Drama Essays Shakespeares Tempest

Drama Essays Shakespe bes TempestThe conflict and contrast among the Utopian exalteds and Elizabethan politics presented in Shakespe ars The TempestThe piece of cake opens with a comment of a terrifying and relentless storm that wrecks the ship belonging to the big businessman of Naples, Alonso. The wreck drifts onto the shore of Properos island but the propel of the ocean is insuperable, and the boatswain appeals to the statuesquemen, repetitive divulge that they ar hindering the opposites. He c tout ensembles to Gonzalo,If you rouse command these elements to silence, and cream the peace of the present, we leave behind non hand a rope more(prenominal).Antonio and Sebastian be also rebuked by the boatswain, and reminded of the inefficacy of their social status is nothing in such(prenominal) a critical fact, invoking their wrath, opus simultaneously hinting at the deflect of the play. We suspect the boatswain will be proven right, and that Shakespe atomic number 18 gently asks us to heed the rude wisdom of the common pragmatists, even or especially- the place setting of ostensibly decadent theatricality. Hence from the start we atomic number 18 presented with an intriguing symmetry of high romantic drama, opinionated political gossip, and fragile idealism. The shipwreck symbolises intimately more than what it appears to at initial. It is no mere vehicle for the themes of the play to bank check a lift on, it is representative of an entire alliances collapse into irretrievable disarray. Indeed, it whitethorn be representative of the doom faced by all improper societies. As such it is a moral vehicle, carrying an apparently disparate base of frightened and confused figures to their identical destiny. As Soji Iwasaki writes,A voyage is a great deal a symbol of the progress of a mans life, and the sea is symbolic of stack a shipwreck is a typical instance of bad fortune, piece of music a ship sailing before a fair nothingness is an image of good fortune. Sometimes a ship at sea serves as a symbol of the Church, in which the whole congregation sails over the sea of ProvidenceIn The Tempest it is Goddess Fortune (1.2.178) that drives Alonsos ship towards the island of Prospero, where a tempest is caused by Prosperos magic.Prospero judges the ship to be full of sinfull soules, a reference to the political crimes of the characters on board. The King of Naples was guilty of usurping the Milanese dukedom, Antonio betrayed Prospero- his give birth brother, while Sebastian, Stephano and Trinculo are all intrinsically evil. In fact the tho figure to bleed judgement is Gonzalo, a harmless courtier. These figures will not find their arbitrement in the next life, by some god-figure, kelvingh, as Shakespeare takes nervous strain to emphasise. Prospero is the solitary(prenominal) figure with deific situation, literary or figurative, in the play his sorcerous military groups, clearly, serve a metaphorical purpos e, symbolising the violence of rhetoric and the force that lies behind absolute righteousness. Since Prospero has been wronged, Shakespeare take upms to (fatalistically) say, he will vindicate himself using the power that comes from k without delayledge and wisdom- just synonyms for what is called magic in the play. Prospero knows how to rebuke and is wise plenteous to find forgiveness in his heart.As the ship will ultimately return to Naples, the plays theme arguably evolves into dealing with the ruin and rebirth of a commonwealth. Between the first, highly symbolic tempest scene, and the final heraldic manoeuvre, the plays process all occurs on the island. Prospero reveals to Miranda the truth he has kept from her for twelve days, since her infancy. He tells her of his brother, her uncle, Antonios usurpation of his dukedom of Milan and the hardship they were forced to endure as a payoff. While Antonio be filmd callously by acting on his jealous zest to take over his brothe rs dukedom, Prospero was partially to blame too, since he had been preoccupied with his private, psych wizardurotic studies of cultivation of the mind, omissioning all the state business (1.2.89-97) to which he admits he should support been more committed. By handing the state affairs over to Antonio and investing so much trust in him, Prospero unwittingly sewed perkds of ambition in his brother, instigating his feature down downfall. As Iwasaki describes it, Prospero committed a double offence he forgot the balance between action and meditation that, as sovereign ruler, he should remember, and he also make a mistake in bank the wrong person, a mistake which a ruler should never make. Ficino reports on the same problem.No reasonable universe doubts that thither are triad chassiss of life the contemplative, the active, and the pleasurable (contemplativa, activa, voluptuosa). And three roads to felicity have been chosen by men wisdom, power, and pleasure (sapientia, potentia , voluptas).Renaissance humanists aspired to a harmony of the three. Prospero chides himself for his untested pursuit of the contemplative, where his preoccupation with esoteric learning came at the price, eventually, of his political power. Prospero may be paying some kind of price, but it is very tricky to demo the Tempest as a cautionary text. Shakespeares attitude to power and wisdom is not so clear cut, there appears to be more than one kind of power and more than one kind of wisdom, afterward all, and although this is not recognised explicitly by the characters in the play (who bring on the Ficino model), Shakespeare wryly alludes to the holes in the creation-view of his people. Shakespeare knows that there is power beyond and after usurpation, a power beyond the political and more powerful than all government- and it is a sort of wisdom. He represents it in the entirely way he keep- symbolically- as magic. Prosperos power is also inextricable from his idealism, to o. He has transposed his ownership, the communicate environment that has come to signify his signified of self, onto the Island. Thus his ideal society as an image has been projected onto a wild and natural, complicated, uncontrollable and antisocial, setting. In fact, wild and frightening imagery very often accompanies a commentary on a social naivety, and naivety about the limits and constitution of power. The first scene, with the tempest and the useless noblemen, springs to mind immediately for reasons I have already explored, and the scene where Caliban is introduced makes the same point soon after, as he speaks bitingly and fearfully of Prospero,Enter CALIBAN with a burden of wood. A noise of holloa heardCALIBANAll the infections that the sun sucks upFrom bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make himBy inch-meal a disease His spirits hear meAnd in so far I needs must curse. But theyll nor pinch,Fright me with urchinshows, pitch me i the mire,Nor lead me, equal a firebr and, in the darkOut of my way, unless he bid emIn more ways Caliban embodies Shakespeares preoccupation with exposing the ordinary but inaccurate conceptions of what constitutes power,The play also fails to question Calibans position as a churl and slave, and seems to validate and legitimise it by his behaviour and his move rape of the sweet Miranda. In many ways the play acts out the treatment of indigenous people by Europeans. The values system of Caliban is stamp down and simply seen as barbaric. He is costructed as the Other, different from Europeans and therefore of course inferior (But thy vile run-/Though thou didst learn had that int which good/ spirits/Could not abide to be with therefore wast thou/Deservedly confined into this rock). If we see Caliban as representative of the indigenous peoples dispossessed by European colonisers the previous(prenominal) quotations certainly shows how it is his quicken and nature that makes him inferior, even though the benevolen t Whites assay so valiantly to make him human.Caliban is supremely ironical, then, since he is the least civilize but the most symbolically loaded the most powerful on the level of information (or reckon) a play- the only character who represents more knowledge than his actions will ever reveal. Prospero, by contrast, finds himself judged and committed entirely by his actions, although his power actually lies in his psychological strength his knowledge and wisdom. In fact, Caliban and Prospero, as characters, represent two sides of this play about politics and idealism. While Prospero is a meditator who is treated for his activity, Caliban is an activator and catalyst of discourse who is treated only as intellectually weak. Both characters are more active in their capacity as viewed figures than as material people within the universe of the play, however, underlining one of the many ways in which that this play is idealistic its potential for bypassing narrative viewing and se ttling at an ideological operative level. Prospero only call ons when we freeze down our assumptions about realism and begin hearing in his voice the tones of Shakespeare himself, when we depart from assuming that this character should be literal and real not touching a performance. Prospero and Caliban, equivalent, perhaps most of the characters in The Tempest, exceed mimesis and function as narrators of their own lives. Their words, then, express their own ideals, and between the lines of the words they say we can be sensitive to the playwrights attitudes to the naivety that informed the politics and idealism of his own society,The Tempest is Shakespeares dramatization of his political ideas concerning the state and the prince. Prosperos island is a model of a commonwealth Prospero is the king, his magic a symbol of his absolute power, Ariel the agent of his government, and Caliban all the subjects (1.2.341) Shakespeare makes much of the criminally large amount of trust Prospe ros invested in his brother. As Iwasaki notes,Prospero was not an ideal prince in his trusting his brother nor in his neglect of a life of action his loss of the dukedom was a result of his disqualification as a prince. He did not put realpolitik into practice. Alonso is another(prenominal) failure as a sovereign ruler. Having sent in married couple his daughter Claribel to a far-off country, he has now lost his only son and heir Ferdinand to his great sorrow. The political uneasiness of a res publica with no prospect of its future succession is analogous to the actual situation of the Virgin Queens commonwealth, in which succession problems caused political unrest and political debatesTheory aside, there are keen racial implications, entangled in the rhetoric of ostensible politically sensitive play. The Tempest has generally been read as a play about forgiveness and reconciliation, change and transformation, misrepresentation and magic and the Prosperos usurpation. Such interp retations generally privilege the attitudes of noble, educated Europeans- in peculiarly those of Prospero. Such readings are in danger of nulling Calibans rights and silencing his appeal for liberty. A postcolonial reading leads to another reading entirely The Tempest can then be appreciated as allegorical, referencing the exploitation of indigenous races, with Caliban as a wizard figure standing for the natives of the refreshed World who were dispossessed and exploited by the European powers. Caliban voices the indignance of the natives who were widely treated as inferior and even sub-human because of their scramble colour and their differing cultural traits- which lead to their social marginalisation as uncivilised. repayable to their widely accepted, aggressive branding as inferior creatures, the natives were exploited to well-being the economy, by dint of their capture and subsequent use as slaves.Arguably, the manner of representing race in The Tempest suffers from bein g heavily and naively Eurocentric. Calibans physiologicity evidences his difference, which is arrogantly equated with inferiority, something even found in his name which is about an anagram of cannibal. just I have argued that Shakespeare is conscious of his characterisation as separate from himself, and that, although they may sometimes speak with his voice they certainly have distinct voices of their own. Shakespeare takes pains to establish a partially artificial, in many ways almost pantomimical, universe where characters who react to each other naively or selfishly, are in fact being puppeteered by the playwright who has filled the gaps between every line of the play with invisible communications aimed directly at his audience. Hence Shakespeare does not see his savage as a cannibal, he has named him so to signal the way in which the other characters/puppets in his play perceive Caliban.At first sight, the Europeans, Stephano and Antonio, see Caliban as an anomaly that they exponent be able to sell in Europe as a spectacular freak, saleable for his Otherness an alien that their perception has constructed. Their attitude is shock in its narrow capitalist scope Trinculo says Were I in England now as once I was and had but this fish painted, not a holiday-fool there would give a piece of silver and Antonio and Sebastian also see him as a marketable product that can be bought and sold, very(prenominal) like. One of themIs a plain fish, and no doubt marketable persist is therefore a marker for one human-ness and anything other than European is constructed as naturally inferior, without rights and available to be exploited for economic purposes. In one writers opinion,Caliban is constructed as innately inferior and savage because of his race. This is articulated by the purportedly sweet and tender Miranda But thy vile race -/Though thou didst learn had that int which good natures/Could not abide to be with ..(31) In these lines Calibans race is seen as the reason for his barbaric behaviour it is his very nature that makes him savage and dangerous. In this the text constructs other non-European races as savage, less human, incapable of supposed civilisation all because of their race this is a damning indictment of non-Europeans as it positions them as naturally inferior and unable to change their ways so that they will never be able to develop the fine sensitivity and refinement of Western civilisation.All the characters in the play speak and hazard politically and everyone is aware of the significance of the state as two a real, specific, place, and a general idea. Where some characters are idealists, others are have a grave ambitions to achieving power. Speaking for the idealists, Gonzalo point in times his dream in such detail it evokes a certain melancholy- only those so far from paradise can imagine its details with absolute precision,I th commonwealth I would by contrariesExecute all things, for no kind of trafficWould I admit no name of magistrate allowters should not be knowriches, poverty,And use of service, nonecontract, succession,Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, noneNo use of metal, corn, or wine, or oilNo occupation, all men idle, all,And women too, but sinless and pureNo sovereigntyAll things in common nature should produceWithout sweat or endeavour.Treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any locomotiveWould I not have, but nature should bring forthOf it own kind all foison, all abundance To feed my innocent people. (2.1.145-62)In the words of Alvin Kernan,For the old courtier Gonzalo, as for those who would later settle the many utopian communities of America, the new world offers the opportunity to recover the lost Eden where, freed of the cant over of European society, human nature will be purified and the sins of the old world left behind.Gonzalos island country may excels the golden age (166) in the sense that there is no property, unfair wealth, employment nor e xploitation but Gonzalo describes a commonwealth controlled by contraries, that is- a nonsensical place of inverted logic. In fact, Gonzalos ideal principality is markedly similar to that other island government, Thomas Mores Utopia- an ideal place free from property, currency, or enclosure where gold and silver are hated.Stephen Greenblatt points out that Mores utopia is dense with contradiction in Hythlodaeuss account freedoms are heralded, only to shrink in the course of the descriptionFor example, travelling is free and a citizen may go anywhere he likes in the country, but only with the Mayors permission, and a record of the date of return, and wherever the traveller goes he must work. Should he be caught breaking any of these rules, the traveller faces punishment as an banned runaway and would be instantly sent home. Furthermore, if he continues to flount the rules, he risks being sent into slavery. The freedom and, subsequently, the Utopia, suddenly seems rather less ideal w ith these dour qualifications. Gonzalos commonwealth contains similar contradictions, particularly,Had I plantation of this isle . . .And were the king ont . . . ,I would by contraries /Execute all things . . . / No sovereignty.Gonzalo is thinking on his feet, dreaming, and like a dream his thoughts need follow no consistent logic. A kingdom with no sovereignty is obviously a contradiction, as Sebastian and Antonio are quick to point out. Gonzalos commonwealth is an abstraction, an impossible, in many ways a perfect example of the Utopia, the impossible, seductive, unrealisable dream- like the communist one of our times, a real place that nevertheless exists nowhere. Set in stark contrast to Gonzalos balmy innocence optimism stands the brash cynicism of Antonio and Sebastian. As Iwasaki writes,These are such people as are wickedly ambitious for higher status. One is a usurper, and the other once attempted usurpation. Their idea of a kingdom is not such a Utopia as Gonzalo imagines , where the people are all contented with their freedom and natural abundance, nor is it a holy kingdom ruled by an anointed king, the mortal heaven the kingdom they conceive is a country owned by themselves, tyrants whose interest is solely in their own material felicity and perverse domination over the people. Stephano, a drunken servingman, also desires to be nobleman of the island, and attempts to kill Prospero. It is because of the bottled spirit he owns that Caliban asks him to be his king. Stephanos wine is a physical correlative to his spiritual power it is what Ariel is to Prospero. If Stephanos kingdom were to come into being, he and Trinculo, together with Caliban, might have a utopia of fools very much like Bruegels The globe of Cockaigne, where people can eat and drink as much as they like, yet they never have to work.The theoretical quality of Prosperos magic for which I have been arguing is backed up by his realism, the authorial voice, perhaps, finding a mouthp iece in this character. It is not Prosperos intention to transform his Island into a utopia. He lacks the nave optimism of Gonzalo, with his imagined new world and ideal plantation, where people are impossibly, illogically liberated from the social conventions of the Old World. Indeed Prospero is actively debate to the illogical and knows intuitively that the wisest decisions can only be made through accommodation of all the facts of life, however unpalatable.Prospero values knowledge to the point of snobbery, and when Ferdinand lands on the island, Prospero intends to marry Miranda to him, someone who, as the Prince of Naples, ought to have a proper education for a future king. Stunned with grief for his fathers death, Ferdinand is drawn by Ariels witching(prenominal) song to Prospero and his daughter. When the two youngsters meet they fall in screw instantly, both mesmerised by the wonder of the others beauty, as she calls him spirit and he refers to her as goddess. Despite th eir passion, however, Prospero intervenes he is adamant that Ferdinand should recieve a princely education, since he will eventually rule over both Naples and Milan. Prospero is emphatic that the new prince should have an awareness and appreciation of real politics that Prospero himself never had, and suffered for his ignorance of, thirteen years ago.So Prospero imparts trials upon Ferdinand, calling him a usurper for assuming his fathers kingdom while he is still alive, and accusing him of being a spy who intends to buy the island from ProsperoThou dost here usurpThe name thou owst not,and has put thyselfUpon this island as a spy, to win itFrom me, the lord ont. (1.2.454-57)When Ferdinand draws his sword against Prospero, the old man entraps the jejuneness by means of his magic, again, an obvious analogy for the power of superior wisdom. Ferdinand is humiliated, made to surrender and forced to carry logs. He is unaware of the effort, however, cherishing Mirandas acknowledge so m uch that he endures the slavish work with astonishing patience. Iwasaki compares Ferdinands education to the learning principle implied in Raphaels aspect of The Dream of Scipio,In the left emphasise of the picture is depicted a knight on horseback move up the difficult passage to the tower of virtues on the top of a mountainous mountain, the journey, of course, representing the trial a knight must undertake to achieve the gothic virtues, represented here by the book and the sword held by the peeress in the foreground. Ferdinand, capable of a life of pleasure as a lover, is now encouraged, like Scipio, to go through a trial for his self-fashioning. Raphaels picture of Scipio was given by Thomaso Borgese of Siena to his son Sipione as a moral lesson, and like Thomaso, Prospero is a man whose educational ideal is Renaissance-humanistic.Through his slavery, as he subsists on plain food and water, Ferdinand tells Prospero that all his hardships arebut prosperous to me, Might I but through my prison once a day Behold this maid.All corners else o th earthLet liberty make use ofspace enoughHave I in such a prison. (1.2.490-94)When Miranda sees Ferdinand labouring she yearns to take his place. Since the lovers devotion is characterised by their lack to serve each others physical labours, this slave labour itself comes to define the nature of their love. That is, they share a need to express their love through equipage the burden of the other, sparing the others body any pain. Their labour, then, in a kind of paradox, comes to signify the bliss of their mutual adoration- Shakespeare pits ethereal magic against physical work repeatedly in this play, and the message here seems to be that true love is best expressed through the essential of shared labour.The name Miranda, of course, has the heart and soul wonder and miraveglia (the principle of heroic wonder), comprising part of what Iwasaki calls the neoplatonic rhetoric of love respect Miranda Indeed the top of admiration WorthWhats dearest to the world (3.1.37-39)Ferdinands love of Miranda seems appears to represent the affections female adoration according to the prescribed ritual of noble courting, but his feminine obsessiveness is levelled out and enhanced by the manly force of his sweethearts devotion. Their love is emphatically built upon a systematic balance, a mechanism of reflection and reaction, eros and anteros, modern, complimentary, and more neoplatonic than conventionally courtly. Yet there remains in Shakespeares words a forceful, if unbiased, commentary on male dominance- particularly in the person of Prospero- that represents an ideology apt to Jacobean versed politics.ReferencesBacon, Francis. Essays 1625. capital of the United Kingdom Oxford UP, 1937, 1962.Castiglione, Baldesar. Il Cortegiano writ. 1518, pub. 1528. C. S. Singleton, trans. The Book of the Courtier. Garden City, New York Doubleday, 1959.Corbett, Margery and Ronald Lightbown. The Comely Frontispiece Th e emblematical Title-page in England 1550-1660. London Routledge Kegan Paul, 1979.Erasmus, Desiderius. The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. L. K. Born. New York Norton, 1968.Freedberg, David. The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the aged (Catalogue for the Exibition, organized by Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo, January 7- Febrary 26, 1989). Tokyo Tokyo Shimbun, 1989.Frye, Northrop. Introduction to The Tempest in William Shakespeare The Complete Works, general ed. A. 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