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Shakespeare Drama Round Table

The historical, social and cultural background of “The Tempest”, 

in the context of the geographical discoveries and the practices of colonizing the locals  

 

I

 

Considered to have been written in 1610-1611, and first performed at Court by the King’s Men in the fall of 1611, The Tempest   is indeed one of the greatest Shakespeare’s plays. It is difficult to assert where the plot for the play was taken from, as it seems to be an amalgamation of different sources from classical literature. However, some scholars consider the plot to be entirely original. The Tempest   does, however, draw on travel literature of its time, most notably on the accounts of a tempest off the Bermudas that nearly wrecked a fleet of colonial ships sailing from Plymouth to Virginia. The play addresses the most important moments of being such as love, friendship, freedom, revenge, sense of forgiveness and others, while the action is laid on a mythical island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. 

It seems that the nearly uninhabited island set in a lonely sea presents the sense of infinite possibility to almost everyone who lands there, it is like a sweet piece which everyone wants to grasp, as it seems to be “just an island” but setting one’s foot there turns out to be much more challenging. If we talk about the protagonist, Prospero, he, being in the isolation due to the circumstances found the island to be an ideal place to school his daughter Miranda. Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, worked her magic there after she was exiled from Algeria. Caliban, once alone on the island, now Prospero’s slave, later laments that he had been his own king. As he attempts to comfort Alonso, Gonzalo imagines an utopian society on the island, over which he would rule.  

Òhe island is represented as a self-sustaining society, whose symbolic meaning relies both on the feature of insularity, as well as the feature of commonness. And if it comes to the storm, it depicts the twists and turns of one's life, and how quickly things can change because of one single event, while the key actions are like magnetized to the magic place. The storm brought justice to Prospero, and love to Miranda, along with affecting all of the characters in this play, and it is now perfectly clear that nearly all the action of the play takes place in different parts of the island. 

 

In other words, the island connotes isolation and uniqueness: it is full of drama. The heroes’ being on the island challenges them all, it is where everything becomes clear and resolved. The place is a real redemption to them: they finally meet all together, and the most burning issues are determined: Alonso, already in despair, meets his son, Ferdinand, who has also lost hope that they would ever meet again; moreover, the king sees his son as happy as he has never seen him before – the young man has found his love – Miranda, whom he met on the magical island. And Prospero, seeing that everything has improved, makes everyone free of his denunciation and claims that from now on he will be the rightful duke, and he says that he wants to be pardoned and he finally leaves the island ‘As you from crimes would pardon'd be, Let your indulgence set me free’. All in all, the island in The Tempest   is a magical place which has lead to real changes in people’s lives.  

 

II

 

There was one more significant moment related to the island: colonialism. In Shakespeare's day, most of the planet was still being "discovered", and stories were brought back from distant islands, with myths about the Cannibals of the Caribbean, faraway Edens, and distant tropical Utopias. With the character Caliban (whose name is almost an anagram of Cannibal, also resembling "Cariban", the term then used for natives in the West Indies), Shakespeare may be offering an in-depth discussion into the morality of colonialism. Different clues to this point are found in the play, including Gonzalo's description of Utopia, Prospero's enslavement of Caliban, and Caliban's subsequent resentment. Caliban is also shown as one of the most natural characters in the play, who is very much in touch with the natural world (and modern audiences have come to view him as far nobler than two of his Old World friends, Stephano and Trinculo, although the original intention of the author may have been different). There is evidence that Shakespeare drew on Montaigne's essay “Of Cannibals”(which discusses the values of societies insulated from European influences) while writing “The Tempest”.  

Starting from about 1950, with the publication of “Psychology of Colonization” by Octave Mannoni, “The Tempest” has been viewed more and more through the lens of postcolonial theory. This new approach to the text explored the effect of the coloniser (Prospero) on the colonised (Ariel and Caliban). Though Ariel is often overlooked in these debates in favour of the more intriguing Caliban, he is nonetheless an essential component of them. The French writer Aime Cesaire, in his play “Une Tempete” sets “The Tempest” in Haiti, portraying Ariel as a mulatto who, unlike the more rebellious Caliban, feels that negotiation and partnership is the way to freedom from the colonisers. Fernandez Retamar sets his version of the play in Cuba, and portrays Ariel as a wealthy Cuban (in comparison to the lower-class Caliban) who also must choose between rebellion and negotiation. Although scholars have suggested that Ariel’s dialogue with Caliban in Act two, Scene one, contains hints to a future alliance between the two when Prospero leaves, Ariel is generally viewed by scholars as the good servant, in comparison with the conniving Caliban - a view, which Shakespeare's audience may well have shared. Ariel is used by some postcolonial writers as a symbol of their efforts to overcome the effects of colonisation on their culture. Michelle Cliff, for example, a Jamaican author, has said that she tries to combine Caliban and Ariel within herself to create a way of writing that represents her culture better. Such use of Ariel in postcolonial thought is far from uncommon; the spirit is even the namesake of a scholarly journal covering post-colonial criticism.  

“The Tempest” has only one female character, Miranda. Other women, such as Caliban's mother Sycorax, Miranda's mother and Alonso's daughter Claribel, are only mentioned. Because of the small role women play in the story in comparison to other Shakespeare plays, “The Tempest” has not attracted much feminist criticism. Miranda is typically viewed as one who is completely deprived of freedom by her father. Her only duty in his eyes is to remain chaste. Ann Thompson argues that Miranda, in a manner typical of women in a colonial atmosphere, has completely internalised the patriarchal order of things, thinking of herself as subordinate to her father. 

 

III

 

From the humanists’ point of view, “The Tempest” is all about freedom, both personal and national. The unrestricted national liberty influences people in a horrible way which we watch in the behaviour of Trinculo and Stephano, a drunken jester and a drunken butler. The other form of freedom is personal, which Caliban and Ariel ask for. While the situation with Caliban stays unchangeable, Ariel finally gains his freedom. Actually, there is another interesting parallel, with Prospero willing to get his freedom, and losing his power as a result. In short, “The Tempest” is a play of freedom and liberty that makes us think about what it is to be free and how free people behave. 

 

We must not forget to mention among all other things in the play, that the major changes in philosophy and science took place in that age, often characterized as the Scientific revolution. The books are the only source of power for Prospero; to be a magician means to be a clever person that leads us to the knowledge itself. It was his love of knowledge that made him lose his crown. Was it worth it or not? The answer is found in the play. 

The intricate interactions of reality and illusion extend from the beginning to the end of the play. The opening scene, in which the ship is beset by storm and starts to sink, seems realistic; yet the next scene assures us that the manifest destruction was illusory. At the play’s end, the Epilogue blurs the distinction between reality and illusion by letting the speaker be partly Prospero, and partly the author. Its last six lines, in which that voice not only prays for the audience’s indulgence but also, apparently, solicits their prayers to God, the ultimate source of mercy, are certainly more earnest and devout, in tone and substance, than is customary in such an epilogue: 

 

            Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
(ELIPOGUE spoken by Prospero)

 

Last but not least, “The Tempest” expresses the age it was written in, the age when the moral and the scientific ran high, when people could rise in the world at one time, and fall down at another. This explains the happy ending, when Prospero forgives everyone and everything. Let us read it as a piece of advice, provided by Shakespeare for the generations to come. 

Valentina Polkovnikova, Julie Ivanova, Tatiana Drozdova
3rd-year students.
 



×èòàåì

William Shakespeare:

«The purpose of playing <…> both at first and now, was and is to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure».  

(Hamlet. Act 3, scene II.)