SHAKESPEARE's The Tempest and the Allegories of Colonialism
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- Опубліковано 23 жов 2020
- This episode will be using Shakespeare’s The Tempest to explore a variety of questions to do with colonialism, resistance, and the relationship between Nature, artifice, and ideology as demonstrated in the play. A central focus will be on the ways in which the play allows us to think productively about the forms of colonial space-making that inextricably connected the idea of governance those of beauty and proportion, thus also suggesting a hierarchy between the beautiful and the ugly as subjects of colonialism. Caliban’s famous rebelliousness will be contrasted to Ariel’s pliant obsequiousness to show how each of them is produced through forms of colonial ideology that is masked in the language of Nature. Some suggested readings are also listed below.
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Suggested Reading:
- Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, 1984.
- Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Modern English Culture, 1990
- Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, 1991.
- Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, 1995.
-Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from ‘Utopia’ to ‘The Tempest’, 1992.
An immensely enriching lecture. Helped me a great deal in writing a paper on The Tempest. Thank you, Professor Quayson!
Your explanation is very simple. It really helped me in my preparation.
I can say that "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"
Thanks you sir
love from INDIA:)
Thank you so much for this video! I am from Australia and am writing a paper for my Literature and decolonisation class, I found this super helpful.
A thoroughly engaging and insightful lecture. Thank you and hello from Hamilton College!
"‘By contraries execute all things’: Figures of the savage in European philosophy": Alberto Toscano has an interesting take on THE TEMPEST. Gonzalo, one of the characters, posits a Rouseauesque utopia sans all the institutions of class society: "a European’s utopia, of the island as tabula rasa where one may elide or invert civilisation and its discontents; it is not a description of the ‘natives ...",
Thank you Professor, for such an insightful video on post colonial aspect :)
Absolutely brilliant video- really helped me with my college dissertation, which is on Caliban and the role of language in colonialism. Thanks so much Professor :)
Ophelia, I a glad you found it useful. And thanks for letting me know. This is much appreciated.
Thank you, I am researching the play to prepare for an audition. Everything you shared was super helpful. Are you able to share access to the essays you mentioned? or even a pdf copy of the play?
I know it’s been 2 years, but I gotta know, did u get the part?
I enjoyed the lecture, but somewhat grating is the assertion near the outset that "The Tempest" was the last of Shakespeare's plays. It may have been the last of Shakespeare's sole-authored plays, but Shakespeare wrote at least a substantial portion (perhaps the whole, but at least a substantial portion) of "Henry VIII" after "The Tempest." Shakespeare probably also wrote a substantial portion of "The Two Noble Kinsmen" as the final drama in which he had a hand. "The Tempest" does tend to come across as Shakespeare's farewell to playwriting, but he was not quite finished with that activity when he wrote it.
LOVE YOUR VIDEOS!!!
fabulous - thank you
Glad you enjoyed it
thanks a lot prof
You are most welcome, Agyeiwaa.
I am planning to write a research paper on Caliban and disability.....I need guidance to write my paper.
Dear Astha, I hope the video helps you with writing your research paper. Good luck with it!
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I've seen Caliban used as a metaphor countless times, esp. with respect to colonialism. And it's evident that Prospero usurped whatever was on the island before he took possession. That much is not difficult to understand. I've seen the play only once, and I was confused about what was happening. All I remember is the beautiful black women who played all the female parts. Your final comments about Ariel are intriguing (nature viz. artifice) & key I think, but I still find it difficult to unravel the ideological structure of the play and how in the end Shakespeare understood his own creation and what he unconsciously might have proved.
As with anything from Shakespeare, unravelling anything is always a large task. But in this case the lines are fairly straightforward: it is about power and control versus slavery and rebellion. This at least is one central part of it. The rest is given over to standard plot devices of impediments in the face of the growth of true love, which in Shakespeare typically emerges at first sight. Then there is the whole superstructure of the political problems Prospero had while in Milan, with the events on the island serving to displace them onto a different theatre of action.
There is one reference to Bermuda ("the still vex'd Bermoothes"), which may be a reference to an area frequented by prostitutes in London - not "references" (in pliral). In any case, it is clearly elsewhere with the implication that is a far-away place. The island is clearly in the central Mediterranean, not the Caribbean since we know that the Neapolitans are returning from Tunis (where Claribel has just been married). That the island could be reached from Algeria, Tunis, Naples and Milan places it somewhere near to Sicily, not in North Africa and certainly not in the Caribbean. Repeating again and again the Post-colonial mantra about this play doesn't make it true.
Hi Franklin, you are of course entitled to your views. I address the North African provenance of the island in the episode. But the convention of seeing a Caribbean provenance of the island in The Tempest long predates Postcolonial Studies, which started in a trickle in the late 1980s and only came into full force in the 1990s. The first systematic attempt to prove a Caribbean providence was put forward by Edmond Malone in 1808 and was titled "An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakespeare's Tempest Were Derived; and Its True Date Ascertained". Malone was manifestly not a postcolonial scholar. But I also say this in the episode: "But the Age of Exploration was also the age of imaginative storytelling about the places that had been discovered. While travelers’ tales did not start with the Age of Exploration, they did get intensified during that period, and provided many examples of merchant and sailor tales that circulated widely. Some of these can be assumed to have been familiar to Shakespeare in his day. Stories of encounter as Europeans moved out in search of new lands rapidly evolved into accounts that sought to impose European patterns and ideas on their expanding physical world, while also providing models for thinking about these places for people in the metropolitan imperial capital itself. For example, William Strachey’s “A True Repertory of the Wreck in Bermuda” of 1610, which gave an account of the shipwreck of the ship called the Sea Venture off the coast of Bermuda as it was heading for Virginia was widely known and is taken to be one of the sources for the image of the shipwreck in the opening of The Tempest. The Florentine Antonio Pigafetta’s The First Voyage Around the World, 1519-1522 was also widely popular when it was first published in 1534 and was available in translation in England. Like other travelers’ tales of the period, it purported to provide a “true” account of the places that had been encountered in the New World."
@@CriticReadingWriting Thank you for your prompt and detailed reply. I'm sure you will agree that Malone's 19th-century provenance doesn't, in and of itself, make it true. While the Pigafetta origin of Setabos seems undoubted, that was a voyage of discovery not colonialism. My problem with your school of thought is that it is a moving target. Anything that can possibly be linked to events outside Europe is fair game; so discovery in South America is as valid as people being marooned on an uninhabited island, as events in Ireland or North Africa. Colonialism means the intentional suubjugation of a foreign people in order to exploit them and their resources. Either the first colonial ruler of the island is Sycorax or the Duke of Milan is not a colonialist: he does not choose to go to the island, he does not exploit the island in the interest of the metropolis and he leaves at the first possible opportunity. In other words, exactly the same relationship as Duke Senior has with the Forest in As You Like It (which of course predates Strachey's account). Strachey's account of the storm is somewhat similar to Prospero's (which proves nothing - it's just an account of a storm) but so is the account of the storm suffered by St. Paul in the Bible (a known published source at the time, which we know Shakespeare consulted, as opposed to a manuscript he might have seen). However, the biggest problem for me with the post-colonial interpretation of The Tempest is the fact that the play's source is so clearly the Scenarios of the Commedia dell'Arte (which were published in England at the time of writing): nobody has ever suggested that they were related to colonialism. By the way, you make some allusions to Prospero calling Caliban "slave" near the beginning of your lecture. There is nothing to read into this: Shakespeare uses the hateful word 130 times in his work almost always in reference to Europeans with the meaning either of "villain/rascal" or "churlish servant", never to trafficked and enslaved Africans, which is effectively a later shameful phenomenon as regards England (as is any successful English colony in the New World). Given Raleigh's successful collaboration with the Cimarrons against the Spanish in the Caribbean, a colonialist, colour-conscious interpretation of the play wouldn't make sense at time of writing (I do not doubt that the play was later used with colonialist and indeed racist intent, but that's not Shakespeare's fault). Similarly, English political intrigues with African states against the Spanish would mean that a racist interpretation of the play in the reigning political climate of the early 17th Century wouldn't make much sense as regards Africa, either. As we know from Dr Kauffman's work on "black Tudors", there were hundreds of Black British people in Shakespeare's England working as everything from salvage divers to musicians to servants to gardeners. None of them were enslaved as slavery was illegal in England at the time (as the contemporary courts confirmed). Anyway, I won't bore you further. Best regards and thank you for this cordial interaction. Nick