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Powerful And Powerless Characters In Shakespeare's The Tempest

1080 Words5 Pages
How does the writer present powerful and powerless characters? I will be analysing and determining the methods the poet/writer uses to presents powerful and powerless characters in the poems limbo, about a slave and his days on a cramped and horrific slave ship, and the characters in Shakespeare’s “The tempest.” Firstly, I will focus on the tempest. In “the Tempest,” Shakespeare presents powerful characters through the way they address other characters such as their slaves. In this case Prospero is the powerful character talking to his slave Ariel. He says to Ariel, “Thou liest, malignant thing!” This shows how he has the power to say anything he wants to Ariel, his slave.people would only say things like that to characters similar to weak cripples, which was Ariel as he was clearly mistreated and cursed upon by Prospero .Prospero clearly also does not fear this character due to the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence suggesting that he was shouting or exclaiming. Usually , nowadays, a person to be shouting at someone would be a parent or a teacher shouting at a child. Children would be considered powerless in society as they take orders and listen to people elder to them. Prospero also gives himself the power and the upper hand in this situation by calling Ariel a “malignant thing,” meaning he is a thing with an evil soul. It was a curse to call someone a malignant thing and the person calling someone that, would have the power in the situation, as only an adult
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