Justice In 'The TempestAndThe Book Of The City Of Ladies'

Justice means fairness and justness. In the tale The Wife of Bath's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, justice is not served. The tale takes place in King Arthur's days. One of the kings knights takes advantage of his power and strength. He forced onto a girl near the stream. Despite the girl’s pleads to stop, the knight continued. During the time that the story takes place due to this crime “the knight was to be dead By course of law…” (pg.126). Although the crime was punishable with the death penalty the queen granted his life. The victim of the incident not only was physically hurt but, mentally as well. She did not get a say on what would happen with the knight’s punishment. However in order to be granted his life, the knight was to find the answer

Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest is a ‘new world’ response to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In Cesaire’s adaptation, the characters and plot are generally the same. However, there are a few small deviations from Shakespeare’s The Tempest that make a significant impact on the play as a whole, and lead the play to illustrate important social issues occurring in the time of the adaptation.

The power and marginalization of literature in past societies diminished the power of the people, because men had to follow a role placed by the town, and women had to be submissive. In the literature works of Canterbury Tales, Lysistrata and Vindication, we view the negativity of the townspeople because of hypocrisy of the highest power. In Canterbury Tales there is hypocrisy in the church due to the pardoner, in Lysistrata, women are not granted rights, and in Vindication, women were not allowed to education.

A twenty-first century reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey will highlight a seeming lack of justice: hundreds of men die because of an adulteress, the most honorable characters are killed, the cowards survive, and everyone eventually goes to hell. Due to the difference in the time period, culture, prominent religions and values, the modern idea of justice is much different than that of Greece around 750 B.C. The idea of justice in Virgil’s the Aeneid is easier for us to recognize. As in our own culture, “justice” in the epic is based on a system of punishment for wrongs and rewards for honorable acts. Time and time again, Virgil provides his readers

Since the dawn of mankind we have always had a fascination with stories. Tales ranging from helpless romance between lovers to epic battles between civilizations. Although all stories may not share the same plot or characters, they often share a commonality in that they all portray justice in one form or another. Whether it’s black and white such as good triumphing over evil, or something with shades of Gray, justice finds a way to present itself to characters. Two novels that portray this sense of justice are Beowulf, an ancient Anglo-Saxon epic that dates back to 1000ad, and Julius Caesar, the world renowned tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime during 1599. Both are very well known, and both are ripe with their own respected interpretation

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest provides dialogue that portrays the social expectations and stereotypes imposed upon women in Elizabethan times. Even though the play has only one primary female character, Miranda, the play also includes another women; Sycorax, although she does not play as large a roll. During many scenes, the play illustrates the characteristics that represent the ideal woman within Elizabethan society. These characteristics support the fact that men considered women as a mere object that they had the luxury of owning and were nowhere near equal to them. Feminists can interpret the play as a depiction of the sexist treatment of women and would disagree with many of the characteristics and expectations that make Miranda

   A production of The Tempest should emphasize the idealized methods in which Prospero uses magic to solve the problem of revenge which is so prevalent throughout his tragedies, perhaps the production might be a direct allegory for the magic of the theatre itself.   In this conception of the play, the scattering and bringing together of the characters in the script is significant in that theatre also could be said to bring people together and allow them to share in an experience of emotion, magic, and finally, of resolution. In this way the production could be used as a vehicle for conveying the idealistic virtues of forgiveness, compassion, and of course knowledge. In his book, A

In the Renaissance era traditional gender roles was an unconscious concept that was part of the society’s life. Gender inequality was not something that was often brought up or even recognized. Women and men had specific roles in the society and were expected to act a certain way; men as tough and powerful being who were the bread winners and women as the helpless, sensitive beings who were caregivers. The men were seen to be the beings that had the jobs and paid for the family’s needs; to be the backbone of the family. Women then, and to extent today, were to be the ones to cater to the men and children and make sure that they were cared for.

Written about 300 years apart, The Tempest, a play, by William Shakespeare and Inferno, a poem, by Dante, both highlight the topic of justice. Being from different time periods and composing stories of different genres, having different definitions of justice. Justice in The Tempest is Prospero, the protagonist who is stranded on an island, returning to Milan and reclaiming his rightful dukedom. Justice in Inferno is divine, with God’s creation of nine levels of Hell with individualized punishments for sinners. In both texts, Shakespeare and Dante similarly prove that justice is hypocritical and selfish with three components: their motives in writing the stories, the cruel actions taken to bring about justice, and the desired balances that the justice creates. These three overarching characteristics, however, vary in the content of the actions, the balances, and the motives.

In the plays Oedipus the King and Macbeth, the authoritative structures of gods and Kings are the dominant orders in the plays respectively. To be exact, kingship is the dominant order in Macbeth and gods are the dominant order in Oedipus. In both plays, the authors deal with justice and how it is used against the protagonists. Justice ties in with morality, as justice is the treatment of the good and bad. The authors show that morality is lacking in both of the text’s dominant orders.

In this eminently Shakespearean way, the operations of providential justice proceed through an entirely natural sequence of events, apparently the random and collateral effects of fortune coadjutant with man’s free will, but at the same time, instinct with great ethical bias, stoic/scholastic in origin, by which the whole of creation conforms to the enactment of natural law; so that the economy by which evil is employed to its own destruction, and by which “foul practices” turn against themselves, though infinitely mysterious, expresses simultaneously a moral design publically suggestive of the glory of its Creator. (123)

Justice is the pursuit of righteousness and moral good standing within an individual or a group. Shakespeare, however, gives new perspective to this idea of justice in his work, The Tempest. Shakespeare critiques justice and portrays it in way in which justice is defined as the rule of the majority, and governed by the person with most power. Through the actions of the main character, Prospero; this new viewpoint of both justice and mercy emerges.

The Presentation of Authority and Inferiority in The Tempest Shakespeare has staged a play that explores the human hierarchy of the Elizabethan era. At the time dominance of one person over another was part of a system, which kept the society going. The social hierarchy consisted of the educated, kings, bishops, lords and noble men at the top of the hierarchy, with the working class peasants at the bottom. Everyone had a fixed status in society. However this is all physically displaced on the island, as there is no social structure and it is uninhabited and tropical.

The Hidden Power in Being Powerless A Feminist perspective evaluates the way in which gender effects the understanding and outcome of a text. Shakespeare uses the role of women and men to make a statement about the marital and relational stance between the two sexes. In the play The Tempest, Miranda, the daughter of Prospero, has been stranded on an island for the majority of her life not knowing there was a world outside of it.

After viewing the 2010 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by acclaimed cinematic visionary Julie Taymor, several key features are easily identifiable regarding the changing dynamics of power and agency found present therein. First and foremost would be the fairly significant genderswap of Prospero (here called “Prospera”) from a man to a woman, thereby carrying with it the often presumed contexts, connotations, and consequences of such a change. “Prospera” almost takes on the role as a sort of vindictive siren; now as the spurned wife of the late Duke of Milan, quite seamlessly preyed upon through her conspirators invoking the more negative or outdated perceptions of women’s inferiority, branding her as a heretic and a witch.