The Characters of the Tempest Walk into a Bar

I don't know where to begin. The clowns of the play Stephano and Trinculo kept me laughing as did drunk Caliban. Prospero's controlling nature still unnerves me and Miranda's innocence is touching. Acts IV and V of this play had me rooting for Miranda and Ferdinand and only them. While I don't dislike Stephano and Trinculo, I have a difficult time fully accepting them as anything but drunkards at this point. I have often wondered how powerful Caliban would be if he was sober. Prospero seems to know everything. It is this factor that I will focus on. Prospero is without a doubt a control freak. Not only does he control every aspect of his daughters life but he controls the lives of everyone else on the island. Prospero is a man with a plan. I don't think that he left anything up to chance throughout the whole play. He planned his daughter's marriage to Ferdinand as soon as he knew he'd arrived on the island, who does that?

Prospero knew what he wanted to get out of his 'guests.' He wanted his dukedom back and when the king offered it, Prospero was quick to take it. Honestly, I believe that the king only gave the dukedom back to Prospero because he wanted to get off the island and he was pretty much stuck there until Prospero decided otherwise. As far as Prospero's giving up of his magic goes, I see it as a bargaining tool. He is trying to prove that he has changed and is more worthy of the dukedom. Whether he is trying to prove is to himself or the king, I cannot say. In a way I think that Prospero has realized that he does not need his magic, though that is also speculation.  Prospero is an interesting character and one whose motives could continually be analyzed. I apologize for the short post this week, I hope you enjoyed my ramblings.

Ah.... The Tempest.... We Meet Again...

I love this story, and re-reading it for class reminds me of the bitterness that I have for not being able to see it in Central Park earlier this year, but anyways…

In regards to this class and what we have thus far understood magic to represent—demons, crazy women and witches, among other things—Prospero and his experience with magic is refreshing. Surely, his interest in magic has implications, hence the life on an island, but Shakespeare seems to be less focused on the demonic implications of magic, and more so the abilities of the art of magic. Nevertheless, Miranda refers to her father’s magic as “his art,” but contextually she is referencing this art as something negative: the storm is hurting these men and she cannot understand why, saying “If by your art...you have/ Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them/…I have suffered/ With those that I saw suffer!” (1.2.1-6). Prospero, though, has control over the situation, almost like a director orchestrating a dangerous scene for a film—a car crash or even an explosion—where he or she knows that the situation is under control, and that the people are safe. It is a new idea of a magician that Shakespeare is portraying. Doubled with the idea that this is a father, who cares for his daughter, and appears to have been protecting her from the pain of his personal experience with magic and the people on the ship.  

We are reminded though, of the negative forms of magic, but it appears that they are represented as evil in the play as well—the “foul witch Sycorax” (1.2.309). She is exactly what the people from pretty much every text in the anthology would hang by the stake and kill, and she also appeals to pretty much every modern negative connotation and association of witches. She is portrayed as a hag, evil and has an almost deranged quality that, by nature, Shakespeare’s audiences knows to dislike and distrust her. Even outside of what we learn about Sycorax, we know that she is no good, simply because of what we know about witches. At least for myself, ignoring what I already know about this play, I imagine that one must be concerned about what to think of Prospero. Is he the opposite of Sycorax on the witchy-evil spectrum, or is he just as bad, taking Ariel as a servant. Considering he essentially stole the island from Caliban and his mother, I am not entirely sure.

Also, I loved this. 

Maybe you will too!

It's Very Shakespearean

So this reading assignment has shoved how terrible I am at reading old(er) English so far up in my face that light is no longer able to reach my eyes. The summaries at the beginning of each scene helped a lot with giving me the foundation I needed to work with, but then I had to use the bricks of detail given to me by Shakespeare to build a proper house of story understanding in the neighborhood that is my mind. Normally I'm a pretty good carpenter, but now instead of normal house-pieces it's like I'm working with some sort of weird stone blobs and odd shaped doors that are just really hard to figure out how to put together. Then if you can't figure out how to fit the plot-pieces together and you just start placing them wherever or leave some out because you don't think they're important for the structure, then they don't fit right you get some weird shape but you think "a little mistake is fine, nobody will notice when it's done" and then you keep building, but the mistakes keep piling up and then your house ends up looking really awkward and ugly and nobody wants to live in it.

 I turned Hamlet into an M.C. Escher painting.

Basically the task I set for myself while reading this was to figure out who the heck it is that I'm supposed to be rooting for (joke's on me and it's probably going to turn out that everyone's terrible and anyone who I actually like will die anyway, as per Shakespeare). My current consensus is thus: The king and duke are assholes, the slave kid started out pretty cool but then turned out to be a creepy rapey weirdo, the daughter and the prince are the arbitrary hormonal teenagers that decide they're in love because they are opposite gender and happened to make eye-contact, Ariel is just a perfect wonderful innocent little spirit who can do no wrong, and the wizard guy doesn't seem too bad, except I feel like his grudge about being out-duked is going to go bad places AND HE'D BETTER KEEP HIS PROMISE TO FREE ARIEL OR I SWEAR TO GOD. What I'm saying is, screw the mortals, Ariel is my protagonist.

There's no doubt a lot of details that I missed, since I don't understand half the things these people say and the stuff on the left pages IS NOT VERY HELPFUL. Seriously though, half the time there's a phrase I don't understand and the book refuses to help me, half the time it decides to help me with something that I'm honestly insulted it thought I couldn't figure out on my own ("incharitable: i.e. uncharitable" Really? REALLY!?), and some of the time it actually aids me in figuring out the story. (I may have rounded these values.) Basically all I picked up from the whole first scene was that the ship was sinking, and in retrospect I guess the prince guy was on it? So if anyone picked up on any details that would probably affect my character opinions, please tell me I feel so helpless.