The Tempest :: essays research papers

The violent storm was one of William Shakespeares last meets. Into it, he put his heart and his soul. The epilogue in itself carries enough emotional weight to fill an wide play. The shaft where Ariel says that she would feel bad for the manpower trapped on the island if she were human (V. i. 20), if performed right, after piece of music be one of the roughly moving lines in the history of theater. The emotions in the play make the play extremely laboured to perform. It is one of the most difficult stage plays for the audience as well as the puff to interpret, but isnt impossible with a good director, cast, and crew.If a play is not staged well, the audience may have a bad time understanding it. In The Tempest there are galore(postnominal) scenes that are extremely difficult to stage. For example, in Act III background 3, there is the stage direction, "Enter several hostile Shapes, bringing in a banquet and dance about it with gentle actions of salutations." (S hakespeare, 57) Then, after the men decide to eat, "Enter Ariel, like a harpy claps his wings upon the put over and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes." (Shakespeare, 58) How does one bring an entire banquet onto the stage and then in the blink of an eye, make it unfreeze? It is one of the greatest obstacles in known theater. The appearance of Caliban is something to be argued over. In some performances, he has been portrayed as a fish, in others a dog, in some a hunchback, but his appearance is an important part of the play. It is imperative that the audience hate him, be disgusted by him, for the emotions to march right. He has to be depicted as abhorrent and lewd. This is another dilemma for the director, and the actor who plays Caliban has to be notably gifted. The spirit, Ariel, is of undefined gender, and this is also quite a difficult thing to portray on the stage, as one moldiness choose, to a degree, the sex of the spirit. Also, the language, late sixteen th century English, is rather hard for the modern ear to understand without scrupulous study. Many words strange to those of the twentieth century were common, ever day words in Shakespeares time. The line, "You have often/Begun to tell me what I am, but stopped/And left field me to a bootless inquisition/Concluding, Stay Not yet.