Tempest AO3 Flashcards
Joseph Warton
‘of all the plays of Shakespeare, the tempest is the most striking instance of his creative power’
ST Coleridge (Caliban)
‘[Caliban is] in some respects a noble being: the poet has raised him far above contempt’
ST Coleridge (Ariel)
‘He is a sort of creature of the earth, as Ariel is a creature of the air’
ST Coleridge (politics)
‘in this play… are also shown the springs of the vulgar in politics, – of that kind of politics that is in-woven with human nature’
William Hazlitt
‘the savage Caliban, half brute, half demon’
Edward Dowden (Prospero)
‘His heart is sensitive, he is profoundly touched by the joy of the children, he is deeply moved by the perfidy of his brother… Prospero masters his own sensitiveness, emotional and intellectual’
Edward Dowden (theme)
‘forgiveness and freedom: these are the keynotes of the play’
EMW Tillyard
‘next to the word nature, ‘the chain of being’ was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century’
G Wilson Knight
‘[Miranda and Ferdinand] are representative of beautiful and virtuous youth as drawn in former plays (Marina, Florizel and Perdita)’
Frank Kermode’s reading
In Kermode’s reading, Prospero is the ‘artist’ who cultivates the ‘good seed’ that is Miranda and disciplines the ‘born devil’ who is Caliban
Roger Poole
‘ironically it is Antonio and Sebastian, those products of height civilisation, whom music cannot touch’
Paul Brown
Prospero’s speech exemplifies the cyclical nature of colonialist discourse, its endless need to produce an Other that destabilizes the system, hence requiring the system to impose order (228).
William Tydeman (Prospero)
‘By the close, the master story-teller has to acknowledge that there are limitations to his no longer sovereign powers’ ‘the narrator clearly sees himself as more sinned against than sinning… guilt is diverted to Antonio’ ‘Prospero somewhat blandly excuses himself from any taint of weakness’
Stephen Siddall
‘He has lived on a boundary between the world of men and spirits… he can never live in the world of the spirit and as a man he is fallible and subject to passions’
Peter Reynolds
‘Prospero can distinguish between illusion and reality, and ultimately he opts for the imperfections of the latter’
Ann Thompson
‘Women are notable absent from Shakespeare’s Tempest
Barry Beck (island)
‘the island represents an enchanted locality where things do not work by the normal rules of time, space and physical action and reaction’
Barry Beck (Caliban)
‘Caliban is the shadow of the island, and of Prospero’s mind’
Richard Adams
‘order and authority are not fixed absolutely, but shift with time and place’ ‘in the course of the Tempest, then, we see a widespread upsetting of social order and organisation’
Diana Devlin
[Caliban’s ‘be not afeared speech] ‘has the lightness and eagerness of a young lover’
Harold Bloom
‘The Tempest is neither a discourse on colonialism nor a mystical testament. It is a wildly experimental state comedy, prompted ultimately, I suspect, by Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus’
Virginia Mason Vaughn
‘Gonzalo’s assertion that all the Neapolitans have ‘found’ themselves during their afternoon on this enchanted island is overly optimistic, but he correctly judges that most of them were radically changed by the experience’
Richard Jacobs
‘for all his stage-management [Prospero’s] the victim of one crucial circumstance above all: the fact that his daughter has grown up… the play explores most subtly in the area of father and daughter’
Roy Booth (clothing)
[of Caliban’s gabardine]’ David Lindley… more imaginatively compares it with a Jewish gabardine worn by Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, suggesting that Shakespeare uses such a cloak as an ‘outsider garment’’
Malcolm Hebron
‘In alchemy, a ‘tempest’ is the term for shifting out impurities from a mixture’
Neil Bowen
‘the end of the play does not provide a simple return to social order; the rainbow Prospero produces for the masque is an illusion only’
