Analysis of Shakespeares The Tempest - Effective Use of the Cliffhanger :: free essay writer

The Tempest Effective Use of the Cliffhanger The commencement exercise crack of The Tempest is unlike most of the orifices in Shakespeares plays, in that includes quite a bit of action. Instead of properly introducing some of the main characters, or position up an important plot strand, this inception scene appears to be provided an attention-grabbing device. This statement can be made quite justifiably, due to the occurrence that all the events of Act 1 shooting 1 are recounted in the following scene, in the conversations between Miranda, Prospero and Ariel. Under ordinary circumstances, it is quite possible that Shakespeare would have removed the first scene and just relied upon the audience paid attention to what was being said in the second scene - indeed, if these events took stain some way into the play, he may have considered doing this. However, as an opening scene, Scene 2 would have been rather boring and uninspiring - it consists to the highest degree entire ly of lengthy explanatory duologue from Prospero. Audiences would not have been pinched into the play very effectively and at the time the play was written, during the seventeenth Century, audiences were not as reserved and polite as they are these mean solar days and they might not have reacted very good to being bored. Scene 1 solves this problem by abandoning all explanation of the events unfolding, as well as much of the characterisation and concentrating on creating an exciting and tense opening scene which immediately engages the audiences attention. Theatres of the time when The Tempest was written were very basic, and would not have been able to achieve the special effects and clever sets that we mind in modern theatres. Therefore, Shakespeare had to rely on more subtle, but equally effective, techniques to convey the correct atmosphere. One of the most obvious things about this first scene is how short the characters lines are. There is just one moderately surface speech, lines 20 - 25, but the rest are all only intravenous feeding to six lines long. This hurried dialogue immediately signals that the characters are panicking, and that they do not have time for long conversations. From the script itself, we can see that at that place are an awful lot of exclamation marks in the dialogue this is because the characters are shouting to be heard above the noise of the storm. go nowadays the storm would probably be created using recordings of thunder and crashing waves, by chance along with creaking sounds of the ship breaking up, theatre in Shakespeares day would not have had this luxury.