William Shakespeare's The Tempest

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In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, the cast of characters are squeezed into some very typical kind of roles. Prospero is our noble hero, Miranda is the beautiful maiden, and Antonio is the “villain”. Shakespeare gave each of the characters a sense of humor, a tool that allows us to see the small details of their minds; a glimpse at the inner workings of each character’s personality. It is through the humor that Shakespeare is able to show the “roundness” in characters that could be otherwise be seen as “flat” characters. Shakespeare uses humor to give his characters a new life, to help them expand beyond the bounds of just normal characters and turn into real people. Miranda is a good example of a character whose humor enriches her personality. At the beginning of the play, it is explained to us, largely through Prospero’s actions, that Miranda is a perfect child. She’s compassionate, beautiful, well educated and obedient. She’s the apple of Prospero’s eye. Later on, however, she comes off as being too perfect. Perfect to the point of annoyance and perfect to the point of being sterile and despite her assets, she’s no more than a china doll. Throw Ferdinand into the equation, a handsome prince. She becomes much more interesting, gone is the high standard maiden, replaced by a googly eyed, puppy headed, hormone enraged teenager with love. She is so head over heels for Ferdinand that she refers to him as a ‘noble creature’. He is so perfect to Miranda. It’s a wonderfully amusing transformation, to watch Miranda, the model for women around the world, go bananas over a boy to the point where she is volunteering to carry gigantic wooden logs for him. This humor allows us to see the Miranda underneath the class act and obedient demean... ... middle of paper ... ...kered in by Prospero’s clothesline of gaudy robes. Trinculo and Stephano take their time pretending to be dukes and kings, even forcing Caliban to carry their luggage, in spite of Caliban’s warnings. Even though Trinculo and Stephano are silly creatures, their humor does a lot to reveal the kind of resentment they bear for their powerful masters. They are clearly frustrated by their years of unrewarding hard work, and it manifests itself in their wackiness. Shakespeare’s humor shows us that they are not just drunks, but angry, disgruntled drunks. Shakespeare uses his gift for humor and goofiness to reveal new sides of his characters. By making his characters laugh and be stupid, we get to see them as actual , complex people with thoughts and vulnerabilities and weird personalities. He uses humor as the tool necessary to make humans out of words, as opposed to roles.

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