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  • Essay / Essay on Dramatic Effects in Shakespeare's The Tempest

    The Importance of Dramatic Effects in The TempestIt has been said that the function of drama is to confront and then engage the audience. This is certainly the approach taken by Shakespeare in his play The Tempest. From the beginning of the play, the audience is immediately confronted with the ferocity of the storm, and as soon as the unfortunate passengers land on the island, the audience is immersed in the fantasy of Prospero's island. At the beginning of the play we see the action aboard the ship that is taking the king and some of the upper class home. They are in the middle of a great storm, the kind that sailors of that era would have prayed not to encounter. The state of nature, at this point, is very messy. This becomes important after the action and in the quiet that follows, as many different binary opposites come into play, such as fate versus free will, human versus nonhuman, and order versus order. mess. Prospero, the ruler of the island, is in fact both the rightful Duke of Milan and the leader of his island, and also a magician with a servant's spirit. Through his “art”, he also shows us again the order/disorder opposition. He created the storm at the beginning of the play, the great disorder. Towards the end, however, he is responsible for the mask scene, a grand order - the high point of perfection for this culture, in fact. In the Elizabethan era, playwrights used the thrust scene as the standard for all plays performed. The thrust stage, unlike the Proscenium arch used later, was a large raised platform which extended towards the audience. In fact,...... middle of paper ......we. It's important to note that you don't get the full effect of a play just by reading it, but in The Tempest these effects work as well as in any of Shakespeare's masterpieces. Works cited and consulted: Garnett, Richard. "Irving Shakespeare" The Tempest (and selected reviews). Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (eds.) Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 1903. Knight, G. Wilson. “Shakespearian Superman” The Tempest DJ Palmer (ed.) Macmillan & Co. 1968Murray, J. Middleton. "Shakespeare's Dream" The Tempest DJ Palmer (ed.) Macmillan & Co. 1968Palmer, The Later Comedies of DJ Shakespeare: An Anthology of Modern Criticism. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 1611. Ed. Stéphane Orgel. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.Tillyard, EM "The Tragic Pattern" The Tempest DJ Palmer (ed.) Macmillan & Co. 1968