The Tempest
by William Shakespeare · first published 1611
18% recommend82% neutral
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 marria
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…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.
on “Autism and Responding to Authority” ↗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…
on “Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?” ↗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…
on “A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it” ↗…they studied some Shakespeare which had been translated into his language so didn’t sound so unfamiliar, but I can’t imagine something like that being done for english-speaking schools). I feel like The Tempest is lower than I expected. I think it is often liked for not so easily fitting into one of the traditional genres. I feel like I see productions advertised reasonably frequently but I also did this at…
on “My ranking of every Shakespeare play” ↗…whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. I get Phlebas mixed up with those lines from Shakespeare's "The Tempest", where we get the idiom "sea change": Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth…
on “Memento mori” ↗…remains. For example, Shakespeare is still mandatory to learn in India, and novels that are today confined to humanities in Britain, are most read in India - they don't read catcher in the rye, they read The Tempest and The Woman in White etc. You can see that firsthand - Indians use idioms that long ago fell out of use in Britain. "Please do the needful" anyone? "I was doing that only"? This is not just about Indians.…
on “As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry” ↗…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.” ― William Shakespeare, The Tempest
on “Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics” ↗…and applicable ones, and I would recommend those to anybody. They're broad-minded, rigorous, and incredibly humane. Fun fact: Montaigne is one of the few authors we know Shakespeare had read, since The Tempest basically quotes him.
on “Montaigne Fled the Plague, and Found Himself” ↗Shakespeare had some plays that had at least tragic elements--Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale. Maybe The Tempest.--with happy or happyish endings. But he mostly didn't do "Hollywood Endings" on his tragedies. So the something may simply have been "great source material but that ending has to go."
on “A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it” ↗…were killing his kind. Brave New World is his cry. Given that Huxley was a writer, who names several of his books with the words of Shakespeare -- Brave New World itself is a bit of dialogue from The Tempest, -- I believe John IS Huxley's avatar. And John commits suicide at the end. I find myself incredibly sad that you've interpreted him this way. I truly don't believe he was the type of individual you…
on “Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”” ↗My personal machines are named after characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest: Caliban, Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, etc.
on “Hostnames” ↗…and Cressida contain an undisguised bitterness which is largely absent in the earlier tragedies (although you can glimpse a hint of it in Anthony and Cleopatra). The late romances, Winter's Tale and The Tempest, are of course unusually heavy in their subject matter. Harold Bloom interprets this as a certain melancholy in Shakespeare which made him weary of the theatre business altogether, which certain explains…
on “Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?” ↗As well as comedies, histories, and tragedies, some plays include The Tempest are often classified in a 4th genre - "romances" [0] 0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_late_romances#....
on “My ranking of every Shakespeare play” ↗…on events around the founding of Jamestown, Virginia. The character of Stephano, is likely based after one of my ancestors, Stephen Hopkins, who led a failed mutiny at Jamestown. Shakespeare wrote the Tempest after reading news and hearing about the Jamestown incident. Interestingly, after Jamestown Stephen Hopkins returned to England and then made the trip a second time, this time on the Mayflower, where…
on “My ranking of every Shakespeare play” ↗…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.
on “Standard Ebooks” ↗