Yachnin, ''Shakespare and the Idea of Obedience: Gonzalo in The Tempest

"Once we realise that Gonzalo is guilty of complicity in Prospero's overthrow, that he obeyed Alonso's command to cast Prospero and Miranda adrift...From Prospero's viewpoint, Gonzalo's obedience to his master (even thoug it has entailed Prospero's suffering and near-death) is praiseworthy because political obedience guarantees the stability of government. Prospero's own experience with disobedient and treacherous subjects (Antonio and Caliban) underlies his praise of Gonzalo..." (42)

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AngelaPalumbo/2009/02/so_this_is_how_history_ties_in.html

"I want to suggest that the The Tempest, at the historical moment of its production and reception, should be seen in terms of both the freedom to consider vexed political issues and the freedom from authorial policing of the production of meaning which are characteristic of texts inscribed in the literary field" (Yachnin 37). Click here!

What Not to Do: Assume the Author Agreed with Popular Opinion
“To suggest this, of course, is not to preclude the possibility of subversive interpretations of the play in Shakespeare’s time; however, it does mean that the normative meaning of The Tempest for Shakespeare’s audience would have been conservative” (Yachnin 44).
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/GretaCarroll/2009/02/what_not_to_do_assume_the_auth.html

History and the Audience
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/EricaGearhart/2009/02/history_and_the_audience.html

question...plays different from other lit in analysis?
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/BethanyMerryman/2009/02/soooo-many-factors.html

Dumb Books=Smart Books

“As Roger Seamon has suggested, modern criticism tends to assume that the text itself is “dumb,” and that the business of criticism is to “speak” for it (296). One of my contentions is that many Renaissance texts constructed themselves as unable to speak authoritatively or powerfully about politics and that by marking themselves as “dumb,” such texts were freed from censorship and thus able to represent political issues in complex and candid ways (qtd. in Yachnin 37).

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JennaMiller/2009/02/dumb-bookssmart-books.html

"Gonzalo's guilt valorizes his conduct and speech" (Yachinin 43).

“To locate The Tempest in the literary field does not necessarily foreclose the possibility of a particular political reading of the play; rather, it simply requires that such a reading be grounded in a historically specific negotiation between the text and the normal political attitude of the theater-audience.” (Yachting 34)

"...it does not, of course, necessarily follow that Shakespeare's audience would have valued individual rights over the interests of the state, or would have associated political obedience with the abuses of facism

"...it seems clear that the majority of the English people throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods both espused a doctrine of a political obedience and renounced any idea of active resistance" (Yachnin 35). Don't you just love it when the cattle like masses all moo in unison about how their mooing doesn't accomplish anything. Join the herd and do nothing about a government you don't agree with, just let them do what they wish.

"That many Renaissance texts constructed themselves as unable to speak authoritatively or powerfully about politics, and that by marking themselves as dumb, such texts were freed from censorship and thus able to represent political issues in a complex and candid ways." (Yachinn 37)

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/SueMyers/2009/02/obedience-and-t.html

Not completely understanding Gonzalo's guilt.
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/CoreyStruss/2009/02/guilty_gonzalo.html

"During the Reformation, struggles between Protestants on one side and the Catholic Church on the other threw into high relief the often opposing claims of conscience and political obedience, and moved the question of obedience near the center of the polemical wars ongoing from the time of Luther to the time of Milton," (Yachnin 35).

Stephano: "Flout 'em and cout 'em/And scout 'em and flout 'em!/Thought is free," (Shakespeare III.2.133-35).
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/BethanyBouchard/2009/02/freedom_of_speech.html

"On one side is obedience: no man is "his own" since each man is determined by his station (Kermode V.i.213n); and on the other side is conscience: each man is himself because each values himself according to the integrity of his conscience..." (Yachnin 43).
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/BethanyBouchard/2009/03/every_man_for_himself.html