The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skilful manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to the island. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio's lowly nature, the redemption of the King, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso's son, Ferdinand.
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3recommend
18mentions
17people
2013–2026years
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Collected Works of Shakespeare
The Tempest was my way in. Hated him as many did at school, but when my path was my own I decided there must be something to the extraordinary reverence in which he was held so I decided to have another go.
I had to plough through for a while rereading until I finally "got" the flow.
After that it was a long journey through some of the most beautiful words and thoughts I'd ever encountered, my life genuinely deepened and enriched.
- The historical context for this was the belief that those in positions of authority were put there by God's will. And so to question the rightness of them being placed over you was to question God.
With the most extreme form of this being the idea of divine right of kings. Because kings were given the most extreme authority, they must have the strongest sanction of God supporting them.
It would be a mistake to think of this as a purely Christian notion, either. Divine right very closely parallels the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven for the emperor. And Christian notions owe a lot to Plato. In particularly the Neoplatonic idea of the Great Chain of Being. Which (though the phrase has a separate history) can be summed up with, "As above, so below." So we are reflections of our rulers. If our rulers are just, we will be. If our rulers are unjust, we will also be unjust. If we upset the natural order by overthrowing our rulers, chaos will descend upon the land. Shakespeare did a great job of capturing the mindset in The Tempest.
- Yes. Of those 4, only The Tempest is top-drawer Shakespeare although, to be honest, The Winter's Tale is the only one of the other three I've actually read/seen performed.
The Tempest--which is one of my favorites--was one of his very last plays and certainly his last great one; it's hard not to see the ending, e.g. the breaking of the staff, as symbolic in a way that his other play conclusions were not.
>his most widely regarded plays
I guess I agree. Comedy doesn't get a lot of love at the Oscars either. I certainly appreciate plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream. But I have admit a lot of the gender-switching and mistaken identities in many of his comedies tend to blend together for me after a while.
- Obviously my experience is a little dated (graduated high school in 1997), but Shakespeare was a recurring theme throughout my high school English classes. We read The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet, and a number of poems, some of which we had to memorize and recite. I didn’t mind the poetry; I still remember bits of the Whitman, Coleridge, and Lewis Carroll poems I memorized. In addition, we read The Odyssey (which felt like torture to me), various Dickens novels, Jane Austin (also torture), etc.
Despite being an avid reader, I did not enjoy all of the above. However, now that I am middle aged, I count myself fortunate that my public school teachers forced me to do it.
- When prompted LLMs Shakespeare said:
You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse”
The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
“The poorest service is repaid with thanks.”
The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare
Pretty funny!
- Who decides or sets the difficulty level of "reading ease" (which is a sortable metadata attribute on the search page) ?
Some classiications seem a bit ...nonintuitive. For example, the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill is classified as "very diffcult" whereas "The Tempest" by Shakespeare is classified as "fairly easy".
I would classify it the other way around, but what do I know, I'm a nonnative speaker anyway.
