How Does Castelvetro Use Of The Simile To Venetian Shipbuilders

Often, we cannot see the good until we have experienced the bad. Dante Alighieri, a poet who makes himself the main character in his Divine Comedy, finds himself lost in a dark wood at the start of The Inferno. Though he sees a safe path out of the wood towards an alluring light, he is forced to take an alternate route through an even darker place. As the ending of the pilgrim Dante’s voyage is bright and hopeful, Alighieri the poet aims to encourage even the most sinful Christians to hope for a successful end. Thus, Dante the pilgrim goes to hell in The Inferno to better understand the nature of sin and its consequences in order to move closer to salvation; his journey an allegory representing that of the repenting Christian soul.

In Dante’s Inferno, part of The Divine Comedy, Canto V introduces the torments of Hell in the Second Circle. Here Minos tells the damned where they will spend eternity by wrapping his tail around himself. The Second Circle of Hell holds the lustful; those who sinned with the flesh. They are punished in the darkness by an unending tempest, which batters them with winds and rain. Hell is not only a geographical place, but also a representation of the potential for sin and evil within every individual human soul. As Dante travels through Hell, he sees sinners in increasingly more hideous and disgusting situations. For Dante, each situation is an image of the quality of any soul that is determined to sin in

Dante’s The Inferno is his own interpretation of the circles of hell. The people that Dante places in hell tried to validate their offenses and have never seen the injustice of their crime or crimes. They were each placed in a specific circle in Hell, Dante has nine circles in his hell. Each circle holds those accountable for that specific crime. Each circle has its own unique and fitting punishment for the crime committed. There are three different main types of offenses; they are incontinence, violence, and fraud. These offenses are divided into Dante’s nine rings of Hell. Each of these rings has a progressively worse punishment, starting with crimes of passion and

In Dante 's divine comedy, there are countless references to all forms of sins and the punishments of those who committed them. Dante goes into great detail when describing these sins and their consequences. Each punishment is perfectly fitting to the crime itself, so that the sinner desereves exactly what he is facing. Dante 's work teaches the reader that sin is to be despised, and yet simultaneously weaves his own symbolism and meaning into his book.

Central to “Inferno” is the concept of contrapasso, the idea that the punishment one experiences in Hell is the reversal of one’s sin on earth: gluttons are forced to consume filth against their will; prophets and soothsayers have their bodies disfigured to turn their heads backwards; adulterers are forever forced to couple with their lovers; it is a poetic, medieval take on Exodus’s reciprocal punishment of “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (King James Bible, Exodus 21:24). Within Canto XIII Dante meets those who have committed suicide: those that have taken their lives are “reborn” into bleeding, deformed trees upon which harpies feed and onto which harpies nest. There they remain forever, subject to all forms of abuse--and completely unable to abuse themselves again (as they did in life). While Dante’s intent may be to illustrate the justice of God’s punishment for sins done on earth, the forest of suicides found in Canto XIII questions the punishments delivered by God through the words and actions of the unfortunate souls found in this level, the words of our guide, Virgil, and our the words of our protagonist, Dante.

Moreover, the vision of Dante’s emphasizes how distorted love or excess is punished, because distorted love is a form of hubris. The hubris or exaggerated pride is punished because it alters the ascent to love or communion with God. Therefore, Dante’s pilgrim travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven to see the perfection of God’s justice and journey towards a higher understanding of love. In order to understand God’s justice, Dante the pilgrim must first understand the degradation of man and the punishments of sin. However, the torment of sinners causes Dante to question how a loving God would allow people to suffer, but as Allan H. Gilbert asserts, “Dante’s answer is that these sufferings counteract man’s tendency

Dante gives a picture perfect example of their torment. It was said that, “And as they scrubbed and clawed themselves, their nails / drew down the scabs the way a knife scrapes bream / or some other fish with even larger scales” (Alighieri XXIX.82-84). The impression that Dante gives forces the reader into picturing the sinners drag their dirty nails into their prickly, scabbed skin, so rapidly and intense, that he compares it to a knife grating the scales of a fish. Dante also uses visual imagery to describe the lives of the gluttons. Since the gluttons spent their lives consuming massive amounts of food and drink, they represented themselves as garbage. Therefore, they were treated as such in Hell. The reader is able to visualize the punishment of a glutton through Dante’s vivid expression: “Huge hailstones, dirty water, and black snow / pour from the dismal air to putrefy / the putrid slush that waits for them below” (Alighieri VI.10-12). The reader can obviously picture the clean ground beneath all of the disgusting dirt, mold, mud, and rancid slush. Dante also puts the image of the rotting gluttons that lie under this filthy mess into the reader’s mind. Each realm contains something different, and Dante clearly proves to give the sense of a different image every time.

The story of “Dante’s Inferno”, by Dante Alighieri is a dark story which depicts nine circles of Hell. The one circle of Hell that we will be discussing is that of greed which happens to be the fourth circle. In the Fourth Circle of Hell, Dante and Virgil see the souls of people who are punished for greed. They are divided into two groups (The Prodigal and the Miserly), those who hoarded possessions and those who lavishly spent it. They use great weights as a torture mechanism where they are pushing them with their chests. This symbolizes their selfish drive for fortune during their lifetime. As they make their way further down, they come across a swamp filled with naked people with their faces scared by rage. One other form of greed is that of anger, which overcame these terrorized souls. The two groups are guarded by a character called Pluto which also happens to be the God of Wealth from the Underworld. The fourth circle (Greed), is one of the iniquities that most incurs Dante's scornful wrath, thus is of great importance to understanding the text.

The Enmity between Christians and Jews is first revealed in this passage by Shylock’s tetchy, sarcastic reply to Bassanio. Bassanio politely invites Shlock to dinner and Shylock replies sarcastically saying, “Yes, to smell pork…” He further separates himself from Bassanio by referring to, “…your prophet, the Nazarite.” Also, in an irritated way, he lists the things he is prepared to do with Christians, and the things he in not prepared to do. In this passage, “I will buy with you…nor sell with you”, Shylock repeats the word ‘YOU’ Eight times, making it sound like an accusation, not only against Bassanio, but all Christians, for wronging

“My Guide and I crossed over and began to mount that little known and lightless road to ascend into the shinning world again.” The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri, is an epic poem, divine comedy, which was written in the 1500’s in Italian. Dante Alighieri lost his mother at a very young age and was exiled from his hometown, Florence when his group, the White Guelphs got into a disagreement with the Black Guelphs. Dante was a writer and greatly involved in politics which influenced him to write this epic poem. The story starts at with him meeting the ghost of Virgil, his idol, who becomes his guide for the remainder of the book and tries to escort Dante to heaven to be with his love, Beatrice.

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is so alike to our financially afflicted world. The rules of law and commerce are subject to deceptive manipulation, fear of "the other" overwhelms respect for a common humanity, duplicity is the norm, sexuality is a vehicle for ambition, and money drives and wraps almost every action. It is a classic tale that includes important details of the financial crisis in the United States during 2007-2009. Shakespeare’s Venice, like the New York of his time - and the financial capitals of ours - is a city based on borrowing, on market speculation and greed masquerading as wealth and sophistication. Behind the curtains of the practice of lending and borrowing money in Shakespeare’s play lay the transition to capitalism: the rise of banking system; the scarcity for credit in developing industrial enterprises; and the growing dispute of default facing both aristocratic landlords and, above all, small, independent early entrepreneurs on trading ventures. Even though almost 600 years apart from each other, both Shakespeare’s tale and the financial crisis in the United States during 2007-2009 have a similar financial dilemma, each has its unique Shylock, Bassanio and Antonio- people who were responsible for causing the meltdown of their days.

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante is taken on a journey through hell. On this journey, Dane sees the many different forms of sins, and each with its own unique contrapasso, or counter-suffering. Each of these punishments reflects the sin of a person, usually offering some ironic way of suffering as a sort of revenge for breaking God’s law. As Dante wrote this work and developed the contrapassos, he allows himself to play God, deciding who is in hell and why they are there. He uses this opportunity to strike at his foes, placing them in the bowels of hell, saying that they have nothing to look forward to but the agony of suffering and the separation from God.

As Dante explores the Second Circle of Hell, he is horrified by the punishments that the sinners must suffer through. When he hears the story of Francesca and Paolo’s lustful actions, Dante relates deeply to their stuggles because he reflects on his own sins and believes he may be cast to a similar fate in the afterlife. Dante reacts to the story when he says, “I fainted, as if I had met my death. / And then I fell as a dead body falls” (5.142-143). Dante faints from compassion for the two sinners’ pitiful story. Dante struggles to grasp the wrongdoing these people have participated in to be placed in Hell because he continues to search for the noble qualities in everyone. On the one hand, Dante believes God’s punishment for the lustful sinners, relentless winds and storms, is unethical. On the other hand, this belief is naive because it is known that all of God’s punishments are just. The lustful are condemned to an eternity in Hell because they did not care about their actions on Earth, so the raging storm that torments them is not concerned with what is in its path. Dante is not only attempting to discover the possible consequences of his own actions, but also learning to trust in God’s judgement.

The first sin that Dante describes is heresy. The penalty in the medieval era for heresy was often "public humiliation, imprisonment" or "to suffer death by burning." (Cantor). The punishment for the "arch heretics and those who followed them" was that they be "ensepulchered" and to have some "heated more, some less." (Alighieri). These red-hot sepulchers served as a punishment for the heretics, causing burns. The archheretics firmly believed that everything died with the body therefore there was no soul. So, they were punished with the hot and crowded pokers, but they were also punished with their beliefs and they were allowed to feel what it’s like to die eternally and lie and wait until the apocalypse. This punishment is one in that was more focused on inflicting a physical and bodily pain rather than a mental one.