Tempest Blog #1

Ross Schonberg
Ms. Gubanich
English
November 18, 2015

              Appearance vs. Reality

               In The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, the opening scene takes place with a ship, holding some regular crew on a ship, but also some very high and important people of Naples. As the play opens the ship seems to be under attack by a bad thunderstorm. Although the people on the crew see this as a bad storm, what is really happening is that there is a wizard named Prospero, who is using his magic to make a storm on that ship, for unknown reasons so far. This can bring up a topic that makes the characters think differently and the reader has a may or may not have a clear understanding of what is happening. In this act, there is a difference between what things appear to be and what the reality is.

               First, the main difference between appearances and reality is that appearance is when something appears to be there, that might not be what it actually is. While reality is exactly what really took place. Within the first act as the people on the boat are struggling on the water, they think that they are fighting through a storm, which they are, but they think it is a storm caused by the weather, rather than magic. An example of when they are in the storm is when the Master says "Good speak to the mariners. fall to 't yarely, or we run ourselves aground. Bestir, bestir!" (1.7, 3-4) .When in fact the reality of the situation is that the wizard Prospero, who has been trapped on a magical island, is creating the storm above the boat. In a way we, as the reader, get to see both the first appearance and the reality, because at first you only think of the storm is just a regular storm, added to the plot simply because that is how they would probably drift to the island. Then we are told that the storm is on purpose, so that means that the storm wasn’t really a boring plot point when it was really a “catalyst” created by Prospero. There is also a small example from act one (since there aren't many because it is a very short act), which is when we are introduced to Prospero he appears like a reclusive wizard, but then in reality he used to be a duke of Milan, but eventually got bored of that position. It turns out that Prospero used to work with the people who are on the boat. So the reality is that all of these characters are connected.


          In The Tempest, there are a lot of different perspectives, and many things seem to be shown in different ways. After doing some classwork with the play, it seems like appearance and reality will play a very important theme throughout the book. Personally I find it interesting that the story makes us think that the storm is a regular storm when really it’s a wizard making the storm. That type of story is a way for people to see things one way at first and a different way later. So that can be some of the ways that the Tempest is going to act with how readers and the characters see things as the story progresses.