The Tempest for Shakespeare Act I - Assignment Example

“The Tempest for Shakespeare Act I Unlike other plays experienced in the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare opens his play with a spectacle of nature leaving less in the imagination of the audience. Shakespeare utilizes magic and illusion to engage his audience. The play is a masterpiece stretching imaginative vision with the amount of spectacle occurring in scene 1. Imaginative vision is widely used in the whole play. Shakespeare does not introduce his characters until later in the play.

The howling storm presents a scene of confusion and portrays of power of factions in an event that does not recognize power or class in the society. In case of a shipwreck, everyone would die. The professionals, nobles and the servants, who make up the mix of characters, all included. In terms of the plot point, the Tempest is central to the plot and begins with the confusion caused by the storm and conflict between classes that continues through the play.2. The two factions are generally comprised of a split of the noble men and commoners.

It is a display of the different political and social class existent. The noble are the masters such as Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio and Gonzalo. The commoners are the subjects and servants such as the boatswain and the mariners. The boatswain is a master in the case of controlling the ship in the storm at sea whom the nobles cannot do yet at the same time is a commoner on land. The passage means that Gonzalo, a noble, is the character caught in between the factions. This can be attributed to how he thinks that the boatswain is the type of person with a destiny to die by hanging and not drowning.

Gonzalo is suggesting that the boat would not capsize because that is not his fate and thus is their cable of rescue and if not they are doomed to die.3. Gonzalo implies that the Boatswain looks like a man brought forth into the world to be hanged. Gonzalo has these great hopes that fate will not let him be drowned, rather that the ship be saved in order that the Boatswain can fulfil his destiny to be hanged. The ugliness of the Boatswain also gives Gonzalo the hope that the ship will be saved.

If that would not be the case (the hanging of the Boatswain) then the ship would capsize and they would perish.References Shakespeare, William. Tempest. Cambridge: Harvard university, 1864.