How does Shakespeare maintain dramatic interest in Act 1 Scene 2?
The relative calm of Act 1 Scene 2 provides a sharp contrast with disorderly melodrama of the previous scene. The second scene of act one recounts the story of how Prospero and Miranda came to be on the island, introduces Ariel and Caliban and shows Ferdinand come ashore and fall in love at first sight.
The scene begins with Miranda expressing her alarm that her father has caused the ‘wild waters’ with his ‘art’. Despite the immediately evident slower moving pace of the scene, created by the longer and more ordered speech of the characters, Shakespeare still creates dramatic interest with this line by altering the audience’s perceptions of what has happened in the previous scene. The Tempest is a play where things seem to happen, yet often do not. The storm in the previous scene seems to be natural, yet Miranda’s revelation it makes irony of the boatswain’s line ‘What care these roarers for the name of the king?’, again transforming the audience’s perceptions. The ‘roarers’ are merely the work of Prospero who knows well the king. Prospero’s declaration that ‘There’s no harm done’ when in the previous scene it seemed as if everyone aboard the ship had perished also radically alters the audience’s set perception of Scene 1. Miranda’s reference to the ‘god of power’ also makes Prospero seem even more powerful immediately attracting the audience to character who can harm and save with his mysterious ‘art’. By transformation of the audience’s perception on Scene 1 Shakespeare is initially able to engage the audience’s attention in Scene 2, despite the contrasting lack of action.
The Tempest is different from other Shakespeare plays because the play tells only the end of a story (of Prospero’s exile). Rather than choose to have the story of Prospero and Miranda acted out, avoiding the need to strenuously maintain dramatic interest, Shakespeare chooses to have it retold. This choice coupled with the need to clear the confusion of Scene 1 means that much of Scene 2 is reserved for explaining plot and character to the audience, rather than continuing action in the present. This lack of action means several techniques are employed instead to keep an audience attentive. In place of a narrator, who would most likely not hold the audience’s interest due to an excessive detachment from the protagonists, Prospero is used. By using Prospero, Shakespeare can still create a connection between the past and the present through the emotional effect of Prospero’s narration of his clearly distressing tale upon his character. ‘My brother...called Antonio...mark me, that a brother should be so perfidious – he whom next thyself of all the world I loved’, Prospero’s dramatic outpouring of emotion before he has even begun his story is an extremely effective way of engaging an audience. The idea of the long, brooding emotions built up on the island overcoming Prospero is continued with the use of dashes (as if he is in broken thought) on lines 110 to 115. To keep the audience’s attention for the duration of Prospero’s speech, Shakespeare uses the premise that Miranda is not listening attentively enough. This requires Prospero to chide her, ‘Dost thou attend me?’. He could equally be seen as addressing the audience, keeping their attention, whilst Miranda’s interjections help break up an overlong speech that would require the audience to concentrate for too long a period. Nonetheless, Prospero’s calls on Miranda to listen seem gratuitous in the context of their conversation. It is here the idea of the character as narrator falls short. Earlier in the scene when Prospero announces himself, explicitly more to the audience than Miranda, ‘I am...Prospero, master of a full poor cell and thy no greater father’, there is again a conflicting role between character and a clarifying narrator which Shakespeare has not effectively disguised.
