Analysis of Shakespeare's The Tempest - Effective Use of the Cliffhanger

The Tempest: Effective Use of the Cliffhanger

The first scene of The Tempest is unlike most of the openings in Shakespeare's plays, in that includes quite a bit of action. Instead of properly introducing some of the main characters, or setting up an important plot strand, this opening scene appears to be only an attention-grabbing device.

This statement can be made quite justifiably, due to the fact that all the events of Act 1 Scene 1 are recounted in the following scene, in the conversations between Miranda, Prospero and Ariel. Under ordinary circumstances, it is quite likely that Shakespeare would have removed the first scene and just relied upon the audience paying attention to what was being said in the second scene - indeed, if these events took place some way into the play, he may have considered doing this. However, as an opening scene, Scene 2 would have been rather boring and uninspiring - it consists almost entirely of lengthy explanatory dialogue from Prospero. Audiences would not have been drawn into the play very effectively; and at the time the play was written, during the 17th Century, audiences were not as reserved and polite as they are these days and they might not have reacted very well to being bored.

Scene 1 solves this problem by abandoning all explanation of the events unfolding, as well as much of the characterisation and concentrating on creating an exciting and tense opening scene which immediately engages the audience's attention. Theatres of the time when The Tempest was written were very basic, and would not have been able to achieve the special effects and clever sets that we see in modern theatres. Therefore, Shakespeare had to rely on more subtle, but equally effective, techniques to convey the correct atmosphere.

One of the most obvious things about this first scene is how short the characters' lines are. There is just one moderately sized speech, lines 20 - 25, but the rest are all only four to six lines long. This hurried dialogue immediately signals that the characters are panicking, and that they do not have time for long conversations. From the script itself, we can see that there are an awful lot of exclamation marks in the dialogue; this is because the characters are shouting to be heard above the noise of the storm.

While nowadays the storm would probably be created using recordings of thunder and crashing waves, perhaps along with creaking sounds of the ship breaking up, theatre in Shakespeare's day would not have had this luxury.