Shakespeare attentively dissents about The Great Chain of Being, which is portrayed by, the common idea of the overthrowing of a dukedom, the King being abused and commanded by a plebeian, and the correlations betwixt Miranda and Prospero. The Tempest utilizes the Great Chain of Being throughout the play as Shakespeare presents the hierarchy from the angelic to the bestial between Ariel and Caliban; involving a full wavelength of low-life and virtuous characters in between. Each key character in this play is an adagial linkage in the Great Chain of Being, the image that characterized the medieval understanding of the nature of universe and one’s place in it, an understanding that survived well into the Renaissance.
According to the Great Chain of Being, some characters tend to be higher than other characters. These may be due to their background or what they are identified, or classified as by everyone. The contradiction can be portrayed through Shakespeare’s common preposition of overthrowing, Prospero’s control and commanding of Ariel who is above him, and the king’sShakespeare frequently uses an proposition in which the duke is arbitrarily exiled and gets his/her dukedom usurped from another official. For example in The Tempest, the rightful duke, Prospero gets overthrown by usurping the duke of Milan, Antonio; described as ‘awak’d an evil nature’, who coincidentally happens to be Prospero’s brother. While Prospero and his daughter Miranda, were on the ship during the tempest, Antonio and his abettor Gonzalo, the king’s advisor, worked together to overthrow Prospero. Antonio had promised the king of Naples to pay him if he made Antonio the new duke Afterwards, Prospero explained to his daughter how he had gotten busy in his studies that he gave his brother the power to transiently rule Milan. He had trusted his brother like any other brother would, but then Antonio abruptly became greedy. He had too much power and told his army to banish the rightful Duke and his daughter from Milan. After listening to this, Miranda queried that why didn’t they just kill us? Her father then answered that they didn’t have the courage to and that the citizens of Milan loved to too much. A king or queen, formally addressed a monarch, is the head of the state or a sovereign country, who antecedes everyone else. They are the ones who belong to the royalty.
A duke/duchess belongs to the nobility, a social class normally ranked immediately under royalty, that possesses more acknowledged privileges than most other classes in a society. In Act V, Scene I, Prospero commands Ariel to free the traitors and the rest of their crew from their confusion, while he draws a magic circle with his staff. As Ariel leaves him, Prospero muses on all that he has done with his potent art of magic, and solemnly says that once this last task is done, he’ll break his staff and bury it in the earth, and drown his book in the ocean.
