Prospero both defies the stars and uses them to his general benefit | EMW Tillyard, P & stars |
endorses and celebrates the dominant cultural narrative of the father’s responsibility for educating his daughter and for settling her…in a prosperous and profitable marriage | Moncreif, dom cultural narrative, educating, marriage |
woman as a threat to patriarchy with her potential to issue bad offspring | Bogosyan, Miranda as a threat |
Miranda shares Caliban’s fate as both have been relegated to the role of the other | Donaldson, the other |
She is at once a victim and an heir of the forces of colonialism | Donaldson, victim and heir |
a struggle for liberation and cultural authenticity…against the hegemonic, eurocentric vision of the universe | Massachusetts review 1971 Caliban symbolises |
magic island as a metaphor for the theatre: it is a place where natural identities are called into question and we have to reexamine our everyday expectations | Norbrook, island = theatre |
a Jacobean audience would have been struck by Caliban’s insubordination not just in politics…but also in language | Norbrook, C refuses politics & lang |
the impact of the music of the isle varies from person to person according to the effect Prospero wishes to achieve | Green, music, Prospero controls |
an unconventional woman who threatens the stability of a patriarchal society | Brett, Sycorax = unconventional |
by dint of its scarcity, her femininity becomes an extremely valuable commodity | Brett, Miranda’s femininity |
Prospero’s problems concerning the maintenance of his power on the island … of representation, of his capacity to ‘forge’ the island in his own image | Brown, P maintains power |
Sycorax’s magic is remembered as viciously coercive, yet beneath the apparent voluntarism of the white, male regime lies the threat of precisely this coercion | Brown, Sycorax’s magic & P’s coercion, voluntarism, threat |
The sea is associated with forces both of destruction and renewal | Norbrook, sea |
The initial tempest becomes retroactively a kind of antimasque | Brown, antimasque |
The island seems to operate not for the colonizer but for the colonized | Brown, island operates |
ends with order emerging from disorder | Bowen, ends |
The end of the play does not provide a simple return to social order | Bowen, no return to social order |
Prospero becomes an official historian and all other accounts are dominated by his | Charry, P historian |
one of Shakespeare’s most significant commentaries upon the conduct of real human beings and practical government in a modern civilised state | Bowling, significant commentaries, conduct & gov |
This state of discord and disorder prevails until leadership has again been correctly reassumed and all individuals are willing to return to their proper places in the universal chain | Bowling, discord prevails, proper places |
a treatise on practical government | Bowling, treatise |
the supernatural is used as a means of giving further amplification and extension to the natural | Bowling, supernatural |
the masque serves as a parallel to, or a re-enactment of, Prospero’s original error … he neglected his practical duties as ruler and allowed matters of state to get out of hand | Bowling, P’s masque as a parallel to neglect of duties |
By the end of the play Caliban discovers the asinine ignorance of his error. | Bowling, C’s asinine ignorance |
the civilised man who goes savage is worse than the savage who never was anything else | Moseley, civilised to savage, worse |
to accomplish his transformation, he must overcome his enemies and the anger within…exorcised in the events following the storm, the expression of Prospero’s anguish and mental torment | Riches, overcome…exorcised, expression |
the survival of Ferdinand, and his attachment to Miranda, make the play’s final return to harmony | Cutts, survival = return to harmony |
Shakespeare’s humour functions within the bounds of a persistent ‘high seriousness’ | Knight, humour functions |
Despite his brutishness, Caliban is the true heir | Briggs, C’s brutishness |
Prospero’s power expands sometimes to tyranny | Riches, P’s power = |
sunk in the hallucination of greed | Northrop the royals |
Like his magician-philosopher, Shakespeare too had reached a state of serenity and happy contemplation, a state reflected in the play’s rhetoric of redemption and forgiveness | Charry, Shakespeare state of serenity, reflected in play |
In renouncing his ‘rough magic’, Prospero accepts his limitations as a man and re-enters the human community | Berry, P accepts |
The Tempest critical quotes
July 19, 2019