This may be a completely off interpretation, but I was thinking about Prospero being a representation of himself. That made me wonder if the other characters are representative of people in his life as well. So are Caliban and Ariel his...lovers? Ariel could be Anne and Caliban could be the dark lady? This might be completely a completely arbitrary interpretation, but it got me thinking.
UPDATE: Read my comment below.
Tara, you are definitely on to something. Shmoop actually points this fact out in the bottom half of the summery of "The Tempest."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.shmoop.com/tempest/
I would be interested in getting your take on what I had to say further on the interpretation of Ariel, if Prospero is Shakespeare. Let me know!
http://custermiklavicarielle382.blogspot.com/2012/01/oh-arielthats-me.html
I am sure there is a lot of research that could go into this and I have revised what I said above slightly, but I wonder if Ariel is perhaps representative of one of Shakespeare's ladies as Prospero is a representative of himself. I know he wrote many things about the "dark lady," and she seemed to inspire him. Perhaps Ariel is representative of the dark lady as well and all his creativity and imagination? Shakespeare could have had to give the dark lady up at some point.
ReplyDeleteAs with Caliban, where he has been said to perhaps represent Shakespeare's "earthly appetites, and the enslavement of Caliban with Shakespeare’s own self-control and discipline," Caliban could be representative of Anne. I believe I remember it being said that Shakespeare was unhappy with her and he was forced to marry her because she was pregnant, so Caliban could easily reflect this and Shakespeare having to stay with Anne?
This may be arbitrary, but just something interesting I was thinking about.
http://www.glencoe.com/sec/literature/litlibrary/pdf/tempest.pdf
A very interesting thought! Thanks for the links, both of you.
ReplyDelete