The Tempest

Now that's my kind of story! Funny in parts, bit of intrigue, bad guys getting pinched and a happy ending all around. Mind you, I would have liked for Antonio to have received some of those pinches, he got off far to lightly in my opinion. I must not have quite the forgiving nature of Prospero.

Strange, this is the direct opposite to King Lear. There were many near misses and narrow escapes, but no actual deaths. While in KL, they were dropping left and right, sometimes before you even realized it...there went another one! They very nearly all died! I prefer The Tempest. ( )

It's very tempting to make this review simply, "It's Shakespeare. What do you expect?"

I'm really glad I never had to study The Tempest. I've never been able to appreciate Shakespeare (or Chaucer, for that matter) when he was shoved down my throat for a course. I'm glad that I could randomly decide to pick it up on a Saturday morning, with a background of Loreena McKennitt's beautiful Prospero's Speech. Aside from seeing them performed live, I think coming to Shakespeare's plays of your own accord is the best way to experience them, when you don't have to read them looking for themes and whatnot. You can just appreciate the fine language and the skill with which he arranges his scenes.

I already knew the epilogue well (from the aforementioned song), so it might be cheating to call that my favourite part. So I'll say Ariel is my favourite bit. ( )

i read this on my nook e-book and think it would have been a better experience in tree-book form. with shakespeare, i like to go back and forth and re-read passages and while i highlighted a lot of places in the text, it wasn't the same experience. ( )

The Tempest is almost a wisp of a thing. There's little plot and almost no character development. It's like a magic trick: you blow into your hand, and a cloud of flame pops up, and a dove flies out of it, everyone claps.

So the play is the spectacle, and the magic is the language. Prospero's speech, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," is second maybe only to "All the world's a stage" in crystallizing Shakespeare's philosophy (and better, poetically); and there's Miranda's line, "O brave new world, that has such people in't!" - these and others are among the best lines Shakespeare wrote; and the feel of the play, the atmosphere - that magical island, populated by beasts and wizards, the evocation of a world we were still exploring - it sticks with you, even though, as I said, dramatically speaking, almost nothing happens.

And Caliban! Arguably the only memorable character - Prospero is cool, and Ariel differs from Puck, but is no Puck, and the others are just placeholders, a virtuous maid here, a villainous uncle there - but Caliban, that sniveling, backstabbing, savage would-be rapist, searching for a God whose boots need licking - he's a tremendous find. (And what made me love Tennyson.) Caliban's right up there with Iago.

In some ways, this play is all flash. But what a flash! ( )

I usually like stories about people stranded on islands. This one wasn't my favorite. ( )