The Tempest

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom (695) maintains that ShakespeareÆs retirement was ôstaggeredö and ôuneasy,ö and that the playwright wrote nothing during the final three years of his life, ôthe rest was silence.ö We see in ôThe Tempestö that the concept of silence is a pervasive one, including ProsperoÆs ôsilencingö of both Ariel and Caliban. Shakespeare, the master of literacy and language, posits these characteristics in the character of Prospero. Through his books, language, and imposition of this learning and language on others, Prospero often silences others. In the play, Prospero warns Ariel that if he ômurmurÆstö another word of discontent, Prospero will ôrend an oak / And peg in his knotty entrails, till / Thou has howlÆd away twelve wintersö (Shakespeare I.ii). As Hansberger (137) not

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, Issue 3Database: Academic Search Premier    SHAKESPEARE'S THE TEMPEST   Contents  WORKS CITED  In The Tempest, Prospero brings with him to the island of Sycorax an imposed standard of literacy; if Caliban is to survive, he must adopt and measure up to that standard. Janet Eldred and Peter Mortenson have argued that reading for the ways in which literacy shapes and is shaped by characters in literary texts can reveal much about the larger social function of literacy (512-13). Eldred and Mortenson are especially interested in what they term literacy narratives, or literary texts, that "foreground issues of language acquisition and literacy" in character development (513). If we read against Prospero's assimilation of Caliban through literacy, the play can be understood as Caliban's only partially written and perhaps wholly misunderstood story, his literacy narrative, in effect. Read as Caliban's literacy narrative, The Tempest records Caliban's struggle to reinstate his own standard of literacy on the island. Largely a question of definition at first, Prospero's literacy quickly teaches Caliban his place in this new social order. Much to Caliban's dismay, he understands completely how Prospero would define Caliban'
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Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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