For over a century, and particularly in the past twenty years, a number of interpreters have taken a very different approach to The Tempest, seeing in it the exploration of some particularly relevant political issues. The English critic, William Hazlitt, was the first to point out (in 1818) that Prospero had usurped Caliban from his rule of the island and was thus an agent of imperialism. Since then such an approach to the play (with various modifications) has remained more or less current, although only in recent decades has it become widespread in North America.
Some of these arguments are quite simple and reductive; others are a good deal more sophisticated. I cannot do full justice to these interpretations here, but I would like to consider some of the main points in order to raise a few questions in your minds. [Those who would like to read a useful historical survey of these treatments of the play should consult Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
I have taken historical information from this book] This approach to The Tempest also begins with some obvious features of the play. Prospero is a European who has taken charge of a remote island. He has been able to do this because he brings with him special powers. With these he organizes a life for himself, gets the local inhabitants (Ariel and Caliban) to work for him, and maintains his control by a combination of painful force or threats of force, wonderful spells, and promises of freedom some day.
In taking charge of a place which is not his and in exerting his European authority over the strange non-European creatures, compelling them to serve him and his values, Prospero, so the argument runs, is obviously a symbol for European colonial power, with which England was growing increasingly familiar during Shakespeare’s lifetime (not just in the New World but also in Ireland).
The key figure in this treatment of the play naturally is Caliban, the island native who regards himself as the rightful owner of the place, who is forced against his will to serve Prospero and Miranda, and who constantly proclaims his unwillingness to do so. Initially, Prospero extends to Caliban his European hospitality, teaches him language, and, in return, is shown all the natural resources of the island by Caliban, in an act of love.
But Caliban refuses to live by Prospero’s rules, tries to rape Miranda (he still wants to), and their relationship changes to one of master and slave. The gift of language, Caliban now says, is good only because it enables him to curse. Prospero may control Caliban (with painful torments), but he has not vanquished his resistance. For Prospero, the main problem with Caliban is that he is incapable of being educated (although Caliban’s command of beautiful poetry might make us wonder about that).
He is thus (for Prospero) some lower life form (like a native of Ireland, for example, many of whom were in Shakespeare’s day not considered fully human): deformed, evil smelling, treacherous, rapacious, and violent. Unlike Ferdinand, who is a suitable lover for Miranda because he can discipline himself to work to earn her, Caliban has no restraint. Hence, Prospero feels himself morally entitled to exercise his control over him; indeed, the safety and security of his and Miranda’s life depend upon such enforced obedience (as Prospero says, they need Caliban’s labour to survive).
There is obviously much here one might point to as an allegory on European colonial or capitalist practices. One might well argue that the presentation of Caliban is itself a very European perception of alien New World cultures, and thus Prospero’s moral authority rests on a complete inability to see the natives as fully cultured human beings, in other words, on his European mind set, which automatically labels those different from Europeans as ugly, uncivilized, and threatening “others. The gift of language is not a gift but an imposition, a common means of enforcing colonial rule on recalcitrant subjects. [In a well known production of this play in 1974 (in the National Theatre in London), the actor playing Caliban had the two halves of his face made up in different ways: one side was that of a noble-looking Native American; the other side was that of a grotesque ape-like man. Depending upon which way the actor turned, the audience’s perception of the character changed entirely.
This theatrical device obviously invited the audience to consider the importance of cultural perceptions in our evaluative judgments in dealing with people from “primitive” non-Europeanized societies]. If we pursue such a political basis for the allegory, can we come to any conclusions about Shakespeare’s vision of colonial practices? What, if anything, is the play offering as a vision of European imperialism? For me, the emotional logic of the action suggests that Shakespeare is offering a defense of colonial practices which he then undermines.
Caliban may, indeed, offend every European moral principle, but in some ways he is more intelligent and more open than some of the Europeans (like the drunken idiots Stephano and Trinculo and the deceitful murderous conspirators). He may resist Prospero’s authority, but that authority is something we can call into question, especially by looking closely at the way it is enforced. In his renunciation of magic and return to Europe, Prospero would appear to be finally conceding that continuing on the island is wrong.
Significantly, among his last words is the potentially pregnant comment (about Caliban) “This thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine. ” If this means, as it might, some recognition of a bond between Prospero and Caliban, then Prospero’s leaving the island to Caliban and renouncing his magic (the source of his power) would seem to be a tacit apology for the master-slave basis for their earlier relationship which Prospero enforced.
That said, however, there are one or two interesting problems which such a political interpretation of the play (which I have not had time to present fairly) generally has some trouble with. In the first place, it requires us to see Caliban as representative of an oppressed culture or class (either a Native American Indian or an Irish peasant or a member of the proletariat). Yet he is the only one of his kind (that is made very clear to us), and is a relatively recent arrival there. He has no culture matrix, no family, and no cultural history.
So I’m not sure that the image of cultural oppression is particularly clear. 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 (although I’m ready to be persuaded by a superb production that the colonialist allegory can make effective dramatic sense of the play as written).
Significantly some of the earliest attempts to see The Tempest as a colonialist allegory identified Caliban, not with the original inhabitants of the New World, but with the European bosses left behind by the original explorers. This view was especially pronounced in South American countries which had a long and brutal history of oppression by American capitalist companies, and Caliban, in some critics’ eyes, looked far more like a Yankee managing director than a noble savage.
This is an interesting possibility, but it does leave one wondering then about the native inhabitants on the island, since they would not be present at all. [In viewing Caliban as an oppressed person, one might mention a recent view that he is a “reluctant student” in a play about education. I don’t take this view particularly seriously, but it does remind us that ideological approaches to the Prospero-Caliban interaction can often quite easily fit into the play a number of different views of various kinds of authority, just or otherwise] The second problem the political interpretation faces is Ariel.
What are we to make of him? One production based on a colonialist theme (directed by Jonathan Miller) made Ariel the “good” native, the intelligent servant of the European masters (in contrast to Caliban the “bad” native). The contrast was heightened by making Ariel an East Indian and Caliban an African (thus duplicating some of the racial realities in post-colonial African states). At the end of this production Ariel picked up Prospero’s abandoned instruments of magic and the curtain closed with a sense of him now as the oppressing power over Caliban.
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 (obviously an important element in the education of Prince Hal in Henry IV). 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.