The Tempest and Kermode
Many students face the challenge of reading and interpreting literature with ease when a classroom and a professor provide a safety net. Reading and interpreting literature on one's own is a more difficult task. While there is no right way to interpret literature, understanding some external factors surrounding the period that the work was written in, the audience it was written for, the events that inspired it, the biography of the author, and many other external factors are helpful for students to develop their own interpretations of literature. Frank Kermode is a traditionalist critic who helps explain William Shakespeare's The Tempest the context of the larger picture. His analysis illuminates the characters, symbolism, and overall meaning of the play itself by looking to Shakespeare's other works and inspiration to write the play, the characteristics of the period, and the controversy surrounding the natural world versus the civilized world. Kermode's research informs readers that this was probably the last play written by Shakespeare. This fact, according t
The design of the play will vary from reader to reader. Reading other interpretations can help a person decide his own view on the work. Kermode's factual information and the logical application of it to the play make his arguments quite convincing. He does not go through the play line by line, but he touches on many of the important events giving specific lines from the text to back up his interpretation. I find the background information on the author, the time period, and the inspiration of a work to be essential tools in forming my own analysis. While other critics focus only on the play itself or focus exclusively on one external factor, Kermode looks at the play itself and at several external factors allowing the reader to see it in the big picture. The Tempest was written during the Romantic Period. Several Romance themes are apparent in the play as well, "... guilt and repentance, the finding of the lost, forgiveness, the renewal of the world, the benevolence of unseen powers" (177). While these characteristics in-and-of themselves do not give great insight into the mea
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Approximate Word count = 737
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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