Consider, for example, the key issue of language. In this play, it's not the case that the Europeans forced Caliban to forget his language and learn theirs. Before they came Caliban had no language at all. This is surely a key point. One can imagine how very different the impact of this play would be if Caliban had some other island natives with him and if they shared their own language and customs, which Prospero then forcibly suppressed. Then the issues of cultural oppression would be irresistibly there. As it stands, making Caliban the representative of a native culture would seem to require putting in the play something that not only is not there but which is expressly excluded.
So if I have to choose between a vision of Caliban which sees him as a semi-human brute (pure nature with no nurture) and a vision which sees him as a misunderstood and oppressed native person, then on the evidence of the play, I would tend to favour the first
But such political approaches to the play all have trouble with the most obvious element in Ariel's character, his non-human nature and his magical powers, which contribute so massively to the play's action and its theatrical effects. After all, if we are going to apply some allegory of colonialism to the play, then we need to be able to account for such an important part of it (and for Prospero's "release" of Ariel from imprisonment in nature). We cannot simply ignore such points because they don't fit. For that reason, it may be significant that political treatments of the Tempest tend to give Caliban far more space than Ariel (who often hardly gets mentioned).
One possible interpretation (which I have not come across, although I'm sure someone must have offered it somewhere) is to combine both the theatrical and the political approaches and explore the play as some vision of the theatrical basis for political power, an issue that is currently very much alive in interpretations of Renaissance drama and politics. This approach would link The Tempest to other plays we have read in which an essential element in maintaining power is the development of politics as public theatre Seizing power and ruling (oppressing?) others (whether New World natives or Irish peasants or naturally rebellious animalistic human beings of the ur-proletariat) requires, more than anything else, control over images which divert, punish, seduce, and, in general, confirm in people's minds the absolute mastery of the power of the ruler. Governing the island is thus a natural extension of governing Milan (or Henry V's England or Octavius's empire), and the most obvious tool is public theatre. Thus, Shakespeare's farewell to the stage might be seen as an ironic deflation of or farewell to the role of theatre and its power of seizing people's imaginations, not simply for entertainment and moral enlightenment, but equally (or more importantly) for their oppression through pleasing images of patriarchal colonialist or capitalist ideology.
I'm not sure if one could sustain such an interpretation of the play, and I have not thought it through sufficiently (particularly the ending where the illusion-making power is discarded). So I tend to return to the first understanding of the play as a celebration of theatre (with a strong biographical link). But with the Tempest, as with so many of Shakespeare's plays, other complex possibilities will not leave my imagination alone.
Seeking cultural analogues in the themes and imagery of Shakespeare's text, Tempest(s) imagines a contemporary Caliban, displaced from his now 'uninhabited', or recently decolonised island, negotiating the borders and cultures of 'Fortress Europe' - the former colonial 'heartland' or 'homeland'. In trying to find a place for himself within a world that is at once both alien and familiar, Caliban discovers that his attempts to negotiate identity and values on his own terms are still shaped by Prospero's 'art'. Prospero's means of maintaining power and control over his enemies, over Caliban and Ariel, and over his daughter Miranda, are imagined as projections - the 'virtual', mediating and invisible power structures that pervade social and political life in Europe, that regulate its geographical and cultural borders. This virtual world of projections is contrasted with the actualities and pressures of a localised everyday world , in particular as seen through the experience of immigrants and refugees. Within this 'brave new world' Caliban rediscovers the difficulties of making a place for himself and the impossibility of a return in any sense to the island home from which he came.
The reality of the situation that Tempest(s) imagines does not only confront immigrants or refugees attempting to find security or asylum in contemporary Europe. Our individual perspectives on questions of gender, class, race, and sexuality are also contested areas of social and cultural negotiation. Our experiences of displacement, insecurity, mobility, and difference are framed within increasingly globalized cultural images of security, prosperity, identity and idealised or normalised behaviours. It is this tension that sustains the displaced and displacing conditions of contemporary life, provides the ideas and relationships upon which the performance of Tempest(s) was built and gives the dramaturgy of Tempest(s) its central trope of 'displacement' in both the actual world of social and cultural experience, and in the aesthetic world of representation.
The dramaturgy links a reading of the The Tempest with contemporary ideas of 'otherness' as experienced by migrants, refugees, the homeless and immigrant communities; and also as experienced on the level of the individual in contemporary society - for example in attitudes to class, gender and sexuality - and in terms of everyday exclusions: where we can go, how we can meet others and so on. The experience of potential displacement and exclusion is clearly intensified in certain locations and situations, such as national borders, immigration control, social security structures. In such situations both physical spaces (the spaces of bureaucracy, the spaces of newsmedia, the negotiation of public space and private space) are intimately linked with language and the individual's abilities to negotiate languages of all types - from sign-systems to 'body-language' codes, to language groups.
In The Tempest both Caliban and Miranda are displaced - the former through the effects of 'colonisation' , the latter through exile and separation. In Tempest(s) the characters of Caliban and Miranda are shown as a single shifting identity that may be recognised in each of us as individuals, and in the everyday social and cultural interactions we are involved with. The coherence and status of the dramatic character (at least in classical terms) is displaced with each performer as both Caliban and Miranda negotiating the projected images that are the illusions and power structures (happy families, ideal homes, social controls and legislation) of a disembodied Prospero, sometimes duplicating, sometimes subverting , always representing and merging with the 'live' presence of the performers. Ariel is the (sometime reluctant, sometime willing) agency of Prospero's authority and its idealisations in the form of the mechanics of projection.
.Tempest(s) was created with a group of people from very diverse ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds who, in proposing that the process and dynamics of theatre and performance parallels and interacts with the dynamics and operations of the contemporary world, recognised that theatre and performance do not simply reflect the world through establishing an 'other scene' or fictional world through which the relationships of the real world can be read.
Renaissance Contexts of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611)
Neoplatonism, collective designation for the philosophical and religious doctrines of a heterogeneous school of speculative thinkers who sought to develop and synthesize the metaphysical ideas of Plato. Such synthesis occurred especially in Alexandria and included Hellenistic Judaism, as exemplified by the Jewish-Hellenistic philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, as well as other outlooks. The doctrine kept its essentially Greek character, however. By extension, the term is applied to similar metaphysical theories expounded in medieval, Renaissance, and modern times. (See .) From the late Renaissance in Medicean Florence to the end of the seventeenth century, the Neoplatonic possibility of uniting "pagan" Classical learning with the Christian spirit fascinated such thinkers as Marsilio Ficino. Recently, critics have argued that William Shakespeare’s late comedy The Tempest (1611) may be interpreted in light of such Neoplatonic archetypes as the virginal princess, the young knight, the primitive, and the magus. Shakespeare’s romantic comedy may reflect Ficino’s postulations that there are three modes of human existence (the contemplative, the active, and the pleasurable) and three roads to felicity (wisdom, power, and sensual pleasure). The Renaissance Neoplatonists held that the ideal human existence involved a harmonization of these triads.
The Neoplatonists regarded the poet as a god-like figure in that he had the capacity to create a perfect world, a world directly reflecting the divine archetype itself–as Elizabethan critic and novelist Sir Philip Sidney remarks at the beginning of "An Apology for Poetry," the poets "deliver a golden" world from Nature’s fundamentally flawed and imperfect world. Prospero may be regarded as the poet, the island his field of creation, and Ariel his agent or means of producing such illusions as the masque for Miranda and Ferdinand or the dance of the islanders for the Neopolitan nobles. Prospero is a magus, an advanced and altruistic thinker, not a practitioner of the black arts, a sorcerer. Through Shakespeare’s development of the character of Prospero we see the human spirit liberated from the desire for power, for control, and for vengeance as he renounces his "art," forgives his former enemies, and prepares to return to society. His exile and suffering have purified him and enabled him to expiate the crime of abandoning the care of his subjects in Milan for the pursuit of esoteric magic, as symbolised by the books that he perused instead of attending to his duties as duke. These books rather than his robe, his wand, or his servant Ariel are the chief source of his power to create illusions, charms, and spells. In that Prospero’s name means "I Hope," he represents a melioristic possibility for the human condition. If Prospero represents the highest Neoplatonic level attainable by human beings (the sensible, the rational, and the intellectual in perfect balance), Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo represent the lowest level, in which the sensible or sensory predominates; the symbol of their pursuit of sensual pleasure is the butt of wine, which clouds their self-knowledge and releases the forces of the Freudian Id, the animalistic passions of gustatory and sexual appetite. The story’s fairy-tale prince and princess, Ferdinand and Miranda, represent the rational and the imaginative faculties, bound together in a non-sensual, Platonic relationship, the most complete stage of human love, according to the Greek philosopher Plato.
Prospero is no more a representation of Shakespeare himself
Prospero, the anti-Faust, with the angel Ariel for his familiar, has made a pact only with deep learning of the hermetic kind. Prospero is a "learned man, strong through years of study" (Gilbert 73) as an exile on his remote island Shakespeare’s benign sorcerer comes from a much newer and more enlightened tradition, Renaissance humanism.
Prospero’s depiction as a moral character derives from previous dramatic depictions of academic magicians. . . . [C]ontemporary controversies over academic magic [are also evident in his character]:
In Prospero’s introductory narrative (I. ii.) Shakespeare implies that sheer love of learning
–"Knowing I loved my books, he [Gonzalo] furnished me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom" (lines 166-168)--
rather than lust for earthly power motivated Prospero’s retreat from the corridors of power into his Milanese study to master not the "black" but the "liberal arts" (I, ii, 73). Prospero’s magic is both magic and art in the old sense, including science and art in ours, and to be sharply differentiated from infra-natural and exclusive sorceries of a Sycorax.
In contrast, although Prospero’s seems to relish having possessed the god-like power to wield lightning bolts; cause eclipses, storms, and earthquakes; and command the tenants of graves to come forth (V, i, 41-49Prospero never wastes his "art" on the execution of trivialities. from extensive academic research and his freeing of the imprisoned Ariel. Although his powers are circumscribed by no arbitrary limit, Prospero acknowledges that his fortunes "depend upon / A most auspicious star" (I, ii, 181-2) and that accomplishing his design between two and six in the afternoon is crucial. Prospero seems constantly aware of its passage, suggesting that he has worked out the timetable for his restoration with great forethought, like the dramatist himself plotting the two hours’ traffic of the stage. Prospero is controlling, not merely a Shakespearian play, but the Shakespearian world. He is thus automatically in the position of Shakespeare himself, and it is accordingly inevitable that he should often speak as with Shakespeare’s voice (208)and stage-manage the action of the play.
prhaps Prospero, too, was afflicted by such a complex before the coup which thrust him from power and into exile. If so, his marooning constitutes a fortunate fall, for through proximity to nature and through raising his daughter he has replaced self-love with love of other persons and things. Prospero has gained perspective on his error, "neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of [his] mind" (I, ii, 89-90However, since he acts for social as well as personal benefit, his lady Fortune permits him to turn the tables on his enemies, enabling the former victim and outcast to touch his enemies’ consciences and to forgive them. Given the opportunity to avenge his wrongs, Prospero prefers justice to vengeance, displaying his spark of divine nature by his empathy with human nature.
Prospero’s manipulation of the plot may be regarded as "directly suggestive of ‘power divine’" (Knight 207). Lest we mistakenly believe, however, that Ariel is the source of Prospero’s power, Shakespeare has his protagonist recall for the edification of the forgetful fairy (and, of course, for the audience) how "It was [his] art, / When [he] arrived and heard [Ariel’s groaning in captivity], that made gape / That pine" (I, ii, 291-3) wherein Sycorax had imprisoned him
The Tempest by Shakespeare
Shakespeare's The "Tempest," is about a dissolving society and a new kind of social order that moves not out of the world, but from an ordinary to a renewed and ennobled vision of nature. Prospero has committed error, has suffered wrongs, and has struggled against them, even has some struggles, on the island and these conflicts move Prospero toward the realization of the renaissance ideal.
The "Tempest" is renaissance drama. The play emphasizes many renaissance ideas and philosophies of Shakespeare's Europe. There is a difference in duties for rulers and subjects, a zest for learning, and emphasis on practical living, and the debate about the free will of man. Prospero's failure as a duke is the type of error people who lived in the Renaissance would take notice of. He is not very competent as a ruler, and the philosophies of the time, especially Locke, emphasized the need for competent and wise rulers. He lacks any practical interest in the affairs of his people, something Locke would have condemned him for doing.
The class structure of the "Tempest" is similar to Renaissance society. The Monarch is the leader and no one disputes his rule. The Dukes and Duchies are below the Monarch. Then, there were the professional working class and merchants like lawyers, who were held in high esteem in the Renaissance, and finally, the working class who were at the lowest level of society.
Compare and contrast Caliban and Ariel
Prospero discovers to inhabitants on the island, Caliban and Ariel. They are both creatures of the spirit world and not human. Ariel is likened to a creature of the heavens, a creature of god. Prospero frees Ariel. Ariel represents freedom-loving, and bravery. He is a gentle spirit. In the Renaisance world God and heaven maintain order and justice on earth. Ariel acts only when commanded by Prospero. He is also an adept sailor and one with nature. Ariel is happy pleasing man, but also craves freedom.
Caliban is the offspring of the devil and a witch. He represents a creature of eart, not the heavens. While Ariel acts from reason and rationality, Caliban acts from instinct, like an animal. Prospero makes Caliban his slave, but Caliban is not pleased being a servant. Prospero attempts to teach Caliban the etiquette of the European man, but Caliban loves the freedom of nature and shuns the way of God.
When looking at Shakespeare s The Tempest one can find an underlying
themes of civilization verses barbarism. The characters that are created
represent symbols of nature, and their actions build their symbolism. Through
the actions we get a view of Shakespeare s ideas on civilization and the
uncivilized, as well of letting the reader form their own opinions. Prospero,
the former Duke of Milan, after being removed by his brother, arrives on an
island. He frees a spirit named Ariel from a spell and in turn makes the spirit
his slave. He also enslaves a native monster named Caliban. These two slaves,
Caliban and Ariel represent the theme of nature verses nature. Caliban is
considered the illustration of the wild, a beast of nature. During the first
meeting, Caliban comes across as very savage and immoral. Prospero, when
approaching Caliban s lair, says disdainfully, ...[he] never/Yields us kind
answer, meaning Caliban never responds with respect. Once Prospero reaches
the cave he calls out and Caliban harshly retorts, There s wood enough
within. This short reply reveals the bitterness he feels from leading his
life as a slave. This attitude makes Caliban appear to be an valueless servant.
There is also an extreme anger on the part of Caliban towards Prospero. When he
is requested to come forward, Caliban answers, As wicked dew e er my mother
brushed/With raven s feather from unwholesome fen/Drop on you both!...And
blister you all o er! Although his actions may be justified they are still
considered improper for a servant. Previous to Prospero s arrival on the
island, Caliban was his own ruler. His mother, Sycorax, left the island to him.
Regardless, Prospero took charge of the island and imprisoned Caliban.
...Thou strok st me...I loved thee... is a portion of a quote that
portrays the relationship Caliban felt towards Prospero prior to be enslaved.
Prospero was his teacher, he taught Caliban to speak and in return Caliban
showed him the island, The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and
fertile... Rightfully so Caliban regrets helping Prospero, near the end of
his speech he says, Cursed be I that did so! Caliban s imprisonment his
why he feels this way. However, the attempted rape of Prospero s daughter,
Miranda, is the direct cause of the enslavement. This crime appeals to the
reader as a good cause for punishment, but Shakespeare also illustrates that
Caliban deserves sympathy, instead of disgust. Caliban committed a crime that
deserved punishment, but he was not raised in society so therefore did not know