The Tempest and Kermode

The Big Picture Many students face the challenge of reading and interpreting literature with ease when a classroom and a professor provide a safety net. Reading and interpreting literature on one’s own is a more difficult task. While there is no right way to interpret literature, understanding some external factors surrounding the period that the work was written in, the audience it was written for, the events that inspired it, the biography of the …showed first 75 words of 720 total…

…showed last 75 words of 720 total…events giving specific lines from the text to back up his interpretation. I find the background information on the author, the time period, and the inspiration of a work to be essential tools in forming my own analysis. While other critics focus only on the play itself or focus exclusively on one external factor, Kermode looks at the play itself and at several external factors allowing the reader to see it in the big picture.