Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.64 AVERAGE
3.64 AVERAGE
kind of like if you put twelfth night through conversion therapy
adventurous
funny
fast-paced
adventurous
funny
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Colonisation
it’s so dumb but it’s fulfilling my superiority complex so it’s okay
This was my first time reading Shakespeare. I really enjoyed this play. I found it comical and entertaining. I read the “Shakespeare made easy” version so I was able to fly through the book in a day.
Uh oh. I found a lot of beautiful moments of verse, but I just wanted there to be more stakes or for it to explore its own themes more deeply. There isn't anything wrong with it being largely lighthearted, but it ended up being not for me. I'll probably have to try out more tragedies. I liked the moment in the epilogue and was attached to Ariel (does he never actually get explicitly freed?), but Elizabethan language continues to be a roadblock.
Greater minds than mine have reviewed the content of this play many times over, so I won't spend much time on that. For what it's worth, I enjoyed it; the fantastical, almost dreamlike atmosphere reminded me a bit of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the more serious tone allowed it to dig more deeply into heavier themes such as revenge and forgiveness, and there is plenty of fodder here to chew on with regard to magic and symbolism, colonialism, the role of the single female character in the play, etc., etc., etc.
As far as this specific edition goes, Folgers are great for a dabbler such as myself because they're basically Shakespeare for Dummies. They meticulously gloss any unusual word or turn of phrase, and make transparent any potentially controversial editing decisions. The summaries at the beginning of each scene allow you to follow the gist of the action, even through difficult passages of the text. If I have one complaint, it's that they do occasionally over-gloss, in my opinion (e.g. at 5.1.1, they gloss "gather to a head" as "come to the critical point", even though the nearly identical phrase "come to a head" is a perfectly normal part of modern English with an identical meaning.) Personally, I often feel compelled to read every note, lest I miss some shade of meaning I'm not aware of, and it's a bit irksome being taken out of the text to read a definition that seems obvious, but I understand and can support the "better safe than sorry" approach. (FWIW, these editions would be great for middle or high schoolers, or those for whom English isn't their first language, for exactly this reason.)
As far as this specific edition goes, Folgers are great for a dabbler such as myself because they're basically Shakespeare for Dummies. They meticulously gloss any unusual word or turn of phrase, and make transparent any potentially controversial editing decisions. The summaries at the beginning of each scene allow you to follow the gist of the action, even through difficult passages of the text. If I have one complaint, it's that they do occasionally over-gloss, in my opinion (e.g. at 5.1.1, they gloss "gather to a head" as "come to the critical point", even though the nearly identical phrase "come to a head" is a perfectly normal part of modern English with an identical meaning.) Personally, I often feel compelled to read every note, lest I miss some shade of meaning I'm not aware of, and it's a bit irksome being taken out of the text to read a definition that seems obvious, but I understand and can support the "better safe than sorry" approach. (FWIW, these editions would be great for middle or high schoolers, or those for whom English isn't their first language, for exactly this reason.)