More of Shakespeare II 'The Tempest'

[Big brotheR]

Remember how we revealed a lot about not only Lady Macbeth but also Shakespeare in the previous intriging discussion about a quote from 'Macbeth'?

Well, let's work on this amazing iceberg quote from 'The Tempest', a late play by Shakespeare. OFTEN considered the LAST play written by the Bard.

let's talk about the diction, the poeticality, importance, IMPLIED meanings, references made to Shakespeare's life... and whatever you notice.




Prospero

Our revels 1 now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158


1 reverls: the short perfromance

[Big brotheR]

context:

Prospero stages a short entertainment scene (subplot) at the near end of the play (act 4), with spirits taking the parts of Roman gods. But he cuts the fun short by the quote above.



it will help you read something in brief about the play.

[Big brotheR]

have a look at this thread to see how things might go

http://www.iopal.net/forum/showthread.php?t=6156

but do not limit yourself to what was done

[cute angel]

(19:)context:

Prospero stages a short entertainment scene (subplot) at the near end of the play (act 4), with spirits taking the parts of Roman gods. But he cuts the fun short by the quote above.



it will help you read something in brief about the play.


Hi,I'll be hounored to participate

but first of all I wanna ask about those spirits ,are they those people wearing maske(persona)on the stage talking in chorus?????(19:)

[Big brotheR]

he is a magician. He conjured those spirits to serve his performance

[cute angel]

Hello,

as you said sir I'm reading the summary it seems as a fairy tale,just like a midsummer night's dream

here is the summary so simple and easy to be read

brb


http://absoluteshakespeare.com/guides/tempest/summary/tempest_summary.htm

[cute angel]

Prospero the Duke of Milan as he ought to be ,asks the audience by the end of the scene to free him to go back to Milan and crown himself Duke,He istalking in a very poetic way ,we feel such music within words such as the following verbs,ended,faded,rounded and melted we see that the final ed is always pronounced the same/Id/.This use of such verbs created a light and cheerful tone for the lines.(6:)

On the other hand ,we find something else,something related to vision ,he created a scene in which the reader can imagine things(19:)

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself

Here we can see the temples,palaces,towers........etc and imagine their states old and fogy and so on.(6:)

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;

I liked those lines so much coz they express magic and because the play is full of magic and prospero is a magician those lines fit his personality.:)

This is about diction

BRB:rolleyes:

[cute angel]

all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

Now let's move to meanings,I'm not that good student of literature ,as far as ,we didn't tackle anything of that kind in Literature except the simpleset things .

Prospero here is talking about things that we have inhereted like palaces names and so on I think the implied meaning here is that the person must work on his own to prove himself not relying on the ancestors inheretancE....????

ليس الفتى من يقول كان ابي لكن الفتى من يقول ها انا ذا

[cute angel]

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

I don't know they are just thought I don't know weither they are true or false plz sir correct them if they are wrong

I think he meant that we 'humanbeings'are just like those palaces and temples and towers that'll remain for ever as indicators of what we've done during our little lives ie after death which is smbolized with sleeppeople will remember us from our achievments just as a temple or palace that reminds us of the ancestors.

[Big brotheR]

thanks cute.

now, can you trace things related to Shakespeare?

[cute angel]

I think Shakespeare here is giving a farewell message to his readers may be he felt his near end and as you said it was his last work.:(

Now I can see that the whole scene is a metaphore between his own life and the things in the play.(19:)

[Lamiaa]

Cute Shakespeare tell us :
Our life which is merely dreams soon will end the same as this magic show, that Prospero has made ,are temporary. This idea is repeated in Macbeth also" life is a stage ".
This magic show was supposed to be the last magic show for Prospero " farewell to magic" . Can this be a parallel to Shakespeare farewell l to play writing since The Tempest is his last play ?
The "play within a play" is a remarkable thing in almost all of Shakespeare plays which adds the sense of reality to unreal thing . The magic show is not real but the scene in the fourth act in Shakespeare`s The Tempest is real one.(22:)
I LOVE SHAKESPEARE

[alla*]

Prospero

Our revels 1 now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.


(7:)
goodbye shakespeare!

[Big brotheR]

so you got the pun.

[cute angel]

I geuss we did (6:)

[Big brotheR]

cute, you have done a great job. thanks for making this thread active.

[cute angel]

Oh not at all sir I'm delighted

[ROOON]

(23:)

[Big brotheR]

- / / - / - - / /
You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
The scansion of the line would seem to indicate that moved might take a stressed ending, given the prevalence of apostrophes in the speech. However, all the original Folio editions print the word as mov'd, so we'll go with the nine-syllable pattern here as intentional. The term moved sort means "troubled or agitated state" in this context. Perhaps the variant rhythm to open the speech and its long vowel sounds help signify Prospero's attempt to calm down and allay what Ferdinand refers to as a "strong passion."

- / - / - / - / - /
As if you were dismay'd. Be cheerful, sir.
Now that Prospero has snapped out of his initial anger at having remembered the plot against him, his speech switches over to regular, non-threatening iambic pentameter. It almost reflects a forced cheeriness, this brisker pace. Dismay'd denotes "apprehensive; filled with fear" in its usage. This marks the beginning of Prospero's philosophical bent.

- / - / - / - / - / -
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
This line also keeps to straight iambic pentameter, albeit with a feminine ending. Revels (from Middle English via the Anglo-French reveler, literally meaning "to rebel") means "festivity, merry-making" in referring to the banished masque (as does the initial reference to actors). It also hearkens to the joy of life, which Prospero knows will soon enough end. It's up to interpretation whether "Our revels now are ended" begins an extended metaphor of a playwright signaling the end of his career. As pointed out in other readings, this type of juicy ambiguity is what scholars live for.

- / - / - - / / - -
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
We're more familiar with foretold as meaning "prophesied"; here Prospero simply means "as I told you before." Spirits primarily refers to the supernatural (the spirits performing the masque) in context. However, the etymology and definitions of the word "spirit" (Middle English, deriving from Anglo-French espirit via Latin spiritus, literally "to breathe") could signify some interesting secondary possibilities. If we're interpreting the speech as a farewell, the spirit and actor references can be read as a metaphor of the stage actor inhabiting (and subsequently shedding) his character role. Which is what Prospero is in the act of doing.

- / - / - / - - / /
Are melted into air, into thin air;
Note how the use of repetition within the line builds emphasis. Melted is synonymous with "vanished" as used here. The comparison with the illusory nature of theater is a natural one, especially given how Prospero goes on to talk about the scenery in the lines that follow.

- / - / - / - - - / -
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
There are a few ways to scan this line, depending upon which beats one wants to emphasize. I've chosen to mark it as iamb/iamb/iamb/pyrrhic/iamb because it seems the most natural. Baseless fabric means "substance without foundation," which poetically translates in this context to an artifice or contrivance. Combined with the word vision (here in its denotation as "supernatural or imaginary appearance"), referring to the pageant, it continues the theme of theatrical magic.

- / / / - - / - / - -
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
Prospero evokes fairy-tale images in this and the following line. He's building on the idea that the scenery of the stage is just that—a trick of the senses easily summoned and dismissed. The stage can transform into places limited only by the imagination, but the play is a temporal thing.

- / - / - - / / - /
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
And here we have the line that has scholars and amateur psychologists debating whether or not Shakespeare is making a pun out of the name of his theater. That in itself is only one implication. If it is intended as a pun, it could simply be the Elizabethan equivalent of a shared joke with the audience, a conscious, momentary breach of the fourth wall and nothing more. In the midst of an extended theatrical metaphor, such a reading makes sense. Then again, we can draw some parallels between Shakespeare and Prospero; to do so invites the reading of the speech as more of a valediction. Only the author knows the truth behind the line.

/ / - / - / - / - /
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
The line begins with a spondee for added emphasis; it works with the "yea" to signal the predicate of Prospero's statement. All which it inherit can sometimes be confusing because it's a minor object-verb inversion to make the rhythm work. The intended meaning is "all which inherit [the globe]." This is leading toward the larger philosophical point, that we're all bound for dust.

- / - / - / - / - / -
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Other than a feminine ending, this line is regular iambic pentameter. Insubstantial is used in a more supernatural meaning as "incorporeal, created out of nothing," although its connotations as weak, flimsy, or frail make interesting secondary meanings if pageant ("show or spectacle" deriving from the Middle English pagyn, literally meaning "scene of a play") is read as a metaphor for life.

- / - / - / / - - /
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
This line features a common Shakespeare variant in his blank verse: a caesura (the pause indicated by the new sentence in mid-line) with a trochaic inversion. The technique puts successive hard stresses on the end of one sentence and the beginning of another, adding emphasis on the shift in thought. Rack denotes "a floating vapor or cloud; wisp" and reflects the relative insignificance of our existence on earth. Stuff (deriving from Middle English via the Anglo-French estuffes, meaning "goods" which comes from Old French estoffer, meaning "to equip or stock") denotes "that of which a thing is made; materials."

- / - / / - - / - /
As dreams are made on, and our little life
In this line, Shakespeare writes on to mean "of" in this context. Little means "short in duration" in the literal sense, although given the metaphorical theme, it also brings a sense of "inconsequential" to the speech.

- / - / - /
Is rounded with a sleep.
The rest of the speech deals with the rather mundane task of getting Ferdinand offstage so Prospero can talk plans with Ariel, so the analysis ends here. Rounded is used synonymously with "surrounded, encompassed" in this passage, which Shakespeare writes to mean loosely, "life is surrounded by (has its beginning and end in) a sleep." The extended metaphor also richly compares life to a dream, which alternately means that life is limited only by imagination and that it ultimately vanishes—at least physically—without a trace.

[cute angel]

what's that?