The Gentle Giant

Loose Ends are Intentional: A Miko Essay

Miko, ''Tempest'' -- Jerz EL312 (Literary Criticism)

...the play's failure to achieve an unambiguous resolution, its resistance to any available version of a neat, closed form, suggests that games with closed form may be going on, and the mode of these may be playful (yet not without seriousness)" (Miko 377).

I guess it would only be reasonable to create an essay that states that Shakespeare's literature has loose ends, not because it is on accident, but it was intentional. It was very apparant to note that the reader looks to far into the literature to find a meaning, but the point of leaving a piece of The Tempest was actually done on purpose. To me, ambiguity as a greater understanding of literature can really only happen if the reader tends to continuously search to find that answer in the first place. Later, Miko describes The Tempest as "experimental" (Miko 380), which is actually an intriguing notion. I wish that Miko would have delved further into this topic, because it seems that Shakespeare appears to create a similar structure, and really, every play he writes has some ambiguity in the play that is intentional. While I would like to believe that this play was experimental, I would have liked to see some comparison to another piece of Shakespeare's literature in order to find where that experiment takes place. I am not saying that Miko is wrong, I just think that he would need a bit more to argue something so broad like that. Basically, if Miko would have given a bit more on some of his theories in his application, I would have been a bit more impressed. But overall, Miko brings up some very valid points, and this discussion should be very good for Thursday's class.