The Tempest

by Helen Street, Charly Cheung (Illustrator), William Shakespeare

A storm, a shipwreck, an enchanted island ...
A violent storm shipwrecks the King of Naples and his noblemen on what appears to be an uninhabited island. What the king doesn’t know is that they have been brought here by powerful magic.
Prospero, the mysterious ruler of the island, has a plan, but will he use his magic for good or bad against the castaways? His daughter, Miranda, has never seen another man except her father. What will she think of the stranger who stumbles into her life? Prospero’s monstrous servant, Caliban, sees a chance to overthrow his master. Will he succeed?
Enchantment and treachery are everywhere on the island – which will prove the stronger?

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Fantasy, Plays, Graphic Novels, Shakespeare, Literature

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1611

Reviews

[Dayna Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The classic drama by the master of English literature. Prospero and his daughter Miranda are abandoned on a magical island by his wicked brother who assumes his dukeship. This is story of their rescue and their return to Milan. Possibly Shakespeare's last play, and definitely one of his best.

[Salem · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read this play for school, year 12 externals for literature. For my first Shakespearean play, I can't complain. It was pretty good, considering I was forced to read it. It explores themes of revenge/forgiveness, parenting, master-servant relationships, love and power.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great follow up to our narrated tempest, we found on the hoopla library app. Gives a great history of Shakespeare and the Jamestown shipwreck

[Kara · Rating 4 out of 5]

The illustrations are lovely, done in classic fairy tale or King Athur style, but the text is too dense and heavy to work for a picture book.

[John Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I made the mistake of reading this the first time without an accompanied viewing of some theatrical production, which probably isn't how you should ever read Shakespeare.

[Ella McMullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Side note: Transitioning my brain out of old English is weird.
Alrighty, so I think I enjoyed this one the most of all the Shakespeare plays I've read. It had the magic and humor of a midsummer night's dream, but the characters were easier to keep track of. It had some minimal plotting like Macbeth, minus the death. It had a happy romance (unlike Romeo and Juliet).
The first fifty pages were a little hard for me to understand (because, you know, Shakespeare), but I acclimatized. Also, full disclosure, I did not read all of the other author analyses of the story that my book contained.

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Widely considered to be the last play Shakespeare authored by himself, it is an extremely hard play to understand and to stage. It crosses literary genres, with elements of comedy and elementts of tragedy (thus for some authors, a tragicomedy, or even a pastoral tragicomedy at that), elements of masque and some even see elements of the Commedia dell'Arte -in despair some critics have created a new category for the late Shakespeare including The Tempest: a romance. As Frank Kermode, the editor of the 1958 edition of the Arden Shakespeare's The Tempest elegantly puts it:

The romantic story is, then, the mode in which Shakespeare made his last poetic investigation into the supernatural elements in the human soul and in human society [...He deliberately] chose the pastoral tragicomedy as the genre is which this inquiry is best pursued.

Kermode also considers that

It has rarely seemed sufficient to discuss the play at the level of plot alone, and there are many allegorical interpretations, some of them assuming a political, some an autobiographical, and some a religious purpose and key.

The themes of the play according to Kermode can be synthesized as:

The main opposition is between the worlds of Prospero's Art, and Caliban's Nature. Caliban is the core of the play [...] he is the natural man against whom the cultivated man is measured [...] Caliban is the ground of the play. His function is to illuminate by contrast the world of art, nurture, civility; the world which none the less nourishes the malice of Antonio and the guilt of Alonso, and stains a divine beauty with the crimes of ambition and lust. There is the possibility of purgation [...]

Linking this to genre he states:

The pastoral romance gave him the opportunity for a very complex comparison between the worlds of Art and Nature; and the tragicomic form enabled him to concentrate the whole story of apparent disaster, penitence, and forgiveness into one happy misfortune [...]

One could just as easily add other key themes such as the meaning and ethics of nobility, vengeance and reconciliation, education and learning, control over Nature, freedom and power or even an (obsolete) justification of discovery, exploitation, and colonialism. I believe it would be most interesting and profitable to compare Goethe's Faust or, on fantasy, dreams, power and freedom, Pedro Calderón de la Barca's 1635 La vida es sueño ('Life is a dream) to Shakespeare's The Tempest.

The character at the center of the play, is clearly Prospero, who is the demiurge of the world depicted in the play, a polymath and a control freak with disturbingly authoritarian traits even though in the end he gives up control (after having attained his purposes), breaks his staff, liberates Ariel and leaves his isle.

The language is Shakespeare at his best: rich, poetic, witty, humorous, romantic, tragic -larger than life. And it is the language, as in Midsummer Night's Dream, that carries the play along the awe-inspiring, imaginative leaps of his boundless phantasy, seeding our minds with a plethora of ideas to disentangle much later.

On a lightly digressive aside, I feel obligated to confess that I watched the 2010 movie based on The Tempest, written and directed by Julie Taymor, just ahead of rereading the play. I hated the movie -- I found it pretentious and bombastic, the director let the special effects run amok, and drown out the language, the metaphors and the themes. End of aside.

A complex, maddening and, possibly, a very rich play indeed, I will need to return to many more times to grasp better.

[Angel Capietro · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here"

"You taught me language, and my profit on´t is, I know how to curse"

"I am a fool to weep at what I am glad of"

"Let us not burden our remembrance with a heaviness that's gone"

"Every man shift for all the rest, and let no man take care of himself, for all is but fortune"

This was my first Shakespeare play and I can say I am satisfied. I´m not very used to theater long dialogues but I like the monologues and this play is filled with them, it´s very poetic and Shakespearean for sure and surprisingly as I was expecting, not very complex.

The characters are a total mess (not in a bad way) yet they are different from each other. Ferdinand is perhaps a character I like along with Prospero the main one. The plot goes about him who is planning a vengeance , threatening with the help of a spirit, a tempest to sink a ship.

The story is divided in three groups of people and they all come together at last. The dialogue was a good poem to finish the story dedicated to god about aspects of oneself.

[Vi · Rating 5 out of 5]

shakespeare… nothing else needs to be said

[Bernie4444 · Rating 5 out of 5]

O brave new world, which has such people in it!

No Fear Shakespeare: The Tempest: Act 5, Scene 1, stanza 185
Transliterated as:
Oh, what a wonderful new world, which has such people in it!

Though on occasion transliteration on the opposing page can clarify the original wording, it can just as easily obscure the original meaning.

The “No Fear” intention is not to annotate but to transliterate so one does not spend time looking at footnotes or holding a dictionary in one’s hand.

Naturally, the magic or feel of the play is lost in place of an understanding made by one person’s interpretation.

It may be better to watch one of the movie presentations or take a class before reading this book.

There are some blank pages for taking notes.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant adaptation! Paiva takes just one of the plots, and succinctly gives the high points. But, the best part is all the educational tidbits: the readers gets a character introduction, lears a bit about the setting and there's a great map all before they read. But wait, there's more! To help with the literary elements so prevalent in Shakespeare, the text is coded with colored words, if it's green it's talking about the setting, purple is character, orange denote alliteration while pink is a simile etc. Fantastic! Especially if you are in an elementary school where the students will be performing Shakespeare - this series is gold as an introduction.

[Sarri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tämä sarjakuvaromaani Shakespearen klassikosta on kauniisti piirretty ja sen värimaailma sopii hyvin tarinaan. Mutta mutta...en muistanutkaan, että Myrsky olisi ollut näin tylsä tarina. Jotenkin tarinan kulku ei vain tässä imaissut mukaansa. Prosperon tyly asenne henki-Arielia ja etenkin noidan poikaa Calibania kohtaan oli albumissa alleviivaavaa. Ja sitä kerrattiin vielä lopun tietoiskussa eli kuinka eurooppalaiset kohtelivat tylysti muiden maiden alkuasukkaita, yksi yhteen.

[Ananya Jain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book to read if you wanna go through the story but not with much effort, which was exactly the case with me at that moment. I'm not much into Shakespeare but wanted to give it a try and would not say that I was disappointed. In fact, now that I've read it as a graphic novel, I may want to give it a try sometime. Not meant for a hard core Shakespeare over though. The stories written by Shakespeare are quite complicated and twisted but that's what is so nice abut him, Isn't it?

[Michael P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent graphic novel of Shakespeare's play. The dialog is sensibly simplified and modernized with the result that this is a good comic, not a stodgy hybrid using dialog that was not written for the comic book page. The only real problem with this book is the educational material in the back which presents some fringe ideas as facts.

[Birgitte Bach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grafisk novelle med flotte og farverige illustrationer. Nem måde at få kendskab til Shakespeares mere kendte skuespil. Eneste minus er at teksten er i moderne sprog, men de kendte og huskede replikker er bevaret.

[Linh Tran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good book for English beginners with some difficult vocabularies.

2024 July - A reread. It is a story of betrayal, revenge and love and also some magic. I don't know what I feel about the story. Am I missing something here?

[Sarah]

I love this one!

[Rebecca Farren · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first experience of Shakespeare and I found it tough going. Although I do remember enjoying the story and it was cool to act out using physical theatre!

[Leverez]

read

[Constanza Carolina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Necesito comprarlo en otra edición

[Maria Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doesnt do shakespeare books any justice!! Didnt rlly like the art style

[Michael P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Attractive children's picture book of Shakespeare's late play.