EN11M: Texts & Contexts I

Fourth Essay Assignment

The fourth essay is due on Friday, December 17. Send it to me by e-mail or drop off a hard copy in the box on the door of my office, Donnarumma 120, by 3:00 on the 17th.

The essay should be about 5 pages in length. In this essay, you should compare and contrast Shakespeare's The Tempest to any one of the other texts we have read this semester. These texts include:

• Hsün Tzu, "Encouraging Learning"; "Man's Nature is Evil"
• Seneca, "On Liberal and Vocational Studies"
• Mary Wollstonecraft, "On National Education"
• Frederick Douglass, "Learning to Read"
• John Henry Newman, "Knowledge Its Own End"
• Paulo Freire, "The Banking Concept of Education"
• Richard Feynman, "O Americano Outra Vez"
• Pericles, "The Funeral Oration"
• Plato, from Gorgias
• Aristotle, from Rhetoric
• Chinua Achebe, "Language and the Destiny of Man"
• Gloria Anzaldúa, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue"
• Toni Morrison, "Nobel Lecture"
• Plato, "The Speech of Aristophanes"
• Niccolò Machiavelli, from The Prince
• Sir Thomas More, Utopia
• Michel de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals"
• Thomas Hobbes, from Leviathan
• John Locke, "Of Ideas"

Here are some ideas on how to approach the essay:

• "You taught me language; and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse," says Caliban in Act 1. Much of The Tempest addresses issues of teaching and language. Compare the play to one of the reading selections on language, paying close attention both to the many references to language in the play, and to the themes of power, control, liberation, and free thought that the different selections address. Or, compare the representation of education or literacy in the play to one of the selections on education.
• In Act 2, Scene 1, Gonzalo imagines how he would control the island if he were lord of it-- using words borrowed directly from Montaigne's "Of Cannibals." (Did you notice that Caliban is a near-anagram of Cannibal?) Compare and contrast The Tempest and "Of Cannibals," on the topic of human nature, or the topic of society and government. Or, compare and contrast the play to one of the other texts on human nature or on government and society. For instance, you could compare and contrast Prospero's governance of the island to More's Utopia. Is either one ideal?
• Antonio and Sebastian seem to be truly Machiavellian. How does Shakespeare depiction of them compare to the selection from Machiavelli? Is Prospero's rule Machiavellian? How does it compare to Hobbes, or to More, or to Hsün Tzu?