The Tempest William Shakespeare

Genre

Romance: Shakespeare's romantic narrative appears in the characters themselves and the island setting. Often, romances involve exotic and remote locations like this island in The Tempest. The environment is the home for Prospero and Miranda. It is also the setting where one of the shipwrecked characters, Ferdinand, falls in love with Miranda. However, they are part of a knight and a princess situation.[56] Romance will use the theme of a knight trying to win the love of the princess. Ferdinand is an example of fitting such a role since he has to work for Prospero to win respect and love him to marry his daughter Miranda.

Comedy: The Tempest was initially presented as a form of tragic comedy in the First Folio by John Fletcher of Shakespeare's plays. Another form of comedy that The Tempest creates is the concept of Greek and Latin New Comedy. Lester E Barber's article "The Tempest and New Comedy" suggests that The New Comedy has to do in part with the narrative of slaves with the characters of Ariel and Caliban. Both characters are considered comedic slaves because their goal is to be free from Prospero's hold. Here both characters differ in how they present themselves as slaves. Arguably Caliban is sometimes considered a character who is not a part of New Comedy since he is regarded as a Convent Vehicle. Lester E Barber suggests a Convent Vehicle is a slave who does vile and unintelligent things that cause them to fail miserably and be humiliated and punished. Caliban fits this through his hatred and disobedience to Prospero. Ariel as a slave carries a different approach to himself since he is a Typical Paradigm. A Typical Paradigm is a more brilliant slave that is more intelligent than other slaves, supportive of their masters, and will fix their master's problems. Ariel is very obedient to Prospero and follows his wishes to use magic against the shipwrecked victims as part of Prospero's revenge.

Dramatic structure

Like The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest roughly adheres to the unities of time, place, and action.[57] Shakespeare's other plays rarely respected the three unities, taking place in separate locations miles apart and over several days or even years.[58] The play's events unfold in real time before the audience, Prospero even declaring in the last act that everything has happened in, more or less, three hours.[59][60] All action is unified into one basic plot: Prospero's struggle to regain his dukedom; it is also confined to one place, a fictional island, which many scholars agree is meant to be located in the Mediterranean Sea.[61] Another reading suggests that it takes place in the New World, as scholars have noted some parts of the play share similarities with the European colonization of the Americas.[62] Still others argue that the island can represent any land that has been colonised.[63]

In the denouement of the play, Prospero enters into a parabasis (a direct address to the audience). In his book Back and Forth the poet and literary critic Siddhartha Bose argues that Prospero's epilogue creates a "permanent parabasis" which is "the condition of Schlegelian Romantic Irony".[64] Prospero, and by extension Shakespeare, turns his absolution over to the audience. The liberation and atonement Prospero 'gives' to Ariel and Caliban is also handed over to the audience. However, just as Prospero derives his power by "creating the language with which the other characters are able to speak about their experiences",[65] so too the mechanics and customs of theatre limit the audience's understanding of itself and its relationship to the play and to reality.

Postcolonial

In Shakespeare's day, much of the world was still being colonized by European merchants and settlers, and stories were coming back from the Americas, 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 and also resembles "Cariban", the term then used for natives in the West Indies), it has been suggested that Shakespeare may be offering an in-depth discussion of the morality of colonialism. Different views of this are found in the play, with examples including Gonzalo's Utopia, Prospero's enslavement of Caliban, and Caliban's subsequent resentment. Postcolonial scholars have argued that Caliban is also shown as one of the most natural characters in the play, being very much in touch with the natural world (and modern audiences have come to view him as far nobler than his two Old World friends, Stephano and Trinculo, although the original intent 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.[66]

Beginning in about 1950, with the publication of Psychology of Colonization by Octave Mannoni, postcolonial theorists have increasingly appropriated The Tempest and reinterpreted it in light of postcolonial theory. This new way of looking at the text explored the effect of the "coloniser" (Prospero) on the "colonised" (Ariel and Caliban). Although Ariel is often overlooked in these debates in favour of the more intriguing Caliban, he is nonetheless an essential component of them.[67] The French writer Aimé Césaire, in his play Une Tempête 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 or negotiation.[68] It has also been argued that Ariel, and not Caliban or Prospero, is the rightful owner of the island.[69] Michelle Cliff, 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.[67]

Feminist

Feminist interpretations of The Tempest consider the play in terms of gender roles and relationships among the characters on stage, and consider how concepts of gender are constructed and presented by the text, and explore the supporting consciousnesses and ideologies, all with an awareness of imbalances and injustices.[70] Two early feminist interpretations of The Tempest are included in Anna Jameson's Shakespeare's Heroines (1832) and Mary Clarke's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (1851).[71][72]

The Tempest is a play created in a male dominated culture and society, a gender imbalance the play explores metaphorically by having only one major female role, Miranda. Miranda is fifteen, intelligent, naive, and beautiful. The only humans she has ever encountered in her life are male. Prospero sees himself as her primary teacher, and asks if she can remember a time before they arrived to the island—he assumes that she cannot. When Miranda has a memory of "four or five women" tending to her younger self (1.2.44–47), it disturbs Prospero, who prefers to portray himself as her only teacher, and the absolute source of her own history—anything before his teachings in Miranda's mind should be a dark "abysm", according to him. (1.2.48–50) The "four or five women" Miranda remembers may symbolize the young girl's desire for something other than only men.[12][73]

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 attracted much feminist criticism. Miranda is typically viewed as being 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.[74]

Most of what is said about Sycorax is said by Prospero, who has never met Sycorax—what he knows of her he learned from Ariel. When Miranda asks Prospero, "Sir, are you not my father?", Prospero responds,

Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and She said thou was my daughter.[75]

This surprising answer has been difficult for those interpretations that portray their relationship simply as a lordly father to an innocent daughter, and the exchange has at times been cut in performance. A similar example occurs when Prospero, enraged, raises a question of the parentage of his brother, and Miranda defends Prospero's mother:

I should sin To think but nobly of my grandmother; Good wombs have borne bad sons.[76][77]

Research and genetic modification

The book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley references The Tempest in the title, and explores genetically modified citizens and the subsequent social effects. The novel and the phrase from The Tempest, "brave new world", has itself since been associated with public debate about humankind's understanding and use of genetic modification, in particular with regards to humans.[78]