The Tempest

Even though I usually do not enjoy reading fiction, the addition of magical elements to the story as well as as the overall conciseness of The Tempest kept me entertained. Prospero received awful treatment from his brother and others, and in the end did not release his fury on the people that wronged him. He simply forgave them and then said nothing after that about them making him flee his own country and give up his Dukedom. Prospero comes off as an extremely intelligent and mild-tempered man, which is why it seems even more so unfortunate that his brother conspired against him.

Caliban and Ariel, Prospero’s two servants feel very differently about their situations as servants. Caliban is extremely angry about being stuck as Prospero’s servant and even went as far as attempting to rape his daughter in order to make his disapproval more clear. While on the other hand, Ariel after being saved by Prospero, feels indebted to him, and willfully carries out Prospero’s wishes. Interestingly, even though I pictured Ariel as a man, I’m pretty sure that his gender is ambiguous throughout the story.

I found the possible connection between Prospero denouncing his magical powers and Shakespeare ending his solo play-writing career pretty interesting. Prospero has a monologue in which he explains that he is going to get rid of his books which held his magical powers, and at the same time, The Temptest is Shakespeare’s last play that he solely wrote.

This class is great because I am finally getting a chance to read the “classics” that I have always heard about. I may not love every book that we’ve been assigned to read, but at least I can say that I know what these so-called classics are all about. I’m even finding that I have begun to enjoy writing the assigned essays because I have enjoyed having to deeply engage with all of the readings. Didn’t think I would ever say something like that.

Thoughts on The Prince

I’m certainly a big fan of the short reads that pack a big punch and I think this is a great example of that. Machiavelli’s ideas reminded me slightly of Plato’s Republic because neither of them are concerned with people’s happiness, they are both more worried with the functionality of the society. Specifically, Machiavelli is more interested in the patriotism of his citizens than their overall happiness. He seems to see citizens as unimportant, and that they only exist to serve their political leader.

Machiavelli is somewhat harsh in terms of the way that he describes the correct way for a leader to gain power. He explains that cruelty is a necessity and even goes on to explain how to inflict cruelty in the most effective way possible. He says that Princes should be cruel for a short period of time and then stop, because shortly after, all of the citizens will simply forget the cruelty. I don’t necessarily understand what he means, nor do I agree with him, but I’m sure he was onto something…

I also found what he said about generosity to be pretty interesting. He says that generosity is an admirable quality for a leader to have, but that it’s a bad thing to be known as generous, because being generous requires depleting your resources. He thinks that it is best to originally be thought of as stingy, because then you will have plenty of resources to be generous with, and any acts of generosity will be more greatly appreciated by the population. He also stresses the importance of self-reliance in terms of having your own soldiers fight for you, and also having resources to last a long time in case of any sort of emergency. If you have auxiliary soldiers that you hire to help you in war-time, they can be helpful to you, but in the end they still have allegiance to their home country.

Overall I definitely thought it was an interesting read and I look forward to hearing everyone else’s thoughts about the book.