Examples Of Allusions In The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

While writing, some authors create an alternative meaning behind their written stories. The genre of romance includes the stories of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Tempest by William Shakespeare, both telling a story with alternative meanings. By looking at this alternative meaning, one can see the fundamentalist religious allusions within both of them. The stories from Shakespeare and Coleridge portray biblical allusions to create an alternative meaning behind the true story the author has created, while evoking a strong emotional and intellectual connections with those associated with the bible.

Christian and pagan themes are confounded at times in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Ancient Mariner …show more content…
The Ancient Mariner's shooting of the Albatross can be compared to several Judeo-Christian stories of betrayal and sin. These including the original sin of Adam and Eve, and Cain's betrayal of Abel. Like Adam and Eve, the Ancient Mariner fails to respect God's rules and is tempted to try to understand things that should remain out of his reach. Even though the Albatross is a symbol of luck, the Mariner feels that it is necessary to kill the symbol. Like Adam and Eve, is forbidden from being truly close to the sublime, existing in a solitude rather than an Eden-like state. However, as a son of Adam and Eve, the Ancient Mariner is already a sinner of God’s rule, making him an outcast. The Mariner is also like Cain, in the story of Cain and Abel. The Ancient Mariner angers God by killing a creature. Most obviously, the Ancient Mariner can be seen as a universal sinner who betrays Christ by committing a sin. Another example of the Ancient Mariner relating to a biblical allusion is his relation to Judas. Judas’s betrayal to the "Christian soul," when Jesus is leading humanity to the salvation and greater understanding can compare to the murder of the Albatross by the Ancient Mariner betraying his …show more content…
The King James Bible was published in the same year that The Tempest. This Bible translation thus appeared too late to influence Shakespeare’s writing, but he was deeply influenced by its later translations, especially the Geneva Bible and the Bishops’ Bible. All of Shakespeare’s plays contain important allusions to the Bible, just as they allude to classical works like Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Virgil’s Aeneid. The story is the old one of shipwreck on a desert island, like the later Robinson Crusoe or even Gilligan’s Island. Shakespeare’s interest in this plot has to do partly with exploring humanity in isolation from civilization. What happens when people are forced to fend for themselves, without the aid of law or civic institutions? Explorers in the seventeenth- century finding the “new world” were asking similar questions as they encountered native people living seemingly in a state of nature. Creating the idea of nature vs. nurture theme relating The Tempest back to the Bible. Were such people brutal savages, in need of civilizing, or were they noble innocents, free from the corruptions of European society? The Tempest explores such questions, often in biblical terms, such as meanings of life and how elements of humanity was created. Shakespeare’s island is a kind of Eden, presided over by the God-like or Messiah figure of Prospero, with Ferdinand and Miranda as a version of Adam and Eve, and Ariel and Caliban as the angel