots between personal history and spot-on cultural criticism that both comments on and critiques the way that girls and women have been portrayed — and have portrayed themselves — in the media, including on online platforms like Tumblr and Instagram.

This cover image released by Tin House shows "The Skunks" by Fiona Warnick. (Tin House via AP)

For instance, she examines the 1994 Peter Jackson film, “Heavenly Creatures,” based on the true story of two teenage girls who bludgeoned to death one of their mothers. And in the essay “Sad Girls,” about the suicide of a close friend, she analyzes the allure of self-destructive figures like Sylvia Plath and Janis Joplin to a certain type of teen, including herself, who wallows in sadness and wants to make sure “the world knew we were in pain.”

In the last essay, “On Murder Memoirs,” Dancyger considers the runaway popularity of true crime stories as she tries to explain her decision not to attend the trial of the man charged with killing her cousin — even though she was trained as a journalist and wrote a well-regarded book about her late father that relied on investigative reporting. “When I finally sat down to write about Sabina, the story that came out was not about murder at all,” she says. “It was a love story.”

Readers can be thankful that it did.

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2024 North Texas Teen Book Festival in Photos

The 10th annual North Texas Teen Book Festival took place in Irving, Tex., on April 27, drawing 15,500 middle grade and YA book lovers. In addition, 865 teachers attended the Educator Day on April 26 for a slate of professional development programming and a chance to connect with creators. The main festival featured 76 authors, including kid favorites such as Jeff Kinney, R.L. Stine, Tui T. Sutherland, and Raina Telgemeier. We’ve gathered highlights from the celebration. All photos by Joon Koo at SJKoo Photography, unless otherwise noted.

And they’re off! As the door opened for the day, excited readers entered the Irving Convention Center on their way to attend featured keynotes and author panels, and visit publisher booths.

NTTBF co-founder Dr. Rose Brock chats with keynote author Tui T. Sutherland during the Middle Grade opening program.

The “Danger Zone” panel focused on action and adventure, featuring authors (from l.) Laurie Halse Anderson, Max Brallier, James Ponti, Judd Winick, and Lisa Yee.

Young fans delighted in the opportunity to meet and pose for a picture with spooky storyteller and literary icon R.L. Stine.

During the “Black Joy, Black Heroes” panel, authors (from l.) Shawn Amos, J. Elle, Saraciea J. Fennell, Kwame Mbalia, Angie Thomas, and moderator Sara Roberts shared stories of monsters, myths, and music.

Readers show off their book haul. Photo: Paige Marie Photography.

Discussing YA fantasy series from start to finish on the “All the Fantasy” panel with authors (from l.) Victoria Aveyard, Alexandra Bracken, J. Elle, Namina Forna, Ayana Gray, Joan He, and Jodi Meadows.

At the Middle Grade closing keynote, Diary of a Wimpy Kid series author Jeff Kinney plays a round of “Cheesy Trivia” with enthusiastic readers from the audience.

Last Kids on Earth series author Max Brallier poses for a picture with a fan.

During the “Cracking the Code” panel spotlighting puzzle adventures, authors (from l.) Alyson Gerber, Stuart Gibbs, and Margaret Peterson Haddix timed Peter Raymundo as he solved a Rubik’s cube.

A festivalgoer finds a quiet moment to read. Photo: Paige Marie Photography.

Gordon Korman (front, l.), Naz Kutub, and Lindsey Leavitt at the author signing.

Readers learned how to keep your friends close and their enemies closer in the “Trust No One” panel with (from l.) moderator Deb Zeman and authors Victoria Aveyard, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Saraciea J. Fennell, Namina Forna, E. Lockhart, Katherine McGee, and Karen M. McManus.

Representing “Team Good” and “Team Evil,” authors Morgan Matson (center) and Soman Chainani (r.) engaged in a battle with support from NTTBF attendees during the first “Middle Grade Madness” program. Photo: Paige Marie Photography.

In “Middle Grade Madness: 2.0,” author teammates Shawn Amos, Max Brallier, Julie Buxbaum, Jen Calonita, Soman Chainani, Margaret Peterson Haddix, Sarah Mlynowski, Aida Salazar, Christina Soontornvat, Tui T. Sutherland, and Angie Thomas competed with young readers to win the round of Friendly Feud.

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Book Reviews

Magic, secrets, and urban legend: 3 new ya fantasy novels to read this spring.

Caitlyn Paxson

As the flowers bloom and the sun starts to spread more warmth this spring, we have three new YA fantasy novels for you.

All of these new releases keep one foot grounded in reality while examining what their protagonists can do if they embrace the magic within themselves. Enjoy!

A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal

Chosen-family siblings Arthie and Jin may be the proprietors of the Spindrift tea house in White Roaring, but that doesn't make them respectable. They've earned a reputation for being the kind of underworld characters you don't want to cross — and it's not even a real secret that by night, Spindrift transforms from a tea house to an establishment that serves a different drink entirely, catering to the city's population of vampires. When the city's ruling power decides to shut them down, they have to assemble a motley crew to steal a well-guarded ledger book that may be the key to more than just saving their home.

Anyone who enjoys the rhythms of a heist will find a lot to love in this book. Arthie is a clever and determined leader, and the team she puts together includes unique characters like a vampire painter with ennui and a rich girl on the run from the law for her forging habit. The magic that creeps into the edges of the story is fairly subtle, and never feels like an easy answer to the problems and conflict at hand, making me genuinely worry that everyone wasn't going to make it through to the end.

This heist also comes with a social conscience. Many historical-flavored fantasies peddle the trappings of wealthy European society without ever interrogating where the trappings of the genre come from. Characters sip their tea and wear their cotton lawn dresses, and we never have to think about who grew the tea or the cotton. A Tempest of Tea takes the opposite road, framing the lives of immigrants who are integrated into a society that exploits their homelands and who are intent on finding some way to take their power back.

The Vanishing Station by Ana Ellickson

Ever since her mother's death, Ruby has had her hands full trying to keep things together. She and her father, who struggles with chronic pain and alcoholism, are living in the basement of her mother's beloved house so the upper floors can be rented out to pay the bills. When she discovers that her father owes a debt to the mysterious people he works for, and that given his unreliability, they intend to call it in by taking away the house, she volunteers to take over his position and pay the debt in his place.

It comes as a shock when she finds out that her father works for a clandestine rail delivery business and uses magic to jump from one train line to another to move illicit goods and money around the world. As she learns how to do his job, she realizes that while the magic of the trains speaks to something inside her, the people she's working for are ruthless and cruel. But what choice does she have but to do their bidding, if she wants to save her home?

I've always found that subways and trains intrinsically have a special magic to them, and it's very exciting to see that used to such good effect in a fantasy novel. The Vanishing Station really captures that feeling of entering a liminal space and being swept through to darkness, destined to emerge once more in a new place. Ruby is one of those characters who is so accustomed to shouldering too much of the burden that she doesn't realize when she's in over her head, and it's easy to root for her as she comes into her power and demands that the people around her do better.

I found that the middle of the story idles a bit in the station, but then rapidly picks up speed as romance builds between Ruby and her magical train mentor, Montgomery, who himself feels trapped in a role he never wanted. By the end, I was very invested in how they could escape a domineering power that can go anywhere the rail lines run, and what they might do with their own magic if they could be free.

The Bad Ones by Melissa Albert

In one night, four people go missing in Nora's small town, and one of them is her best friend Becca. At first, Nora wonders if it's just another way for Becca to hurt her in the wake of a fight that has fractured their relationship. But Nora senses that there is a connection between all the people who vanished, and she begins to believe that it may have something to do with the Goddess Game – an urban legend turned sleepover dare that the whole town seems to know about. Nora follows a trail of clues in search of Becca, and eventually realizes that in order to find her friend, she will have to play the Goddess Game and break a chain of tragedy and revenge that has been passed down through the decades.

Melissa Albert is an author I've followed since she made her debut with her dark fairytale series (beginning with The Hazel Wood ). This book continues in the vein of taking familiar mythologies and patterns and doing something original with them. A haunting, a mystery, a goddess worshipped by teenaged girls: All of these elements blend together in The Bad Ones to create a missing persons supernatural thriller that feels like it has something new to say.

Most impressive is the complicated, deeply important depiction of the friendship between Nora and Becca. Their connection is one of adoration and ride-or-die dedication, but with all the trials that come with growing up alongside someone. Books depicting "toxic friendships" often fall into a trap of making one party the villain, but that's not the case here. The Bad Ones shows a much more realistic version of this dynamic, where two friends love each other so much that they need space to grow into their own people, independent of who they are together. It's only once they allow themselves to change that they come into the power they need to truly set things right.

Caitlyn Paxson is a writer and performer. She is a regular reviewer for NPR Books and Quill & Quire .

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Guest Essay

A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong

A photo illustration of junk food — potato chips, cheesecake and bacon — spiraling into a black background.

By Johann Hari

Mr. Hari is a British journalist and the author of “Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits — and Disturbing Risks — of the New Weight Loss Drugs.”

Ever since I was a teenager, I have dreamed of shedding a lot of weight. So when I shrank from 203 pounds to 161 in a year, I was baffled by my feelings. I was taking Ozempic, and I was haunted by the sense that I was cheating and doing something immoral.

I’m not the only one. In the United States (where I now split my time), over 70 percent of people are overweight or obese, and according to one poll, 47 percent of respondents said they were willing to pay to take the new weight-loss drugs. It’s not hard to see why. They cause users to lose an average of 10 to 20 percent of their body weight, and clinical trials suggest that the next generation of drugs (probably available soon) leads to a 24 percent loss, on average. Yet as more and more people take drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, we get more confused as a culture, bombarding anyone in the public eye who takes them with brutal shaming.

This is happening because we are trapped in a set of old stories about what obesity is and the morally acceptable ways to overcome it. But the fact that so many of us are turning to the new weight-loss drugs can be an opportunity to find a way out of that trap of shame and stigma — and to a more truthful story.

In my lifetime, obesity has exploded, from being rare to almost being the norm. I was born in 1979, and by the time I was 21, obesity rates in the United States had more than doubled . They have skyrocketed since. The obvious question is, why? And how do these new weight-loss drugs work? The answer to both lies in one word: satiety. It’s a concept that we don’t use much in everyday life but that we’ve all experienced at some point. It describes the sensation of having had enough and not wanting any more.

The primary reason we have gained weight at a pace unprecedented in human history is that our diets have radically changed in ways that have deeply undermined our ability to feel sated. My father grew up in a village in the Swiss mountains, where he ate fresh, whole foods that had been cooked from scratch and prepared on the day they were eaten. But in the 30 years between his childhood and mine, in the suburbs of London, the nature of food transformed across the Western world. He was horrified to see that almost everything I ate was reheated and heavily processed. The evidence is clear that the kind of food my father grew up eating quickly makes you feel full. But the kind of food I grew up eating, much of which is made in factories, often with artificial chemicals, left me feeling empty and as if I had a hole in my stomach. In a recent study of what American children eat, ultraprocessed food was found to make up 67 percent of their daily diet. This kind of food makes you want to eat more and more. Satiety comes late, if at all.

One scientific experiment — which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park — seemed to me to crystallize this effect. Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, grew up in Ireland. After he moved in 2000 to the United States, when he was in his 20s, he gained 30 pounds in two years. He began to wonder if the American diet has some kind of strange effect on our brains and our cravings, so he designed an experiment to test it. He and his colleague Paul Johnson raised a group of rats in a cage and gave them an abundant supply of healthy, balanced rat chow made out of the kind of food rats had been eating for a very long time. The rats would eat it when they were hungry, and then they seemed to feel sated and stopped. They did not become fat.

But then Dr. Kenny and his colleague exposed the rats to an American diet: fried bacon, Snickers bars, cheesecake and other treats. They went crazy for it. The rats would hurl themselves into the cheesecake, gorge themselves and emerge with their faces and whiskers totally slicked with it. They quickly lost almost all interest in the healthy food, and the restraint they used to show around healthy food disappeared. Within six weeks, their obesity rates soared.

After this change, Dr. Kenny and his colleague tweaked the experiment again (in a way that seems cruel to me, a former KFC addict). They took all the processed food away and gave the rats their old healthy diet. Dr. Kenny was confident that they would eat more of it, proving that processed food had expanded their appetites. But something stranger happened. It was as though the rats no longer recognized healthy food as food at all, and they barely ate it. Only when they were starving did they reluctantly start to consume it again.

Though Dr. Kenny’s study was in rats, we can see forms of this behavior everywhere. We are all living in Cheesecake Park — and the satiety-stealing effect of industrially assembled food is evidently what has created the need for these medications. Drugs like Ozempic work precisely by making us feel full. Carel le Roux, a scientist whose research was important to the development of these drugs, says they boost what he and others once called “satiety hormones.”

Once you understand this context, it becomes clear that processed and ultraprocessed food create a raging hole of hunger, and these treatments can repair that hole. Michael Lowe, a professor of psychology at Drexel University who has studied hunger for 40 years, told me the drugs are “an artificial solution to an artificial problem.”

Yet we have reacted to this crisis largely caused by the food industry as if it were caused only by individual moral dereliction. I felt like a failure for being fat and was furious with myself for it. Why do we turn our anger inward and not outward at the main cause of the crisis? And by extension, why do we seek to shame people taking Ozempic but not those who, say, take drugs to lower their blood pressure?

The answer, I think, lies in two very old notions. The first is the belief that obesity is a sin. When Pope Gregory I laid out the seven deadly sins in the sixth century, one of them was gluttony, usually illustrated with grotesque-seeming images of overweight people. Sin requires punishment before you can get to redemption. Think about the competition show “The Biggest Loser,” on which obese people starve and perform extreme forms of exercise in visible agony in order to demonstrate their repentance.

The second idea is that we are all in a competition when it comes to weight. Ours is a society full of people fighting against the forces in our food that are making us fatter. It is often painful to do this: You have to tolerate hunger or engage in extreme forms of exercise. It feels like a contest in which each thin person creates additional pressure on others to do the same. Looked at in this way, people on Ozempic can resemble athletes like the cyclist Lance Armstrong who used performance-enhancing drugs. Those who manage their weight without drugs might think, “I worked hard for this, and you get it for as little as a weekly jab?”

We can’t find our way to a sane, nontoxic conversation about obesity or Ozempic until we bring these rarely spoken thoughts into the open and reckon with them. You’re not a sinner for gaining weight. You’re a typical product of a dysfunctional environment that makes it very hard to feel full. If you are angry about these drugs, remember the competition isn’t between you and your neighbor who’s on weight-loss drugs. It’s between you and a food industry constantly designing new ways to undermine your satiety. If anyone is the cheat here, it’s that industry. We should be united in a struggle against it and its products, not against desperate people trying to find a way out of this trap.

There are extraordinary benefits as well as disturbing risks associated with weight-loss drugs. Reducing or reversing obesity hugely boosts health, on average: We know from years of studying bariatric surgery that it slashes the risks of cancer, heart disease and diabetes-related death. Early indications are that the new anti-obesity drugs are moving people in a similar radically healthier direction, massively reducing the risk of heart attack or stroke. But these drugs may increase the risk for thyroid cancer. I am worried they diminish muscle mass and fear they may supercharge eating disorders. This is a complex picture in which the evidence has to be weighed very carefully.

But we can’t do that if we remain lost in stories inherited from premodern popes or in a senseless competition that leaves us all, in the end, losers. Do we want these weight loss drugs to be another opportunity to tear one another down? Or do we want to realize that the food industry has profoundly altered the appetites of us all — leaving us trapped in the same cage, scrambling to find a way out?

Johann Hari is a British journalist and the author of “Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits — and Disturbing Risks — of the New Weight Loss Drugs,” among other books.

Source photographs by seamartini, The Washington Post, and Zana Munteanu via Getty Images.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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COMMENTS

The Tempest Study Guide
Full Title: The Tempest. When Written: 1610-1611. Where Written: England. When Published: 1623. Literary Period: The Renaissance (1500-1660) Genre: Romance. Setting: An unnamed island in the Mediterranean Sea. Climax: Ariel appears as a harpy before Antonio, Alonso, and Sebastian and condemns them for stealing Prospero's kingdom.
The Tempest Essay at Absolute Shakespeare
The Tempest essay features Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous critique based on his legendary and influential Shakespeare notes and lectures. THERE is a sort of improbability with which we are shocked in dramatic representation, not less than in a narrative of real life. Consequently, there must be rules respecting it; and as rules are nothing ...
A Modern Perspective: The Tempest
In this essay, Montaigne ("whose supple mind," writes Ronald Wright, "exemplifies Western civilization at its best" 6) argues in effect that American "savages" are in many ways more moral, more humane people than so-called civilized Europeans. As with so much of The Tempest, Caliban may be seen as representing two quite different ...
Shakespeare's The Tempest essay, summary, quotes and character analysis
Master Shakespeare's The Tempest using Absolute Shakespeare's Tempest essay, plot summary, quotes and characters study guides. Plot Summary: A quick plot review of The Tempest including every important action in the play. An ideal introduction before reading the original text. Commentary: Detailed description of each act with translations and ...
Analysis of William Shakespeare's The Tempest
Analysis of William Shakespeare's The Tempest By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 26, 2020 • ( 1). Many commentators agree in the belief that The Tempest is the last creation of Shakespeare. I will readily believe it. There is in The Tempest the solemn tone of a testament. It might be said that, before his death, the poet, in this epopee of the ideal, had designed a codicil for the Future. . . .
The Tempest Critical Essays
A. Prospero has taught both Caliban and Miranda. 1. Miranda benefits; she recognizes the nobility in. Ferdinand and in the "goodly creatures" of her future. "brave new world". 2. Caliban ...
Colonization Theme in The Tempest
During the time when The Tempest was written and first performed, both Shakespeare and his audiences would have been very interested in the efforts of English and other European settlers to colonize distant lands around the globe. The Tempest explores the complex and problematic relationship between the European colonizer and the native colonized peoples through the relationship between ...
The Tempest Essay Questions
The Tempest study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes.
The Tempest: Critical Essays
The Tempest: Critical Essays traces the history of Shakespeare's controversial late romance from its early reception (and adaptation) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present. The volume reprints influential criticism, and it also offers eight originalessays which study The Tempest from a variety of contemporary perspectives, including cultural materialism, feminism ...
Themes in The Tempest with Examples and Analysis
Theme #2. Superiority of Human Beings. The play revolves around the happy ending and shows the superiority of human beings in a bleak way. When Prospero and his daughter Miranda are stranded on the island, they live there for almost twelve years. Yet, they know how to exploit other humans and creatures for their ends.
The Tempest: Critical Essays
The Tempest: Critical Essays traces the history of Shakespeare's controversial late romance from its early reception (and adaptation) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present.The volume reprints influential criticism, and it also offers eight originalessays which study The Tempest from a variety of contemporary perspectives, including cultural materialism, feminism ...
The Tempest on JSTOR
Shakespeare's valedictory play is also one of his most poetical and magical. The story involves the spirit Ariel, the savage Caliban, and Prospero, the ban...
The Tempest
The Tempest: Critical Essays traces the history of Shakespeare's controversial late romance from its early reception (and adaptation) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present.The volume reprints influential criticism, and it also offers eight originalessays which study The Tempest from a variety of contemporary perspectives, including cultural materialism, feminism ...
The Tempest as a Post-Colonial Text: Exploring Power, Identity, and
William Shakespeare's The Tempest exposes a Western view and political indifference to colonialism; neither invalidating nor justifying. Aime Casaire's A Tempest and Esiaba Irobi's Sycorax presents a writing back and questioning as it restructures the narrative of colonialism in its adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest.
PDF "THE TEMPEST" by William Shakespeare
2010 TEMPEST. "THE TEMPEST". by William Shakespeare. DRAMATIS PERSONAE. ALONSO, King of Naples SEBASTIAN, his brother PROSPERO, the right Duke of Milan ANTONIO, his brother, the usurping Duke of Milan FERDINAND, son to the King of Naples GONZALO, an honest old counsellor FRANCISCO, a nobleman-assistant to Gonzalo CALIBAN, a savage and ...
Book Review: Memoirist Lilly Dancyger's penetrating essays explore the
In the last essay, "On Murder Memoirs," Dancyger considers the runaway popularity of true crime stories as she tries to explain her decision not to attend the trial of the man charged with killing her cousin — even though she was trained as a journalist and wrote a well-regarded book about her late father that relied on investigative ...
2024 North Texas Teen Book Festival in Photos
The 10th annual North Texas Teen Book Festival took place in Irving, Tex., on April 27, drawing 15,500 middle grade and YA book lovers. In addition, 865 teachers attended the Educator Day on April ...
A Tempest of Tea, The Vanishing Station, The Bad Ones : NPR
The Bad Ones by Melissa Albert. In one night, four people go missing in Nora's small town, and one of them is her best friend Becca. At first, Nora wonders if it's just another way for Becca to ...
Opinion
They quickly lost almost all interest in the healthy food, and the restraint they used to show around healthy food disappeared. Within six weeks, their obesity rates soared. After this change, Dr ...

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A Modern Perspective: The Tempest

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

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The Tempest

Colonization ThemeTracker

Colonization Quotes in The Tempest

The Tempest

The Tempest Questions and Answers

Study Guide for The Tempest

Essays for The Tempest

Lesson Plan for The Tempest

E-Text of The Tempest

The Tempest Themes

Themes in The Tempest

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