Prospero,
Duke of Milan, deposed from his throne by his brother Antonio, has been shipwrecked
on a lonely
island with his daughter Miranda. Thanks to his knowledge of magic, Prospero has
released the spirit Ariel who was imprisoned by a witch called Sycorax,
and who now becomes Prospero’s servant. He also has another servant, Caliban, the
witch’s own son. Caliban is a monstrous creature and was the sole
inhabitant of the island until Prospero’s arrival. Prospero has spent twelve
years on the island and during these years he has perfected his knowledge of
magic.
The play
begins with a
storm raised by Prospero’s magic which causes the ship carrying
Antonio, Alonso King of Naples, his brother Sebastian as well as Alonso’s son
Ferdinand to be shipwrecked off the island. The passengers are miraculously
saved but are dispersed about the island in different groups. The members of
each group believe themselves to be the only survivors. This gives rise to
three sub-plots:
1) Ferdinand
meets Miranda and the couple fall in love but Prospero puts a spell on Ferdinand
to protect his daughter’s virtue before finally permitting the couple to marry
at the end of the play.
2)
Meanwhile on another part of the island Antonio and Sebastian, the villains of the play, are planning to kill
Alonso and his honest counsellor Gonzalo, but they fail.
3) Caliban
persuades two Of the ship’s crew, Stefano, a drunken hurler, and Trinculo, a
jester, to try
to murder Prospero and take control of the island. This plot forms a
comic
counterpoint to Antonio’s conspiracy.
At the end
of the play, after Prospero has used the spirit Arid to manipulate events and defeat the
various conspiracies, all the characters are finally reunited. Prospero forgives
Antonio on the condition that he returns his dukedom to him, and
before they all embark tot Italy, he sets Caliban and Ariel free, renouncing both his political
and magic
powers.
Features of
the play
The text
probably derives from more than one source. Some passages echo the English
translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
while among its other influences are Montaigne’s Essays as well as travel literature, particularly the accounts of
the shipwreck of the Sea-Adventure
off the coast of the Bermudas in 1609, before its passengers arrived safely in
Virginia.
The Tempest is a complex play where illusion and reality intermingle.
It is a play about power in all its forms: the power of European
culture over non-European cultures, the power of language and the power of the artist to create illusion.
The relationship between Prospero and Caliban reflects the power of the colonisers over
colonised peoples, while the figure of Ariel stands as a metaphor for the
powers of art and language that the artist may borrow to create his works but
can never master completely. Just as Prospero must set Ariel free at the end of
the play, so too must Shakespeare set his play free once it is complete, thus relinquishing his
control over its ultimate meaning. Art and language have a life of
their own, beyond the author.
On a
different level, Prospero’s release of Caliban at the end of the play is
accompanied by an acknowledgement that he too contains something of Caliban’s savage uncontrollable
nature. This has been much commented on, particularly in
post-colonial readings of the play.
Source: Thomson
– Maglioni, Literary Links. Literature in time and space, Cideb, an old Italian
book 2000.
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