Ariel in the tempest how to#
Ariel in the tempest full#

“What would happen if instead of approaching the character of Ariel through the lens of the dominant culture,” said Saunders, “ from the perspective of someone who actually inhabits a body like that and who finds this body a beautiful body, not a grotesque body?”Įxploring this idea in her paper, Saunders found a number of revelations and parallels between Shakespeare’s work and the transgender experience. Recognizing similarities between Ariel's depiction in the film and the bodies of herself and other transgender women, Saunders sought to approach the interpretation from a different perspective. While analyzing a paper on the film in a course she was teaching, Saunders was struck and offended by the language the author used to describe this depiction of Ariel - including phrases such as “grotesque,” “monstrous” and “an impossible embodiment.” In Julie Taymor’s 2000 film adaption of The Tempest, Ariel is played by Ben Whishaw, a male actor who was portrayed with female breasts in scenes when the sprite was ordered to take the form of a woman. “People read Ariel's gender in a variety of ways.” “In Shakespeare's original play, it's not clear - and hasn't been clear through the centuries - what Ariel's gender is,” said Saunders. In the play, Ariel is a spirit indebted and enslaved to the protagonist Prospero, who takes advantage of Ariel’s supernatural and shapeshifting abilities. All Rights Reserved.What does Shakespeare have to do with the transgender movement? Perhaps more than we think, proposed a UBC professor.Īt the Moving Trans History Forward conference at the University of Victoria last weekend, Mary Ann Saunders, an English professor at UBC, presented her paper exploring the character of Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a lens into the struggles of transgender individuals.

Ariel in the tempest how to#

How to Pronounce the Names in The Tempest The Significance of The Tempest to the Editors of the First Folioīlank Verse, Prose, and Diction in Shakespeare's Tempest The Relationship Between Miranda and Ferdinand The Contrast Between Ariel and Caliban in Shakespeare's Tempest Magic, Books, and the Supernatural in The Tempest The Shakespeare Sisterhood Gallery: Mirandaįorgiveness and Reconciliation in The Tempest Moulton: Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist. Nothing could more clearly paint the instincts of light oppressed by the power of darkness until the deliverer comes.

Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, We hear the reason of his cruel sufferings at the hands of Sycorax. Finally, a single passage is sufficient to connect Ariel with the upward tendencies of human nature. In the form of threats gives his rebellious subject more Prospero, under the guise of invective, is bringing outĪriel's brave endurance and delicate refinement, and Seriousness throughout, and a curious irony, by which If we see in it Prospero governing this incarnation ofĬaprice by outcapricing him there is an absence of moral Quarrel between Prospero and Ariel - takes coherency,

Ariel in the tempest full#

Where it listeth.' So Ariel is 'moody' or full of moods :Īnd one of the most difficult incidents of the play - the Even a characterĬan be found for the atmosphere: in place of our motiveĪnd passion it substitutes caprice - 'the wind bloweth Like the atmosphere he reflects human emotions without feeling them.Īriel. His ideas are the ideas associated with the atmosphere - liberty and omnipresence: to be 'free as mountain winds,' to fly on the bat'sīack merrily, couch in the cowslip's bell, live under the blossom that hangs on the bough. His natural speech is music, or waves of air. Sharp wings of the north, doing business in the veins of earth when it is baked with frost. Like air and fire he can penetrate everywhere, treading the ooze of the salt deep, running upon the He is invisible, but, like the lightning, can take shape as he acts. We can see in him just the qualities of air and fire. Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, The very name of Ariel is borrowed from air, and he is directly addressed: 'Thou, which art but air.' The identification with fire is not less complete: when describing the lightning Ariel does not say that he set the ship a-fire, but that the ship was 'all a-fire with me':. The identification is too detailed to be fanciful. The lower order, identified with the downward-tendingĮlements of Earth and Water, and the lower nature of man. Shakespeare has made Ariel an Elemental Being of the higher order, identified with the upward-tending elements of Air and Fire, and with the higher nature of man and he has made Caliban an Elemental Being of Shakespeare's Characters: Ariel ( The Tempest) From The Works of William Shakespeare. Introduction to Shakespeare's Sprite Ariel from The Tempest