the tempest colonialism essay

Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ explores colonialism, resistance and liberation

Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies, McGill University

PhD Candidate, McGill University

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Last winter, at the Studio Theatre at Ryerson University in downtown Toronto, Canadian actor Antoine Yared played Caliban in The Tempest . He stood, centre stage, looking out over the audience as he reassured his companions that the magic music of the island should not frighten them. He said:

“The isle is full of noises … that give delight and hurt not.”

But his face told the audience a different story — the story of a man heartbroken for what had been taken from him.

We chose Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the centrepiece for our “Playing for Free” workshop because the play has been entangled with the history of slavery and freedom in the west for over 400 years.

The Tempest tells the story of the Duke of Milan, Prospero, who many years before had come to the island with his infant daughter. Upon arriving, Prospero enslaved two of its inhabitants, Caliban and the spirit Ariel. The play follows three interconnecting plotlines: Prospero’s revenge plan against his enemies; how his daughter, Miranda, falls in love with the son of his chief enemy; and how Caliban plans to destroy Prospero and take back the island.

Many consider the play an allegory of European colonization , and throughout the centuries, Caliban’s character has featured prominently in arguments that defend or resist against colonialist tyranny.

The Tempest has also been interpreted as an allegory of liberation. The 20th-century writer Roberto Fernández Retamar declared that the insurgent Caliban spoke for the colonized peoples of the Americas. In 1993, a production by Robert Lepage in Montréal portrayed Caliban as a working-class punk-rocker in open rebellion against the elite Prospero.

The Tempest and religious conversion

In our workshop, we wanted to blend theatre and scholarship to understand how The Tempest could have been used by both European colonialists and also by advocates of resistance. We also wanted to understand how the play might still be relevant.

The workshop brought together four Stratford Festival actors, three student actors from the Ryerson Performance Program and Renaissance scholars from an international initiative dedicated to understanding how Shakespeare’s work helped create the world we live in now.

The artists and scholars worked for a day and a half toward the performance. We talked about the history of slavery and freedom, primarily by thinking about how Christian conversion had served colonization. Indeed conversion has been an instrument of domination in the Americas from 1492 and onwards into recent times .

Forced conversion haunts the play. But there is another kind of conversion in the play where characters achieve the freedom to be true to themselves.

Caliban: Searching for the Other

Prospero attempts to strip away Caliban’s dignity. Prospero forces him to remain “stied” in a hard rock. In the Ryerson performance, Antoine Yared playing Caliban chose his first moments on stage carefully. Rather than obeying Prospero’s commands to “come,” he walked past Prospero, his back turned in a sign of his rebellion. For Caliban, even the act of walking around the Island, his home, was now charged with submission or defiance.

When Caliban encountered the shipwrecked servants he would recruit as co-conspirators against Prospero and when one of them fed him liquor, Caliban thought he had at last come face to face with God. He said to the drunken servant:

“Hath thou not dropped from heaven? … I prithee be my god.”

The drunk Caliban began singing and shouting:

“Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom! Freedom!, high-day, freedom!”

But when the invisible Ariel began to make her magical music, the two servants quaked in terror. They knelt at Caliban’s feet. Caliban rose up — straight and fine like a young tree. He stood triumphantly over the two trembling servants. The music was something he knew well. It was nothing to be afraid of.

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again.”

That was in rehearsal. But when Yared played Caliban in front of the audience, he changed the way he did the speech. His lines about the music of the island were no longer triumphant. They were something that could break your heart.

Yared’s Caliban was a man who had once been at one with the natural world, but who had been cast out and could only recapture some sense of the beauty of nature by dreaming. When he said, “I cried to dream again,” it was as if he were a man turning and turning, trying to find the beloved he had lost.

The workshop taught the actors, the scholars and the members of the audience how the play The Tempest , with its depiction of slavery, resistance and love might have challenged people of the past to see Caliban’s humanity and might also speak to audiences in the 21st century.

Yared’s Caliban left us with this urgent question. It was as if he were echoing Ariel and asking the audience:

“If you have eyes to see this suffering one, if you are human, your affections would become tender.”

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• The Tempest

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The Tempest

William shakespeare, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

During the time when The Tempest was written and first performed, both Shakespeare and his audiences would have been very interested in the efforts of English and other European settlers to colonize distant lands around the globe. The Tempest explores the complex and problematic relationship between the European colonizer and the native colonized peoples through the relationship between Prospero and Caliban. Prospero views Caliban as a lesser being than himself. As such, Prospero believes that Caliban should be grateful to him for educating Caliban and lifting him out of "savagery." It simply does not occur to Prospero that he has stolen rulership of the island from Caliban, because Prospero can't imagine Caliban as being fit to rule anything. In contrast, Caliban soon realizes that Prospero views him as a second-class citizen fit only to serve and that by giving up his rulership of the island in return for his education, he has allowed himself to be robbed. As a result, Caliban turns bitter and violent, which only reinforces Prospero's view of him as a "savage." Shakespeare uses Prospero and Caliban's relationship to show how the misunderstandings between the colonizer and the colonized lead to hatred and conflict, with each side thinking that the other is at fault.

In addition to the relationship between the colonizer and colonized, The Tempest also explores the fears and opportunities that colonization creates. Exposure to new and different peoples leads to racism and intolerance, as seen when Sebastian criticizes Alonso for allowing his daughter to marry an African. Exploration and colonization led directly to slavery and the conquering of native peoples. For instance, Stephano and Trinculo both consider capturing Caliban to sell as a curiosity back at home, while Stephano eventually begins to see himself as a potential king of the island. At the same time, the expanded territories established by colonization created new places in which to experiment with alternative societies. Shakespeare conveys this idea in Gonzalo's musings about the perfect civilization he would establish if he could acquire a territory of his own.

Colonization ThemeTracker

Colonization Quotes in The Tempest

Colonization in the Tempest

This essay will analyze themes of colonization and imperialism in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” It will discuss how the play reflects and critiques Elizabethan attitudes towards colonization, and the dynamics between the characters that represent colonial power and those that represent the colonized. Also at PapersOwl you can find more free essay examples related to Colonization.

How it works

Imperialism started significantly sooner with the revelation of America. It was a major issue during Shakespeare’s time. The opening up of new wildernesses and new land being found invigorated European data. Shakespeare’s creative mind has considered this. Investigation of new geological spaces and control of those terrains by the travelers is essentially what we know by imperialism.

Deciphered as a white man’s weight, colonization was a method for vanquishing new grounds and forcing the colonizer’s way of life from on the local individuals.

Prospero’s catch of Sycorax’s territory and his treatment of the locals of the island have incited numerous pundits to decipher the play as working out the dramatization of colonization. Caliban’s dissent against Prospero and his protection from pilgrim power utilizing the language instructed by the colonizer assists us with interpreting the play as a postcolonial text.

The Tempest has frequently been deciphered as a play about expansionism principally in light of the fact that Prospero goes to Sycorax’s island, quells her, manages the land, and forces his own way of life on individuals of the land. In this understanding, Prospero isn’t seen principally as a caring dad of Miranda and kind ruler rather usurping Caliban’s Island from him (Caliban). However, putting him under subjugation and sabotaging him as a beast, we can accept Prospero as a delegate of the Europeans who usurped the place where there are local Americans and oppressed them. He, as a feeling of prevalence, accepts Caliban as half man. Pushing the local aside, he puts himself in charge of issues. He uproots Caliban’s mom and treats her as a monster. He has full authority over everything on the island. He makes Caliban fill in as his work and considers him a thing of murkiness. Caliban is being dehumanized or treated as subhuman. Like Europeans fantasizes the others like a wild man, Prospero, in this play, depicts Caliban as disfigured, abhorrent grinning, deceptive, boozer, brutal, savage, and fallen angel revering and so forth As per Prospero, he isn’t even the human rather conceived villain.

This shows the colonizer’s mentality of peering down on the colonized individuals. Caliban is viewed as a terrible element. The whites peered down on individuals of another shading. Some are destined to rule while others are destined to be ruled. Caliban is treated as mediocre. The colonizer utilized words like light, information, and intelligence to allude to himself while he utilized terms like obscurity, obliviousness and essential to portray the colonized. This twofold resistance shows how Prospero as a colonizer makes substances about the colonized individuals. Prospero considers himself to be a ruler doing the undertaking of civilization mission. The manner in which light dissipates haziness and information disperses obliviousness Prospero as a colonizer teaches and cultivates Caliban yet absent a lot of accomplishment. The socializing mission is constantly joined by the legislative issues of mastery over the colonized. These components permit us to examine the play in the light of expansionism.

From a frontier viewpoint, we see the play through the eyes of colonizers. In any case, in the event that we see the play according to the post-frontier point of view, Caliban is arising against from the earliest starting point of control. The disdain towards the colonizer is exceptionally extraordinary and solid among the colonized. Prospero controls everyone and each activity in the play. Everyone on the island is controlled by Prospero the manner in which a manikin ace controls his manikins. Caliban as a colonized needs to strike back on the colonizer. Caliban is rebellious and makes issues for the colonizer. He endeavors to assault Miranda and it is a danger presented to the security of the colonizer. He discloses to Prospero that the land that Prospero rules was powerfully detracted from his mom. Like Caliban’s dissent, in world history, also fight has started with the introduction of imperialism itself. He essentially says, ”I wish it were finished”. Notwithstanding this, Caliban over and over claims that the land is to be acquired on him. It implies he is by all accounts defended in asserting that the island initially had a place with him.

At the point when Prospero attempts to show the language, Caliban consistently would not present. Caliban, in this manner, stays toward the end what he was toward the start. No change happens in Caliban’s temperament. Here, Prospero, similar to White men is in the dream that they are working for them (colonized). Yet, such an idea is fizzled in light of the fact that Caliban doesn’t become familiar with his (Prosper) language, even toward the finish of the play. The play shows the opposition of the predominance class. Whatever he has learned, he utilizes it in reviling Prospero. These endeavors by Caliban to dissent and oppose the colonizer can uphold our post-pioneer understanding of the play.

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Exploratory Shakespeare

English 15 summer 2015.

Otherization in The Tempest

In her article “Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism”, Deborah Willis seeks to criticize the current state of discourse regarding the depiction of colonialism in The Tempest . Specifically, she seeks to criticize the arguments made by Paul Brown in a recent essay.  

Willis first sets out to explain the arguments Brown creates in his work.   Brown believes that Shakespeare’s Tempest is a confirmation of British colonialism. By emphasizing the otherness of Caliban, and then having Prospero assume control over him, Brown claims that Shakespeare is furthering the argument for colonization. He sees the play as making the savage Caliban seem inhuman and naturally subservient, representing potential groups to be colonized, and the rule of Prospero to represent the benevolent British colonizers.   Brown also believes that Shakespeare ultimately fails in his quest to promote colonization because the “other” ultimately serves as a place of potential societal disruption, that is, some aspects of the “other” still have appeal to civilized man, such as illicit sexuality and masterlessness.   Willis concludes this section with her own conclusion: that one of the most problematic aspects of Brown’s work is that he seems to conflate the character of Prospero with Shakespeare.

Willis disagrees wholeheartedly with that last idea. She points out that though Prospero has control in this play nearly unmatched in Shakespeare’s work, he is still a character with flaws, criticisms of whom are made clear. Special emphasis is paced on the way Caliban views Prospero. Most obviously, Prospero can be seen through Caliban’s eyes as a usurper with no more right to the island than Antonio has to the dukedom of Milan.

The author also makes the case that Caliban isn’t so “othered” after all. In addition to the sympathy his rightful claim to the island might garner, his childlike demeanor can also be said to grant him an air of harmlessness. Willis addresses the attempted rape of Miranda by Caliban as certainly being problematic for this characterization, but notes that Caliban repents for what he has done. He has some sense of morality. The author notes other relatable characteristics as well, such as Caliban’s appreciation for art and ability to learn.   For these reasons, Willis believes Caliban to be a far too relatable and sympathetic character to be depicted as the “other” in colonialist discourse. Finally, Willis ends by disputing Caliban as a source of potential disruption because of his conversion. She believes he has assimilated adequately.

In Caliban’s stead, Willis states that Antonio is far more “othered” than Caliban. She suggests that his conspiring with Sebastian to kill Alonso is a symptom of a “pathological addiction to treason and fratricide” (281).   Willis points to Prospero referring to Antonio as unnatural because of his evil, noting his complete lack of fraternal affection. Unlike Caliban’s repentance for nearly raping Miranda, Willis notes no obvious signs of repentance from Antonio at the end of the play. He is shown to be rather heartless. Because of these depictions of Antonio, Willis finds that he is set up as an unnatural “other” far more than Caliban.

While I agree with Willis assessment to a certain extent, there are a few problems with her argument. I don’t dispute her claim that Antonio is far more “otherized” than Caliban, but I think that she nonetheless downplays Caliban’s role as the other. Most obvious are the real life parallels between Caliban’s situation and that of a colonized group. Prospero has come to Caliban’s island from his homeland and assumed control over him. There isn’t a lot of metaphor there. That describes the process of colonization too closely to ignore. Furthermore, she completely disregards Caliban’s attempted coup against Prospero. Despite the comedy and its unsuccessful nature, this is still a direct conflict against Prospero, the metaphorical colonizer, further “othering” Caliban. Finally, Willis neglects to properly address the issue of racism in the play against Caliban. Racism by default works by “otherizing”, and to ignore this is to ignore a large part of Caliban’s characterization.

WORKS CITED

Willis, Deborah. “Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 29.2 (2006): 277-89. Rice University. Web. 19 Aug. 2015. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/450475>.

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A Modern Perspective: The Tempest

By Barbara A. Mowat

Somewhat past the midpoint of The Tempest, King Alonso and his courtiers reach a temporary still point in their journey on Prospero’s island. Shipwrecked, they have searched for the lost Prince Ferdinand; now, exhausted, they give up the search. Into this moment of fatigue—and, for Alonso, despair—at the center of what Gonzalo calls their “maze,” enters the maze’s monster: a Harpy who threatens them with lingering torment worse than any death. For Alonso, the Harpy’s recounting of his long-ago crimes against Prospero is “monstrous”; maddened, he rushes off to leap (he thinks) into the sea, to join (he thinks) his drowned son Ferdinand.

King Alonso’s confrontation with the Harpy ( 3.3.23 –133) brings together powerfully The Tempest ’s intricate set of travel stories and its technique of presenting key dramatic moments as theatrical fantasy. The presentation of dancing islanders, a disappearing banquet, and a descending monster is the first big spectacle since the play’s opening tempest. The unexpected appearance of these island “spirits,” combined with the power of the Harpy’s speech, gives the Harpy confrontation a solidity within the story world that seems designed to rivet audience attention. At the same time, audience response to the scene is inevitably colored by curiosity about the “quaint device” that makes the banquet vanish and by awareness of Prospero looking down on his trapped enemies from “the top,” commenting on them in asides, and obtrusively turning the Harpy/king encounter into make-believe, first by telling us that the Harpy was only Ariel reciting a speech and, second, by reminding us, just before Alonso’s desperate exit to join Ferdinand in the ocean’s ooze, that Ferdinand is, at this moment, courting Miranda.

The double signals here—to the powerful moment within the story and to the deliberate theatricality with which the moment is staged—reflect larger doublenesses in this drama. They reflect, first of all, major differences in the temporal and spatial dimensions of the drama’s “story” and its “play.” The Tempest ’s “story” stretches over more than twenty-four years and several sea journeys; it embeds elements of the mythological voyages of Aeneas and of Jason and the Argonauts, of the biblical voyages of St. Paul, and of actual contemporary voyages to the new world of Virginia. The “play” that The Tempest actually presents is, in contrast, constricted within a plot-time of a single afternoon and confined to the space imagined for an island. 1 Through this particular doubling, Shakespeare creates in The Tempest a form that allows him to bring familiar voyage material to the stage in a (literally) spectacular new way.

The “story” that The Tempest tells is a story of voyages—Sycorax’s journey from Algiers, Prospero and Miranda’s journey from Milan to the island in the rotten carcass of a butt, Alonso’s voyage from Naples to Tunis across the Mediterranean Sea and thence to the island—and, on the island, a set of journeys (Ferdinand’s journey across yellow sands; Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo’s through briers and filthy-mantled pools, and Alonso and his men’s through strange mazes) that lead, finally, back to the sea and the ship and to yet another sea journey. This complex narrative, with its immense span of chronological time, its routes stretching over most of the Mediterranean, its violent separations and losses and its culmination in royal betrothals and restorations, is the kind of story told in the massive novels, popular in Shakespeare’s time, called Greek Romances. The Tempest ’s story could have filled one or more such romance volumes or could have been presented in a narrative-like drama such as Shakespeare himself had created in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale . Instead, within the brief period of The Tempest ’s supposed action, the narrative of the twenty-four or more years preceding the shipwreck of King Alonso and his courtiers on the island—worked out by Shakespeare in elaborate detail—is told to us elaborately. The second and third scenes of The Tempest —that is, 1.2 . and 2.1 —contain close to half the lines in the play, and close to half of those lines are past-tense narration. Through Prospero, through Ariel, through Caliban, through Gonzalo, through Sebastian, through Antonio, characters in our presence (and our present) tell us their pasts.

If we take the sets of narratives embedded in 1.2 and 2.1 and roll them back to where they belong chronologically, the first story (and the most fantastic) is that of the witch Sycorax, her exile on the island, her “littering” of Caliban there, and her imprisoning of Ariel ( 1.2.308 –47)—twelve years before Prospero is thrust forth from Milan. That thrusting-forth is the subject of the next story (next chronologically, that is): the narrative of Antonio’s betrayal of Prospero and of Prospero and Miranda’s sea journey and arrival on the island ( 1.2.66 –200). Then comes the story of what happened on the island during the next twelve years, a story in which narratives that tell of Caliban ( 1.2.396 –451), of Ariel ( 1.2.287 –306, 340 –47), and of Miranda and Prospero ( 1.2.205 –8) overlap and intersect. Finally comes the story from the most recent past—the story of the Princess Claribel and her “loathness” to the marriage arranged by her father ( 2.1.131 –40), of Claribel’s wedding in Tunis ( 2.1.71 –111), of the return journey of Alonso and his courtiers ( 2.1.112 –17), and of the shipwreck as described by Ariel ( 1.2.232 –80).

One of the most powerful features of the form Shakespeare crafted in The Tempest is that this detailed, complex narrative, told us in the first part of the play, keeps reappearing within the play’s action. The story of the coup d’état that expelled Prospero “twelve year since,” for example, is made the model for the Antonio/Sebastian assassination plot (“Thy case, dear friend,” says Sebastian to Antonio, “shall be my precedent: as thou got’st Milan, I’ll come by Naples” [ 2.1.332 –34]); the story appears at the center of the Harpy’s message ( 3.3.86 –93); and it is told yet once again by Prospero when, in the play’s final scene, he attempts to forgive Antonio ( 5.1.80 –89). Caliban’s story—“this island is mine”; “I serve a tyrant”—is told by him again and again. The story of Sycorax, who died years before the dramatic “now,” is alluded to so often—her powers described one last time by Prospero even as the play is ending ( 5.1.323 –26)—that she seems to haunt the play, as does the absent, distant, unhappy Claribel.

As the play reaches its conclusion, each of the stories recounted in the early narrative scenes is conjured up a final time, though the pressure now is toward the future—toward the nuptials of the royal couple, toward a royal lineage with Prospero’s heirs as kings of Naples. As that virtual future is created, the structuring process of the opening scenes is reversed: where narrative was there incorporated into the play, now the play opens back out into the next pages of the narrative from which it had emerged. As we watch and listen, the play we have been experiencing moves into the past, becomes a moment in the tale Prospero promises to tell to the voyagers—“such discourse as . . . shall make [the night] / Go quick away: the story of my life / And the particular accidents gone by / Since I came to this isle” ( 5.1.361 –64). As Alonso notes, this is a “story . . . which must / Take the ear strangely” ( 5.1.371 –72).

By folding the story into the play and then unfolding the play into its own virtual narrative future, Shakespeare creates a form in which past and future press on the present dramatic moment with peculiar intensity. We sense this throughout the play, but see it with special clarity in the confrontation between Alonso and the Harpy. The Harpy brings the past to Alonso as a burden Alonso must pick up—an intolerable burden for Alonso, who goes mad under the simultaneous recognition of his guilt and its consequences, given to him as Time Past, Time Present, and Time Future. In Time Past: “you . . . / From Milan did supplant good Prospero, / Exposed unto the sea . . . / Him and his innocent child” ( 3.3.87 –90); in Time Present: “for which foul deed, / The powers . . . have / Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures / Against your peace. Thee of thy son, Alonso, / They have bereft” ( 90 –94); and finally, in Time Future: “Ling’ring perdition . . . shall step by step attend / You and your ways, whose wraths to guard you from— / Which here, in this most desolate isle, else fells / Upon your heads—is nothing but heart’s sorrow / And a clear life ensuing” ( 95 –101). This pressure of past and future on the present moment—a pressure that is created in large part by the way Shakespeare folds chronological time into plot-time, and that we feel throughout the play in Prospero’s tension, in Ariel’s restiveness, in Caliban’s fury—makes believable in The Tempest that which is normally suspect: namely, instant repentance, instant inner transformation. Because the dramatic present is so permeated with the play’s virtual past, so pressured by the future—the six o’clock toward which the play rushes, after which Time as Opportunity will be gone—that Alonso’s anguished repentance, his descent into silence, madness, and unceasing tears, his immediate surrender of Milan to Prospero and the reward of being given back his lost son—can all take place in moments, and can, even so, seem credible and wonderful.

The interplay between The Tempest ’s elaborate voyage story and its tightly constricted “play” is not the only doubleness toward which the drama’s Harpy/king encounter points us. It points as well to two kinds of travel tales embedded in the drama: ancient, fictional voyage narratives and contemporary travelers’ tales buzzing around London at the time the play was being written. The Harpy/king encounter is shaped as a sequence of verbal and visual events that in effect reenact and thus recall ancient confrontations between harpies and sea voyagers. In each of these harpy incidents—from the third century B.C. Argonautica through the first century B.C. Aeneid to The Tempest itself—harpies are ministers of the gods sent to punish those who have angered the gods; they punish by devouring or despoiling food; and they are associated with dire prophecies. The Tempest ’s enactment of the harpy encounter is thus one in a line of harpy stories stretching into the past from this island and this set of voyagers to Aeneas, and through Aeneas back to Jason and the crucial encounter between the terrible harpies (the “hounds of mighty Zeus”) and the Argonauts. 2 In replicating the sequence of events of voyagers meeting harpies, combining details from Jason’s story and from the Aeneid, Shakespeare directs attention to the specific context in which such harpy confrontations appear and within which The Tempest clearly belongs—that of literary fictional voyages.

At the same time, he surrounds the encounter with dialogue that would remind his audience of present-day voyages of their own fellow Londoners. Geographical expansion, around-the-world journeys, explorations of the new world of the Americas had heightened the stay-at-homes’ fascination with the strange creatures reported by travelers. Real-world creatures like crocodiles and hippopotami, fantastic creatures like unicorns and griffins, reported monstrosities like the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders—all were, at the time, equally real (or unreal) and equally fascinating. The dialogue preceding the Harpy’s descent in The Tempest centers on such fabulous creatures. When the supposed “islanders”—creatures of “monstrous shape”—appear, bringing in the banquet, Sebastian says: “Now I will believe / That there are unicorns, that in Arabia / There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne, one phoenix / At this hour reigning there.” “Travelers ne’er did lie,” says Antonio, “Though fools at home condemn ’em.” Gonzalo adds, “If in Naples / I should report this now, would they believe me? / If I should say I saw such islanders . . . ” ( 3.3.26 –36). It is into this dialogue-context that the Harpy descends—that is, into a discussion of fantastic travelers’ tales and fabulous creatures.

When the Harpy—one of these creatures—actually appears, claps its wings upon the table, and somehow makes the food disappear ( 3.3.69 SD), she is very real to Alonso and his men—as real as the harpies were to Jason and to Aeneas; as real as the hippopotami and anthropophagi were to fifteenth-century explorers; as real as is Caliban, the monster mooncalf, to his discoverers Stephano and Trinculo. The attempts to kill the Harpy are classical responses—that is, they are the responses of Jason and Aeneas when confronted by the terrible bird-women. The response of Stephano and Trinculo to their man-monster is a more typically sixteenth-century response to the fabulous. When, for example, Stephano finds Trinculo and Caliban huddled under a cloak and thinks he has discovered a “most delicate monster” with four legs and two voices, he responds with the greed that we associate with Martin Frobisher and other sixteenth-century New World explorers who brought natives from North America to England to put on display: “If I can recover him,” says Stephano, “and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather. . . . He shall pay for him that hath him, and that soundly” ( 2.2.69 –81). Trinculo had responded with equal greed to his first sight of the frightened Caliban:

What have we here, a man or a fish? . . . A strange fish. Were I in England . . . and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.

( 2.2.25 –34)

While the finding and subjugating of “wild men” was a feature that ancient and new-world voyage stories held in common (for example, Jupiter promises that Aeneas, as the climax of his sea journeys, will “wage a great war in Italy, and . . . crush wild peoples and set up laws for men and build walls” 3 ), Prospero’s subjugation of Caliban has a particularly New World flavor. The play itself, no matter how steeped it is in ancient voyage literature and no matter how much emphasis it places on its Mediterranean setting, is also a representation of New World exploration. While it retells the stories of Aeneas and of Jason, it also stages a particular Virginia voyage that, in 1610–11, was the topic of sermons, published government accounts, and first-person epistles, many of which Shakespeare drew on in crafting The Tempest . The story, in brief, goes as follows: A fleet of ships set out in 1609 from England carrying a new governor—Sir Thomas Gates—to the struggling Virginia colony in Jamestown. The fleet was caught in a tempest off the coast of Bermuda. All of the ships survived the storm and sailed on to Virginia—except the flagship, the Sea-Venture, carrying the governor, the admiral of the fleet, and other important officials. A year later, the exhausted and dispirited colonists in Jamestown were astounded when two boats sailed up the James River carrying the supposedly drowned governor and his companions. The crew and passengers on the flagship had survived the storm, had lived for a year in the Bermudas, had built new ships, and had made it safely to Virginia. News of the happy ending to this “tragicomedy,” as one who reported the story called it, soon reached London, and many details of the story are preserved in The Tempest .

Among the details may be the disturbing picture of the relationship of the “settlers” and the “Indians” in Jamestown, represented perhaps in Caliban and his relationship with Prospero. In one of the documents used by Shakespeare in writing The Tempest, William Strachey describes an incident in which “certain Indians,” finding a man alone, “seized the poor fellow and led him up in to the woods and sacrificed him.” Strachey writes that the lieutenant governor was very disturbed by this incident, since hitherto he “would not by any means be wrought to a violent proceeding against them [i.e., the Indians] for all the practices of villainy with which they daily endangered our men.” This incident, though, made him “well perceive” that “fair and noble treatment” had little effect “upon a barbarous disposition,” and “therefore . . . purposed to be revenged.” The revenge took the form of an attack upon an Indian village. 4

As we read Strachey’s account today, we find much in the behavior of the settlers toward the natives that is appalling, so that the account is not for us simply that of “good white men” against “bad Indians,” as it was for Strachey. In the same way, whether or not this particular lieutenant governor and these treacherous “Indians” are represented in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s decision to include a “wild man” among his island’s cast of characters, and (as Stephen Greenblatt notes) to place him in opposition to a European prince whose power lies in his language and his books, 5 raises a host of questions for us about the play. The Tempest was written just as England was beginning what would become massive empire-building through the subjugating of others and the possessing of their lands. European nations—Spain, in particular—had already taken over major land areas, and Shakespeare and his contemporaries had available to them many accounts of native peoples and of European colonizers’ treatment of such peoples. Many such accounts are like Strachey’s: they describe a barbarous people who refuse to be “civilized,” who have no language, who have a “nature” on which “nurture will never stick” (as Prospero says of Caliban). Other accounts describe instead cultural differences in which that which is different is not necessarily inferior or “barbarous.” When Gonzalo says (at 2.1.157 –60), “Had I plantation [i.e., colonization] of this isle . . . And were the King on ’t, what would I do?” he answers his own question by describing the Utopia he would set up ( lines 162 –84), taking his description from Montaigne’s essay “Of the Cannibals.” In this essay, Montaigne (“whose supple mind,” writes Ronald Wright, “exemplifies Western civilization at its best” 6 ) argues in effect that American “savages” are in many ways more moral, more humane people than so-called civilized Europeans.

As with so much of The Tempest, Caliban may be seen as representing two quite different images. Shakespeare gives him negative traits attached to New World natives (traits that seem to many today to smack of racist responses to the strange and to the Other) while giving him at the same time a richly poetic language and a sensitive awareness of nature and the supernatural. He places Caliban in relation to Prospero (as Caliban’s master and the island’s “colonizer”), to Miranda (as the girl who taught Caliban language and whom he tried to rape), and indirectly to Ferdinand (who, like Caliban, is made to carry logs and who will father Miranda’s children as Caliban had wished to do). Shakespeare thus creates in the center of this otherworldly play a confrontation that speaks eloquently to late-twentieth-century readers and audiences living with the aftereffects of the massive colonizing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and observing the continuing life of “empire” in the interactions between the powerful and the formerly colonized states. 7 As many readers and audiences today look back at the centuries of colonization of the Americas, Africa, and India from, as it were, Caliban’s perspective, The Tempest, once considered Shakespeare’s most serene, most lyrical play, is now put forward as his representation, for good or ill, of the colonizing and the colonized. 8

This relatively new interest in the colonization depicted in The Tempest has had a profound impact on attitudes toward Prospero. For centuries seen as spokesman for Shakespeare himself, as the benign, profound magician-artist who presides like a god over an otherworldly kingdom, Prospero is now perceived as one of Shakespeare’s most complex creations. He brings to the island books, Old World language, and the power to hurt and to control; he thus figures an early form of the colonizer. But he carries with him other, complicating associations. He is, for example, a figure familiar in voyage romances popular in Shakespeare’s day. The hermit magician (or exiled doctor, or some equivalent) in Greek Romance tales comes to the aid of heroes and heroines, protects them, heals them, often teaches them who they really are. In such stories, the focus is always on the lost, shipwrecked, searching man or woman—that is, on the Alonso figure or the Ferdinand or the Miranda figure. In The Tempest, Prospero, the hermit magician, is center stage, and the lost, shipwrecked, and searching are seen by us through him and in relation to him. Prospero thus carries a kind of power and an aura of ultimately benevolent intention that complicates the colonizer image.

Prospero is also the creator of the maze in which the other characters find themselves—“as strange a maze as e’er men trod,” says Alonso ( 5.1.293 )—and thus carries yet other complicating associations. The scene of the Harpy/king encounter opens with Gonzalo’s “Here’s a maze trod indeed through forthrights and meanders,” a statement that picks up suggestively Ovid’s description of that most infamous of mazes, created by Daedalus to enclose the Minotaur. The Daedalus story has unexpected but rich links with The Tempest . Daedalus, the quintessential artist/engineer/magician, built the maze to sty the monstrous creature that he had helped to bring into being. (It was sired by a bull on King Minos’ queen, but it was Daedalus who had lured the bull to the queen, encasing her, at her urgings, in the wooden shape of a cow.) Having built the maze, Daedalus (in Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis ) “scarce himselfe could find the meanes to wind himself well out / So busie and so intricate” was the labyrinth he had created (Book 8, lines 210–20).

The story of the maze and its Minotaur is a familiar one, involving the sacrifice of Greek youths to the bloodthirsty Minotaur, an annual horror that stopped only with Theseus’ slaughter of the Minotaur and his escape from the maze through the aid of King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, whom Theseus marries and then abandons. Less familiar is the connection between the story of the maze and that of Daedalus and his son Icarus’ flight from the island of Crete:

Now in this while [when Theseus was overcoming

the Minotaur] gan Daedalus a weariness to take

Of living like a banisht man and prisoner such a time

In Crete, and longed in his heart to see his native

But Seas enclosed him as if he had in prison be.

Then thought he: though both Sea and land King

Minos stop fro me,

I am assured he cannot stop the Aire and open

It is at this point that Daedalus turns to “uncoth Arts” (i.e., magic), bending “the force of all his wits / To alter natures course by craft”—and he constructs the famous wings that take him home, at the cost of the life of his son, who falls into the sea and drowns.

When Prospero stands “on the top,” looking down and commenting on the trapped figures below him, he to some extent figures the magician/artist Daedalus. Throughout the play he, like Daedalus, is almost trapped in his own intricate maze, an exile who “gan . . . a weariness to take / Of living like a banisht man and prisoner such a time,” who “longed in his heart to see his native Clime,” and who thus bent “the force of all his wits” and his magic powers to find a way to get himself and his child home. The associations of Prospero with Daedalus, his maze, and his magic flight are less accessible to us today than they would have been to a Renaissance audience. But the sense of Prospero’s weariness, of his hatred of exile, of the danger facing him as he heads back to Milan having abjured his magic—these complicating emotional factors, even without a specific awareness of the Daedalus parallels, are available to us. We notice them especially in Prospero’s epilogue, where he begs our help in wafting him off the island and safely back home.

Like The Tempest itself, then, Prospero is complicated, double. He, like the play, is woven from a variety of story materials, and like the play he represents a particular moment, the moment at which began a period of colonizing and empire-building that would completely alter the world, leaving a legacy with which we still live. But he, like the play, also embodies ancient stories of travel and exile and the emotions that accompany them. And The Tempest ’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century retellings and sequels (Browning’s “Caliban on Setebos,” Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror,” and such film versions as Forbidden Planet and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, to name but a few) suggest that those stories and emotions have continued to intrigue. The magician fascinates, the journey and the maze still tempt, despite the near certainty that magic—like all power—tends to corrupt and that islands and labyrinths hold as many monsters as they do “revels.”

• I am using the word “story” here both in its general sense of a narration of events and in the more particular sense that translates the Russian formalists’ term “fabula”—that is, the events sequenced in chronological order. The formalists contrast the “fabula” with the “szujet”—the fiction as structured by the author (a term I translate as “play”). See Keir Elam’s The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), pp. 119–26.
• See Barbara A. Mowat, “‘And that’s true, too’: Structures and Meaning in The Tempest ,” Renaissance Papers 1976 , pp. 37–50. The pertinent sections of the Argonaut stories are Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2:178–535, and Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 4:422–636; Virgil’s account of the Harpies as encountered by Aeneas and his men is found in the Aeneid 3:210–69.
• Aeneid , Book I, lines 261–64 (Guildford trans.).
• “A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight,” in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609 , ed. Louis B. Wright (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1964), pp. 1–101, esp. pp. 88–89.
• “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 23–26.
• Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993).
• See Edward W. Said, “Empire, Geography, and Culture” and “Images of the Past, Pure and Impure,” in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 3–14, 15–19.
• For example, in “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest ,” Alternative Shakespeares , ed. John Drakakis (pp. 192–205), Francis Barker and Peter Hulme state that “the discourse of colonialism” is the “dominant discursive con-text” for the play.

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Colonialism and The Tempest.

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Zahra Sadeghi

Colonization and imperialism are of those interesting critical conversation throughout the world and this study examines how English theater addressed, promoted, and at times challenged ideologies of colonization and notions of civility and civilization. The Tempest in regarded as a New World drama by many critics because of colonization and civilization debates presented on the London stage and depiction of the colonizers and the colonized to present and, at the same time, question those colonial debates. Shakespeare depicts the New World’s indigenous cultures in an ambiguous way to both present and question the ideologies of empire. This dramatization of the “other” helped sixteenth and seventeenth century audiences to recognize New World indigenous peoples as different rather than uncivilized and reevaluate what they have read or heard of these native peoples. Shakespeare presented the contemporary rhetoric through the medium of the theater and helped audience to visualize the process of conquest and colonization. He helped to civilize audiences about the reality of colonization, civility, and the New World. This theatrical medium makes audiences to challenge those established stereotypes of the New World natives and understand them as different, not inhuman or monster, and ignorant of European language and cultures, but no incapable of being civilized. Shakespeare, in dramatization of the New World, neither support nor oppose the process of colonization but he tries his best to show both sides of the issues and let the audiences to decide whether it is legitimate or not. This ambiguous representation of both colonizers and the colonized encourages the audience to examine colonial debates in as objective manner.

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Shakespeare in his last play The Tempest (1610-11) dramatizes Prospero to display a cultural consciousness and a way of seeing in which the self is highly exalted and ennobled while the other is degradingly condemned as the wicked and the rapist savage. Such an ideology is conspicuously presented through demonstrating two extremely contradictory characters of Prospero, the dethroned Duke form Milan and Caliban, the native citizen of the island Prospero controls. Prospero is presented as the wise and the powerful duke who can control not only human and spirits but also nature and natural phenomena. He is the rational, civilized and the benevolent agent with humanitarian concern whose source of power is magic that he uses for good tasks in contrast to the malignant magic power possessed by his rival Sycorax, Caliban’s mother. Soon Prospero starts to show irascible, tetchy characteristics and furious rage in dealing with the natives he controls by the power of his books of magic. At an...

Deborah I K E O L U W A Jayeoba

This study seeks to explore and enunciate the characteristics of and pointers to the presence of colonialism which validates the events of colonialism in these three plays: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Aime Casaire’s A Tempest and Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest exposes a Western view and political indifference to colonialism; neither invalidating nor justifying. Aime Casaire’s A Tempest and Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax presents a writing back and questioning as it restructures the narrative of colonialism in its adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

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This paper examines William Shakespeare's The Tempest as a text where colonial education backfires as Caliban resists the colonial teachings of Prospero and Miranda and doublecrosses them to assert his agency. Although The Tempest has received ample attention from post-colonial critics, little study has been done on the role that colonial education played in the power dynamics of the play. The article postulates that like a typical colonizer, Prospero acted like an educator to distort the socio-semiotics of Caliban with a view to eradicating his ancestral way of being, knowing, and doing but his attempt ultimately results in a failure as Caliban carries out a linguistic rebellion. The qualitative analysis of this research pinpoints Caliban's conscious attempt to decolonize himself by rejecting the colonial offerings of submissiveness and servitude, using the language of the colonizers as a weapon for counter-assault, and initiating the process of destroying the source of colonial knowledge.

Farhana haque

Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' represented the emblem of colonialism, racism, and social hierarchy. Prospero's superlative attitudes have created the prevalent touch of suppression over the native people in the play The Tempest. He was the man to supress the inhabitants in the strange land which he has been occupied illegally. Most of the characters in this play remained in a civilized way, although perfectly all of them were not civilized. Several times Prospero was referred as a tyrannical figure who was responsible about the concept of colonialism, racism and illustrated the ideas of social hierarchy. In the Renaissance world this social hierarchy has paved the way of rigidity, extreme political attitudes, God of higher class society. Prospero showed him as the true representator of Elizabethan social higher class. Hence the suppressive conquest has arrived over the lives of African, Asian and North American regions during the 16 th century which was known as Shakespearean era. Later on, this process came to be known as colonialism, racism and the phase of social hierarchy. As a whole the effort of this paper is to unfold the character of Prospero to present the British colonization over the inferior peoples in a strange native land.

Early modern literature in history

Stephen Wittek

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In this theses paper I tried to explore the postcolonial features in the play ‘The Tempest’ of William Shakespeare. This is my personal intention to prove that The Tempest by William Shakespeare plays an important role in the development of post-colonial literature and criticism. It was created in a moment when the colonial system was just beginning to come into being and that is now falling apart from us. I tried to investigate what the post-colonial writers and critics found in The Tempest evidence of a history of colonial context. Because my argument depends on the contention that The Tempest was created in a world where colonialism was coming into being. I explored the historical context surrounding the moment of the play’s creation , in spite of the contention of many historians and some literary critics to the contrary. After verifying and illustrating the historical roots of several popular themes in The Tempest that post-colonial writers have discussed , I turn to the work of writers and critics from the Third World to show how The Tempest plays a significant role in postcolonial studies. It is a matter of analyzing the issues such as subjugation, dominance and language in relation to power. It also discusses the complex relationship that exists between the master and slave. This text “Tempest” have dealt with each issue in its own way. Frantz Fanon‘s Black Skin White Mask , Edward Said‘s Orientalism, Peter Barry’s Beginning theory, Key Concepts Of Post-Colonial Studies and some more texts that I have studied in perspective of Post-Colonial view. I have been used these texts from Post-colonial perspective just for making my point of view a practical one. Except from these texts as primary sources I also took help from many journals, articles and other online resources that i have been used as secondary sources.

International Review of Humanities Studies

amir mohammad

The paper focuses on how the colonizers who in this play are Prospero and Miranda in particular, endeavor to inflict their own socio-cultural precept including their language to make the colonized fully unprotected in The Tempest as a colonial play, but eventually fail to fulfill this attempt. In addition, the high importance of learning the language of the colonizer by the colonized gets illuminated which finally contributes to Caliban so as to undermine the roots of the colonizer in the colony. This article fully evaluates affected literary works by The Tempest, the importance of transferring the colonizer's language to the colony, and the main colonizer and his manners and attitudes towards the colonized; it also brings forth postcolonial concepts including Mimicry, Orientalism, the double consciousness of the colonized and his unhomeliness. Furthermore, it features the dirge situation of mimic men who come across a disappointing dead end from both colonizers and the colonized. After all, this article reflects on the ever-presence of ambivalence and mimicry in colonial discourse and also the vital importance of violence as an inseparable part of the decolonization.

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation (IJLLT)

The twentieth century brought about a new form of understanding, producing and living art that has become a mean to react against the oppression that different groups suffered for centuries. Post-colonial criticism is an approach of analysis that questions racial identity and gender equity. This study investigates how Shakespeare's plays relate to the social codes and the more recent history of the reception of Shakespearian drama within decolonization movements. The Tempest by Shakespeare is defined as a postcolonial text because the colonised is represented in regarding cultural hybridity in which the Self and the Other enlace the colonial experience. Literature has naturally given a voice to these omitted groups and this play is thought to be an early post-colonial work by some scholars. Shakespeare had intended to criticise the European attack of the new lands to the West, and the theme of colonialism is outrightly presented in The Tempest. Post-colonial reading of the text examines the projection of the colonial experience back to Europe. Slavery, colonialism, and the power of changing other civilisations by the West are themes to make inferences.

Chung Chin-Yi

Prospero&#39;s magical powers are that of a God like creator who seeks not to imprison and merely subjugate his subjects to bend them to his will but to redeem them and lead to their moral betterment and growth, as was seen in his attempt to give Caliban an education, his attempt to discipline Ferdinand through hardship, and his attempt to bring Alonso and Sebastian towards repentance. A postcolonial reading merely highlights colonialism as violence without acknowledging the redemptive nature of civilization as Alonso and Sebastian learn that sin has consequences, as does Caliban when he is punished by Prospero after his attempted rape of Miranda. Indeed it is true that Prospero tyrannically subjects all his subjects on the island to hardship but it is for their betterment and moral growth, like God desires towards sinners, that Prospero also desires and hence Prospero is not a mere tyrant but like God, a teacher of lessons through the suffering that he brings about in order to inst...

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Tempest — A Post-Colonial Interpretation of The Tempest

The Tempest from a Post-colonial Point of View

• Categories: The Tempest William Shakespeare

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Words: 1718 |

Published: Jun 29, 2018

Words: 1718 | Pages: 4 | 9 min read

Prospero's assumption of his right to rule the island, 'to be lord on't', is the natural assumption of a European prince...There is ample testimony to the corrupting effect upon natives of contact with dissolute Europeans - 'Christian savages sent to convert heathen savages', as Fuller put it.3

Caliban is not cannibal - in fact he rarely touches meat at all - his name seems more like a mockery of stereotypes than a mark of monstrosity, and in our haste to confirm the link between 'cannibal' and 'Indian' outside the text, we lose track of the way in which Caliban severs the link within the text.4

Be not afeard; this isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; (3.2 174-182).

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The Tempest

A icey allegory to colonialism: the tempest anonymous 10th grade.

The Tempest, is about a marooned sorcerer, Prospero who was exiled from both his land and his ruling position in Naples. As a result of this, Prospero is seething with rage. He uses his magical powers to crash the king-who happens to be his brother- and all of his court’s ship onto his remote island. Shakespeare wrote The Tempest in the year 1611, around the time colonialism began to develop into a common ritual throughout the world. While reading The Tempest, one can see that it is an allegory to colonialism, as Caliban, a native of the island is repeatedly manipulated and used by the foreigners and considered an asset not a human. This mirrors the events that happened in real life during the time of the play.

While colonialism has its perks for the colonizers, the white European invaders continuously use Caliban to their own advantage while giving him little to no benefits, creating a parallel between The Tempest and colonization in the 1600s. Soon after the large group of shipwrecked nobles has arrived, they begin to manipulate Caliban using alcohol. At one point, Stephano and Trinculo force Caliban to consume alcohol. Once Caliban has fallen drunk to the ill beverage, Trinculo, a man who was shipwrecked convinces him that...

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