The tempest- William Shakespeare.

This drama is one of the great comedy plays by William Shakespeare. The themes illustrated in the play are freedom, friendship , repentance and forgiveness and feature different temperaments illustrating temperance and intemperance. The plot starts when King Alonso of Naples and his entourage sail home for Italy after attending his daughter's wedding in Tunis, Africa. They encounter a violent storm, or Tempest. Everyone jumps overboard and are washed ashore on a strange island inhabited by the magician Prospero who has deliberately conjured up the storm. Prospero and Miranda live in a cave on the island which is also inhabited by Ariel, a sprite who carries out the bidding of Prospero, and the ugly, half human Caliban. Various plots against the main characters fail thanks to the magic of Prospero. The play ends with all the plotters repenting the Tempest is calmed.

I have studied the Tempest before, and in brief is a play which asks complex questions about human nature such a nature or nuture and what makes a human,human. It has been a while since I learnt this play so this summary probably does it better. I looked into this as when I think of William Tempest, all that comes to mind is William Shakespeare-The Tempest. It is quite interesting that this play strips back and analyses human nature, Shakespeare uses a beast- Caliban who is half man half beast to explore the theory of nature or nuture and also what is it that makes a man human? Is it appearance, blood, intelligence or his human nature? The character in this play are magical and other worldly. There are many correlations between the themes running through "the tempest" and our film cross examining emotions and state of mind.

Although some scholars have speculated that Shakespeare wrote portions of The Tempest at an earlier stage in his career, most literary historians assign the entire play a composition date of 1610 or 1611. And while Shakespeare may have had a hand in The Two Noble Kinsman(written a decade or so after The Tempest and assigned to dual authorship), The Tempest is customarily identified as the Bard's last stage piece. These marginal issues aside, The Tempestis the fourth, final, and the finest of Shakespeare's great and/or late romances. Along withPericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, The Tempest belongs to the genre of Elizabethanromance plays. It combines elements of tragedy (Prospero's revenge) with those of romantic comedy (the young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand), and like one of Shakespeare's problem plays, Measure for Measure, it poses deeper questions that are not completely resolved at the end. The romance genre is distinguished by the inclusion (and synthesis) of these tragic, comic, and problematical ingredients and further marked by a happy ending (usually concluding with a masque or dance) in which all, or most, of the characters are brought into harmony.

No reading of The Tempest can do it justice: Shakespeare's tale of Prospero's Island is inherently theatrical, unfolding in a series of spectacles that involve exotic, supra-human, and sometimes invisible characters that the audience can see but other characters cannot. The play was composed by Shakespeare as a multi-sensory theater experience, with sound, and especially music, used to complement the sights of the play, and all of it interwoven by the author with lyrical textual passages that overflow with exotic images, trifling sounds, and a palpable lushness.

The richness of The Tempest as theater is matched by the extraordinary thematic complexity of its text. Recognizing that all of the themes and accompanying figurative strands of the play cannot be discussed here, the play's topical highlights can still be approached by first noting the salience of two themes that arise from the very theatricality of the play: the opposition between reality and illusion and the tandem subject of the theater itself. The play challenges our senses and is self-consciously a performance orchestrated by Shakespeare's effigy in the master illusionist Prospero. There are, in addition, numerous interpenetrating polarities in the play, most notably between nature and civilization or Art. These thematic strands come together at multiple points of intersection. Nevertheless, from one angle on the text, The Tempest asks a single question, one that Shakespeare had posed in many and divers of his other plays: What is a human being? (or, in Elizabethan terms: What is man?)

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