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Jean Casimir once said that when anyone sits down to write the history of Columbus arriving on the shores of Hispaniola and he encounters indigenous people for the first time the historian has to make a decision: Are you on the boat or on the shore? In other words, from whose perspective are you going to read or write this history? The way people talk about The Tempest by William Shakespeare has changed
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dramatically over time. The conversations people have about the play today are wildly different than conversations they had a couple hundred years ago. One of the reasons I find such value in Shakespeare studies generally is the opportunity to engage in a conversation across time and space. When I sit down to research these essays, I am largely reading the same text the Romantic poets of the 19th century read or political revolutionaries
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in Madagascar during the mid-twentieth. We are all engaging with the same text. The Shakespearean play- any of his plays- provides a space for intellectual conversations and reflections between people with different life experiences over time and space. And, not surprisingly, the focus of that conversation will necessarily evolve and offer new insights and new connections between the work of art and the world in which it appears.
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For readers and audience members in the 18th century, for example, the character of Prospero embodied wisdom and benevolent leadership. For readers in the 20th century, he embodies a colonizer who vainly seeks control over the bodies of others: he enslaves Caliban and Ariel while asserting patriarchal control over his daughter’s sexuality. Whenever we read or write something, we read or write it from a subjective position,
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so a re-evaluation of characters and situations is inevitable over time. During the 20th century, as colonized peoples gained independence by overthrowing colonial powers, new readings of The Tempest began to appear within that context, and those readings changed the direction of the conversation around the play. Some of these new readings utilized a critical lens called “Post-Colonial Theory”.
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Post-colonial readings of The Tempest acknowledge the choice Jean Casimir articulated. When we sit down to read or watch this play, are we on Prospero’s boat or Caliban’s shore? Today I hope to provide an introduction to this part of the conversation surrounding The Tempest and if this sounds like your kind of thing, please consider subscribing. [Intro Animation] Part I: Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory
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If we’re going to do a Post-Colonial reading, let’s first establish a definition of our terms. I’ll be using a definition from Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory by Jyotsna Singh. In that book, she writes that Post-Colonial Theory is “Put simply… an academic study of the cultural legacy of European colonialism, showing how the literature of former colonial powers represented and often distorted colonial history and the experiences of the native subjects and,
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how, in turn, colonized peoples articulated and reclaimed their identity and history by interrogating European culture and history.” And she adds that it provides “a critical vocabulary whereby we can work through the past in the present and vice versa.” Using this definition, a Post-Colonial reading of The Tempest will first situate the text inside pre-imperialist England at the moment English people and ships
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first begin their imperialist and colonial project. This reading will then examine how the play represents the experience of the native subjects and how colonized peoples reclaimed their identity in part through the interrogation of this particular play. So, to begin, let’s situate the text inside early 17th Century England, a nation encountering other people and cultures on a larger scale than ever before. With innovations
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in shipping and the printing press– transportation and communication technologies– the world must have seemed a little smaller to people living in London. Other geographies with other people and other cultures must have seemed closer, more visible, and often threatening. This would be true of their relationship with the people and cultures present in Continental Europe. Even more dramatically, though, England was forming a colony in what is now Virginia and
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discovered they needed to negotiate relations with indigenous peoples in the area who had never, to give one example, heard of Christianity. All this produced a lot of anxiety: the hope and excitement of first encounters alongside the fear of those encounters. The [quote] “Other” could provide new ideas, new types of crops, and new economic opportunities… but encountering new cultures also threatened English identity
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through outside influence. What if those new ideas or new crops are more attractive than the traditional ideas or the traditional cuisine? What would become of English heritage? This kind of thinking– this fear of being replaced– often provokes conservative responses as people seek to define their identities with clear borders. The resulting nationalism depends on narratives of superiority. In the case of 17th century England,
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this results in the belief that England has the right and responsibility to impose the English language and English culture onto any [quote] “other” they encounter. This was not an experience unique to England during this period. The French thinker and essayist Michel de Montaigne recognized the way Europeans crafted narratives of their own superiority within these encounters. His essay, entitled “On Cannibals”, written in the 1570’s,
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reflects his thoughts on his countrymen’s perception of indigenous peoples in Brazil as savage. In that essay, he interrogates the perception that indigenous people are morally inferior to the French by attempting to see the French from the perspective of those indigenous people. The French may not eat human flesh, but they do tear each other apart in war and allow their own countrymen to starve to death through systems of inequality. In his essays,
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Montaigne attempted to write from the perspective of the shore rather than the boat. I bring this up not only because of my deep love of Montaigne but because this essay is source material for The Tempest. Shakespeare quotes it nearly verbatim through Gonzalo in Act 2. Additionally, Caliban’s relationship with Stephano and Trinculo appears to take the same position as Montaigne: those European characters have a dubious claim to moral superiority over
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Caliban. Clearly, in The Tempest Shakespeare engages with his contemporaries on the topic of cultural encounter and exchange. It is a play that describes the dynamics of these first encounters. Moreover, the play obviously explores the nature of political authority. The two characters who speak the most lines in the play are Prospero and Caliban. Prospero is European with authority granted to him, according to the logic of the play,
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through his bloodline and his books… his heritage, and his culture. He is the Duke of Milan by birth and has been illegitimately removed and exiled to a scarcely populated island which he controls through magic or technology acquired from his books. And Caliban was King of that Island before Prospero arrived. He claims authority through his mother, his knowledge of the island, and the simple claim that he was there first. His
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relationship with Prospero can easily be read as the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. In other words, and to return to our definition, this is a work of literature, produced within the world of a burgeoning colonial power, representing the dynamics of colonialism and the experience of colonized subjects. So our next step will be to examine how this play actually characterizes the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in this play, and
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how does that characterization work. In other words, how exactly does this play treat those two characters and their relationship? And how has that relationship been perceived within different contexts? Part II: Caliban and Prospero To investigate how these characters are represented, we can begin with the cast list as it appears in the first printed edition of the play: the First Folio. It lists Caliban as “a saluage
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and deformed slaue”. So, being a “savage” is an essential part of his character, and “savage” is a moral judgment. It’s not a neutral description like Miranda’s as “Daughter” or Sebastian’s as “Brother”. Similarly, Prospero is listed as “The Right Duke of Milan” which implicitly endorses the European hierarchies of authority and power. This is all to say that the play’s first page characterizes Caliban as essentially inferior while validating Prospero’s authority.
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And this cast list gives us a fairly accurate representation of the way the play was read throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, at least by English readers and audiences: Caliban IS a savage. He’s uncivilized, sexually deviant, and generally unfit for society. By characterizing him in this way, the play's logic justifies the violence and control that Prospero inflicts on him. Caliban requires a firm hand. Prospero enslaves him for his own good and the good of the island.
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It was common in early readings of the play to see Caliban as a contrast to Ariel and Miranda. In 1777, for example, Maurice Morgann claimed that Caliban “is the passion itself, or rather a compound of malice, servility, and lust, substantiated; and therefore best shewn in contrast with the lightness of Ariel and the innocence of Miranda”. So Caliban, the once King of this island, is the substantiation of malice, servility and
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lust. Prospero has to control him. If he failed to control Caliban, it would be a failure to control malice and lust itself. Caliban must be enslaved and re-educated to preserve civilization. To keep this 17th and 18th-century consistent, we have to view Prospero as an effective and wise leader. His reluctance to take control of Milan 12 years before the play starts resulted in his exile, but now, during the action of this play, he’s learned his lesson and takes
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responsibility for the governance of the Island. Enslaving Caliban and maintaining order on the island is proof that he’s more fit for leadership in Milan than he had been. To watch this play is to watch the effect of Prospero’s leadership, and since the play ends with a happy marriage and forgiveness, Prospero earns the reputation of an effective and benevolent leader– or at least that’s his reputation for the first
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couple hundred years. That’s how people viewed this play through the 17th and 18th century. But that’s not the only way to read this text. The perception of these two characters, Prospero and Caliban, and their relationship to each other evolves over time. If we, as readers, choose to de-emphasize Caliban’s anger and instead focus more on his ability to hear the music of the island and his relationship with Stephano and Tinculo,
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then new conversations appear. If we are less interested in imperialist narratives and more interested in environmental narratives, our perception of Caliban will change. Through his connection to the island, Caliban is the character most associated with nature. He is of the earth and knows where everything is. He knows the best springs and which berries to pick. So when the Romantic poets of the early 19th century started reading this play,
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they brought their characteristic love of nature and viewed Caliban with more sympathy. William Hazlitt, for example, wrote that Shakespeare “has described the brutal mind of Caliban in contact with the pure and original forms of nature; the character grows out of the soil where it is rooted uncontrouled, uncouth and wild” and this association with nature makes him superior, in a moral sense, to Stephano
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and Trincolo who have a greater association with civilization and its corruption. The relationship between Caliban and Trinculo muddies the perception that civilization is unambiguously good. Hazlitt would go so far as to argue that Caliban is the legitimate ruler of the Island. And William Hazlitt is certainly not the last one to argue that. At this point, I think it’s useful to return to the play itself to show how a sympathetic reading of
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Caliban is possible even with his initial characterization on the character list. Part III: Sympathy for Caliban Yes, Caliban is listed as a Savage. He also pretty neatly fits into a popular European trope of the “Wild Man” who occupies a human form but is removed from civilization. However, the play treats him with more nuance than that. So let’s look at how his character operates within the story itself.
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Our first introduction to Caliban is in Act 1 Scene 2 which begins with Prospero trying very hard to control the narrative surrounding his exile from Milan. In the first part of the scene, Prospero relates the tale of his life to Miranda, and throughout the entire story he keeps saying “Mark me” and “dost though hear” and other demands that she listen to him closely. In the audience, you really get the sense that he needs his story to be heard and understood. He needs
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everyone to know he is the rightful ruler who was illegitimately usurped. This persistent demand to be heard establishes that power is a story we tell about the world, and he needs to rehearse his story to legitimate his position. When Caliban enters the scene Prospero continues to force his narrative of control and legitimacy. Caliban immediately complicates this situation by providing a
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competing story. Caliban says that the island is his, not Prospero’s, and, similar to Prospero, Caliban needs everyone to know he is the rightful ruler who has been illegitimately usurped. Prospero may be used to European patrilineal systems of inheritance, but Caliban claims authority through his mother. Both characters need to find a narrative that justifies the legitimacy of their position when confronted with competing narratives.
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Caliban also provides additional information about his past with Prospero. Apparently, he and Prospero initially had a relationship of mutual exchange without hierarchy. Prospero gave Caliban fancy water with berries in it and taught him to speak his language, and Caliban taught Prospero about the island. Prospero had book knowledge; Caliban had land experience. They complimented each other. Prospero doesn’t deny any of the facts of this story,
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just the interpretation of the facts. To defend his interpretation he starts by calling Caliban a liar right before confirming the truth of Caliban’s narrative.
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They DID have a respectful relationship and live together, but Prospero casts this relationship not as one of mutual exchange but of charity. Prospero claims to have treated Caliban with human care even though he’s filth. Prospero is using his language here to assert a hierarchy, but his anger and insistence on being listened to expose an anxiety about this exchange and implicitly an anxiety about the legitimacy of colonialism: The imperialist project will require
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narratives that justify political authority, and since there is no moral foundation for those narratives, they need to be legitimated through anger, violence, and enslavement. Where Prospero sought political authority and the establishment of hierarchies with him on top, Caliban sought equality. Caliban desired to merge the two kingdoms he viewed as equal and aspired to populate the island with little Calibans. The areas once ruled by
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Sycorax and Prospero could be joined in a union between their children, Caliban and Miranda, and this doesn’t feel meaningfully different than what every other character in the play wants. Prospero wants to merge the kingdoms of Naples and Milan through Miranda and Ferdinand. Alonso wants to merge the kingdoms of Tunis and Naples through his daughter Claribel and the King of Tunis.
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[Side note] Obviously, Caliban, Prospero and Alonso all ignore the perspective of women and depend on an ideology of masculine control of feminine bodies, but that’s not the argument they’re having. They all assume masculine authority. I think Shakespeare also complicates that narrative, but that’s a different topic for a different video. Prospero ultimately finds a narrative that provides him with the authority he seeks– a
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moral justification for enslavement– when Caliban shows sexual interest in Miranda. Prospero uses Caliban’s attraction to Miranda to craft a story about sexual deviance, which then justifies Caliban’s enslavement. Caliban needs to control his lust and Prospero positions himself as someone who can civilize this wild-man. Notably, Prospero also seeks to control Ferdinand’s attraction to Miranda, but that takes a different form. Ferdinand is European, he’s noble,
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and he knows the rules of courtship. Caliban is African, proletariat, and doesn’t know the rules. Caliban’s desire isn’t restrained by the norms of polite society, and, as readers, it’s easy to identify a whiff of racism alongside the classism within this comparison. Caliban has to be racialized for this imperialist program to work. In other words, Prospero has to position Caliban within a racial hierarchy to justify his position of power.
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Consequently, Prospero insists on this narrative of Caliban as a wild-man, outside civilization, who cannot be trusted with freedom. The narrative of Caliban’s inferiority requires constant performance. He can barely mention Caliban’s name without stacking it with a bunch of dehumanizing insults. The anxiety Prospero has about Caliban successfully coupling with Miranda reflects a European imagination that fears
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desire between indigenous men and European women. These relationships, it was believed, could disrupt established forms of authority within a patriarchal order, and this fear results in Prospero enslaving Caliban and insisting on his characterization as a savage and an outsider. The play itself, though, resits Prospero’s characterization of Caliban in a lot of ways. When Prospero tells Ariel that Sycorax had littered the island with a freckled whelp, hag-born,
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a clear attempt to assert the inferiority of Caliban to everyone else on the island, Ariel quickly reminds us of Caliban's humanity: “yes, Caliban, her son”. Ariel shows the audience how to resist these attempts at dehumanization. Caliban isn’t a freckled whelp; he’s a son. Additionally, Caliban, when removed from Prospero at least, speaks some of the most poetic lines in the play. He claims that he’s only learned to curse in Prospero’s
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language but then says something like: 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; 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. These lines sound a lot like Prospero’s own lines in Act 4 when he tells us that “we are
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such stuff as dreams are made on”. Within the play, Prospero and Caliban share more qualities than either of them would like to admit. The play’s character list and its protagonist both try to force a particular characterization of Caliban– and yet Caliban resists that characterization. This is particularly noticeable when we compare him to Stephano and Trinculo. Stephano and Trinculo are Europeans who live and work in close proximity
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to European forms of authority, and yet they are a pair of drunken idiots who become distracted by the trappings of European power. Caliban, on the other hand, hears the music of the island and produces the labor that everyone else on the island depends upon. Through this relationship, we see that Caliban is more deeply connected to the real world because he is outside of European norms. The fancy shirts mean nothing to him,
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while the island means everything. He cares about the material reality, not the symbolic. And once we start reading the play like this– by being sensitive to the humanity of Caliban and the ways that his humanity is undermined and subverted by Propsero’s hollow rhetoric– we can see how and why Caliban’s character could be re-evaluated as part of a general interrogation of European culture within decolonization movements.
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Part IV: Caliban and Decolonization Before we dig into how Post-Colonial readings of the play have been important to decolonization movements, let’s just acknowledge that even though Shakespeare produced his plays at the dawn of Britain’s colonizing project, his work has been an important part of Britain’s cultural imperialism. Conversations about the importance of Shakespeare that stress his ability to illustrate a “universal human
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experience” implicitly assert whiteness and Britishness as humanity’s default setting. This underlying narrative of white supremacy is then used to coerce colonized areas to adopt the cultural norms and values of Britain through the study of Shakespeare. Alden and Virginia Vaughan wrote an incredible book on the Cultural History of Caliban that will be the backbone of this section. In the introduction, they articulate this
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point about Shakespeare’s role in cultural imperialism really clearly. “Shakespeare has also been widely read” they argue “because, as an instrument of British cultural imperialism, his plays entered perforce the curricula of nations around the world when British language and literature followed the British flag. The canon, one might say, succeeded the cannon. Thus The Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth, and other Shakespearean plays were read
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by children and adults from Sydney to Singapore, Quebec to Cape Town, Bridgetown to Bombay.” But like Caliban learning to curse with Prospero’s language, the inhabitants of colonized lands began to read Shakespeare’s work to reclaim their identity. Or, as Vaughan and Vaughan put it: “When the British Empire dissolved in the aftermath of World War II, Shakespearean motifs became handy weapons in the accompanying clash
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of words.” The character of Caliban became one of those handy weapons. For example, Octave Manonni, a French psychoanalyst who spent a couple of decades in Madagascar, published an influential reading of The Tempest entitled Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, first published in English in 1956. In it, he analyzes the colonial situation in Madagascar through two personality types he saw represented in Prospero and Caliban.
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Prosperos are the colonizers and Calibans are the colonizers. He claims that Prosperos become colonizers because of unresolved issues at home or in adolescence that cause them to seek validation abroad through technologies of control. He says that “no one becomes a real colonial who is not impelled by infantile complexes which were not properly resolved in adolescence”. Prospero loses control at home and then seeks control abroad to validate himself. Thus, the character of
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Prospero helps produce the critical vocabulary for understanding the psychology of colonial projects. Manonni also turns his analytic gaze on Caliban and claims that the colonized become dependent on the colonizer through those technologies of control and begin to internalize that dependence as inferiority. Manonni’s interpretation of Caliban has become very influential and is summarized well by Philip Mason’s Foreward to the American edition of
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the book. He writes that “Ariel is… the good native, the moderate nationalist, the gradualist, usually content to wait until it pleases Prospero to give him his freedom;... one quite expects Prospero to offer him a knighthood.” but Caliban “is the bad native, the nationalist, the extremist– the man who will be Prime Minister after independence. He has to be shut up,... not for making seditious speeches but for wanting to violate Miranda.” In other words, Ariel
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accommodates while Caliban rebels, and Prospero needs to manufacture reasons to punish Caliban in order to neuter his power. This distinction between Ariel and Caliban became very influential. But Manonni’s psychoanalytic approach is not the only way to do post-colonial analysis. Aimé Césaire, a poet and politician in Martinique rewrote the play as A Tempest. He adapts the plot to better reflect the colonial situation in Martinique. And In his version,
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Prospero is unambiguously an authoritarian slave master while Ariel and Caliban are an enslaved “mulatto” and Black respectively. [to be shot while editing] A quick note about that term [show on screen], though it was used in Cesaire’s time and by important thinkers interpreting his work, since the 1960’s it is rarely used except as an insult Césaire gives Caliban a larger role and a more powerful voice in critiquing the colonizer. So,
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if we return to the language of our definition of Post-Colonial Theory, this is a clear example of colonized peoples articulating and reclaiming their identity and history by interrogating European culture and history. Césaire rewrote a British play to surface the pernicious narratives of imperialist Europe. The Cuban intellectual Roberto Fernández Retemar also found value in the character
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of Caliban to understand his Cuban identity. He once declared that “Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same language– today he has no other– to curse him, to wish that the “red plague” would fall on him? I know of no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality... What is our history,
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what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban”. And that just about sums it up: British colonization aspired to replace the languages and stories of native peoples with their own, and now these Calibans use that same language and those same stories, like The Tempest, to curse the colonizers and redeem the character of Caliban. In doing so, these modern Calibans reclaim their identities– their histories– and reread the past
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from the perspective of the shore rather than the boat. They read The Tempest from the perspective of Caliban rather than Prospero. Part V: Conclusions There are, of course, some criticisms of reading the play through the lens of Post-Colonial Theory: After all, Prospero never intends to stay on the island, and Caliban is not indigenous but arrived there with his mother who was also in exile. Some say the colonizer dynamic
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is simply used as a metaphor for theater: Prospero the writer or director with the others representing actors. In other words, Prospero’s relationship to Caliban is simply a representation of Shakespeare’s relationship to an unruly comedic actor named William Kempe. Regardless of these criticisms, Post-Colonial Theory has provided important perspectives and readings of this play. No one reading it in the 21st century can read Prospero as
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unambiguously benevolent and Caliban as unambiguously savage and we largely have Post-Colonial theory to thank for revealing this complexity and nuance in the characters. I’ll end with a quote from Sandra Young’s essay “How Have Post-Colonial Approaches Enriched Shakespeare’s Work”. There she argues that “Post-colonial methodologies have liberating implications for Shakespeare’s plays as sites of cultural imagining and have allowed Shakespeare’s
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work to become an ally in the struggle against racist abuse of power. At their best, post-colonial approaches do more than simply enrich and diversify the creative palette available to theatre-makers and their audiences. They provide the tools and the vocabulary to confront the operations of power and privilege and affirm the possibility of a more just world.” This video would not be possible without the work of so many scholars and historians. There
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is a full bibliography in the description below. Additionally, I received feedback and notes on the script from Dr. Margo Hendricks, professor emerita of literature who now writes incredible mystery novels based on Shakespeare plays. I’ll link to her website in the description as well. I’ll be back in the fall with a series on Twelfth Night. Please subscribe to be notified when that season is published.
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