With my second formal essay of the semester, I was asked to utilize a primary or secondary source in order to give The Tempest more context when doing close-reading analysis. This essay would build off the previous requirements in that it would be a close-reading exercise still, but I would be required to use a background source to either pose a question for the text or answer a question from the text. In this manner, it was a slightly more complex essay, but one I felt entirely confident in from the start. After all, I finally learned how to make a claim in an essay without having it completely engulfed by my sources.
One question I have had since the beginning of our work with The Tempest is why Alonso, as King of Naples, doesn’t seem to exercise any power over the other characters in the play, even though he should be of the highest political standing out of any of them. After reading and becoming intrigued by Machiavelli’s treatise The Prince, in which he argues for the effectiveness of a leadership built upon fear rather than love, I decided his work would be the perfect chance to explore and try to answer my question about Alonso, which turned out to be a strangely fun process.
During this essay process, I tried to revise the way I typically write so that my final product might turn out more genuine and less rigidly, frantically constructed–and so, I started by locating scenes and particular lines that might illuminate more about Alonso as a weak leader and provide evidence for not only a future claim, but to show off the King’s lack of power as a general context. In the beginning of the play, I noted how Alonso held no control over the crew of the ship; then, I examined the way Antonio and Sebastian plotted to kill Alonso with no fear of consequence. This led me to discover that perhaps Alonso is an ineffective leader because he is incapable of using fear as a way of gaining authority, as Machiavelli suggests. From there, I noted the way Prospero utilized fear in ways Alonso refused to, and how he gained power over every other character in the play by doing so. Then and only then, when I had gathered my evidence and organized it and decided its purpose, did I draft an outline of my claim.
Ultimately, I decided I would use Machiavelli to give insight into Alonso’s lack of power and suggest that Alonso’s refusal to step up as a “fearful” leader explains that lack of power, and I would do this by analyzing his moments of weak authority and comparing him to Prospero, who is much more effective at Machiavellian leadership. My essay would attempt to validate Machiavelli’s theory, perhaps not in its morality, but in its effectiveness.
This series of evidence-gathering, outlining, and claim-drafting led me to a more forgiving, flexible first draft than I usually produce. I was extremely satisfied with my “quotes-first” method before attempting to come up with a thesis or claim, as I feel it completely kept me from running into the problem of trying to twist the play’s words to match my claim instead of building my claim from the evidence in a more organic way.
After receiving my peer review, it was clear, at least by one person’s standards, that I had done my job well. My main critique was that some of my sentences seemed to be a little over-the-top in terms of their wordiness and vocabulary, which I attributed to the fact that I tend to ramble, use nominalizations, and the thesaurus function in Word to avoid using the same word eighty times in one essay. I got where she was coming from, so for my next draft, I focused on clarifying and simplifying my sentence structure so that it allowed my claim to shine through in a less convoluted way. The other major piece of advise suggested to me was that I use more longer sections of the play as evidence instead of just little snippets, but I disagreed with this. I think a lot of big block quotes can disrupt the flow of a paper substantially, and so I left my quotes for now to see what further feedback would give me. However, I did try and clarify a few sections so that it was clear exactly what I was saying.
Thankfully, my peer reviewer didn’t see any major content ideas that needed change, and so I was very easily able to come up with my second draft for instructor review, which I was very confident in. I knew there were some tweaks to my argument that probably still needed to be made, but as my peer and I were unable to come up with them, I figured it would be best to see what my instructor had to say.
I was actually very relieved to receive my instructor review, as he felt that my claim was solid, and thus, my sub-claims had a foundation that did not need to be altered. However, he did suggest I rework the structure of my essay, as I did a lot of back-and-forth between Machiavelli and The Tempest that not only made it harder to follow, but occasionally interrupted my argument by substituting textual evidence with Machiavelli’s claims. I was actually counteracting my own purpose in writing this essay–letting my own claim shine through and not letting it be swallowed up in context and scholarly sources. So, I followed his advice and gave Machiavelli his own paragraph in the order suggested to me, letting the close reading follow from it. Even in later paragraphs when I opted to use a new snippet of information or quotation from Machiavelli, I made sure to order Machiavelli before the close reading and not within the close reading so he did not erroneously become part of my evidence. This resulted in an exciting notion–my own unique point of view was in the spotlight and backed up by research without it losing its originality.
The other suggestion given to me was to replace my false use of Machiavelli as evidence in one of my paragraphs with a new section of textual evidence. Instead of focusing entirely on how Alonso fails to instill fear of consequence in Antonio and Sebastian for the murder they plot against him, my instructor thought I could add evidence to Alonso representing a “loved” leader within the scene by using Gonzalo’s drive to protect him from harm. I agreed, and so I edited through that paragraph to make it not only a discussion of the lack of evidence Alonso gives for his fearsomeness, but a discussion of the evidence he does give for his position as a loved leader. From there, I explained how being loved and not feared in the way Machiavelli describes can do nothing to stop plots such as Antonio and Sebastian’s.
From there, I simply tweaked a few sentence-level issues and removed some unnecessary and confusing sentences, and felt as though my third draft was more organized, effective, and more about what I wanted to say instead of Machiavelli. Confident once more, I submitted it back to my instructor for one more round of feedback, to make sure I had followed his suggestions in a way that made sense.
When my professor gave me his review this time, I was excited, as his suggestions were now purely on an organizational level. He gave me a few more ideas on how to further organize my paragraphs to keep my ideas separate, and after tweaking his suggestions and separating some of my larger chunks of texts into smaller, more focused paragraphs, I was sure I had my final draft, fourth draft, which can be found also in my presentation portfolio. As this essay demonstrates the use of more than one round of adviser revising, the skill of using historical background and is the only one of my essays that does either of those things (not to mention, I believe it does them successfully), it is a helpful and welcomed part of the presentation portfolio.