Assignment
🌸Name: Payal chudasama
🌸Sem: 3
🌸Batch: 2019-20
🌸Roll no: 16
🌸Submitted by: smt.Gardi Department of English MKBU
🌸Paper name : The post colonial studies
🌸Course: M.A. English
🌸Topic: post colonial reading of “The Tempest”
🌸 Enrollment no: 2o69108420200005
🌸 Email I'd: chudasmapayal1997@gmail.com
Question:
Post-colonial readings of The Tempest were inspired by the decolonisation movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. Jyotsna Singh describes how these readings challenge more traditional interpretations of the play, questioning Prospero's ownership of the island and rethinking the role of Caliban.
☆ Introduction :
This is Charles A Buchel’s painting of a primitive but emotionally powerful Caliban, played by Herbert Beerbohm Tree in 1904. Tree was the first leading actor-manager to choose this role over the magician, Prospero.
The painting appears in a souvenir edition of The Tempest ‘as arranged for the stage’ by Beerbohm Tree. He had the edition printed as a record of his production at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London.
Tree’s view of the play was that ‘of all Shakespeare’s works The Tempest was probably the one which most demanded the aids of modern stage-craft’. His production was the first to use electric 8light, but not just for spectacle: lighting was used to underline the sensitivity of Tree’s performance as the play’s ‘monster’.
Jonathan Miller’s ground-breaking production of The Tempest was one of the first to highlight the political and colonial implications of the play. It was initially shown at London’s Mermaid Theatre in 1970 and then re-worked and re-designed for The Old Vic in 1988.
In this 1988 photograph, Max von Sydow plays Prospero as a white colonist, while Rudolph Walker plays Caliban as a black slave reluctantly obeying Prospero’s commands. Ariel, also played by a black actor, was portrayed as a servant of the empire, impatiently awaiting political independence.
☆ Prospero's ownership of the island and rethinking the role of Caliban:
After Miranda is fully awake, Prospero suggests that they converse with their servant Caliban, the son of Sycorax. Caliban appears at Prospero’s call and begins cursing. Prospero promises to punish him by giving him cramps at night, and Caliban responds by chiding Prospero for imprisoning him on the island that once belonged to him alone. He reminds Prospero that he showed him around when he first arrived. Prospero accuses Caliban of being ungrateful for all that he has taught and given him. He calls him a “lying slave” and reminds him of the effort he made to Caliban’s hereditary nature, he continues, makes him unfit to live among civilized people and earns him his isolation on the island. Caliban, though, cleverly notes that he knows how to curse only because Prospero and Miranda taught him to speak. Prospero then sends him away, telling him to fetch more firewood and threatening him with more cramps and aches if he refuses. Caliban obeys him.
Ariel, playing music and singing, enters and leads in Ferdinand. Prospero tells Miranda to look upon Ferdinand, and Miranda, who has seen no humans in her life other than Prospero and Caliban, immediately falls in love. Ferdinand is similarly smitten and reveals his identity as the prince of Naples. Prospero is pleased that they are so taken with each other but decides that the two must not fall in love too quickly, and so he accuses Ferdinand of merely pretending to be the prince of Naples. When he tells Ferdinand he is going to imprison him, Ferdinand draws his sword, but Prospero charms him so that he cannot move. Miranda attempts to persuade her father to have mercy, but he silences her harshly. This man, he tells her, is a mere Caliban compared to other men. He explains that she simply doesn’t know any better because she has never seen any others. Prospero leads the charmed and helpless Ferdinand to his imprisonment. Secretly, he thanks the invisible Ariel for his help, sends him on another mysterious errand, and promises to free him soon.
To return once more to Shakespeare; no man ever drew so many characters, or so generally distinguished 'am better from one another, excepting only Johnson: I will instance but in one, to show the copiousness of his Invention; 'tis that of Caliban, or the Monster in the Tempest. He seems there to have created a person which was not in Nature, a boldness which at first sight would appear intolerable: for he makes him a Species of himself, begotten by an Incubus on a Witch; but this as I have elsewhere provide, is not wholly beyond the bounds of credibility, at least the vulgar still believe it. We have the separated notions of a spirit, and of a Witch; (and Spirits according to Plato, are vested with a subtle body; according to some of his followers, have different Sexes) therefore as from the distinct apprehensions of a Horse, and of a Man, Imagination has form’s a Centaur, so from those of an Incubus and a Sorceress, Shakespeare has produced his Monster. Whether or no his Generation can be defended, I leave to Philosophy; but of this I am certain, that the Poet has most judiciously furnished him with a person, a Language, and a character, which will suit him, both by Fathers and Mothers side: he has all the discontents, and malice of a Witch, and of a Devil; besides a convenient proportion of the deadly sins; Gluttony, Sloth, and Lust, are manifest; the dejectedness of a slave is likewise given him, and the ignorance of one bred up in a Desert Island. His person is monstrous, as he is the product of unnatural Lust; and his language is as hob-Thegoblin as his person: in all things he is distinguished from other mortals.’
“ You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!”
This speech, delivered by Caliban to Prospero and Miranda, makes clear in a very concise form the vexed relationship between the colonized and the colonizer that lies at the heart of this play. The son of a witch, perhaps half-man and half-monster, his name a near-anagram of “cannibal,” Caliban is an archetypal “savage” figure in a play that is much concerned with colonization and the controlling of wild environments. Caliban and Prospero have different narratives to explain their current relationship. Caliban sees Prospero as purely oppressive while Prospero claims that he has cared for and educated Caliban, or did until Caliban tried to rape Miranda. Prospero’s narrative is one in which Caliban remains ungrateful for the help and civilization he has received from the Milanese Duke. Language, for Prospero and Miranda, is a means to knowing oneself, and Caliban has in their view shown nothing but scorn for this precious gift. Self-knowledge for Caliban, however, is not empowering. It is only a constant reminder of how he is different from Miranda and Prospero and how they have changed him from what he was. Caliban’s only hope for an identity separate from those who have invaded his home is to use what they have given him against them.
“There be some sports are painful, and their labour
Delight in them sets off. Some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters
Point to rich ends. This my mean task
Would be as heavy to me as odious, but
The mistress which I serve quickens what’s dead
And makes my labours pleasures.”
Ferdinand speaks these words to Miranda, as he expresses his willingness to perform the task Prospero has set him to, for her sake. The Tempest is very much about compromise and balance. Prospero must spend twelve years on an island in order to regain his dukedom; Alonso must seem to lose his son in order to be forgiven for his treachery; Ariel must serve Prospero in order to be set free; and Ferdinand must suffer Prospero’s feigned wrath in order to reap true joy from his love for Miranda. This latter compromise is the subject of this passage from Act III, scene i, and we see the desire for balance expressed in the structure of Ferdinand’s speech. This desire is built upon a series of antitheses—related but opposing ideas: “sports . . . painful” is followed by “labour . . . delights”; “baseness” can be undergone “nobly”; “poor matters” lead to “rich ends”; Miranda “quickens” (makes alive) what is “dead” in Ferdinand. Perhaps more than any other character in the play, Ferdinand is resigned to allow fate to take its course, always believing that the good will balance the bad in the end. His waiting for Miranda mirrors Prospero’s waiting for reconciliation with his enemies, and it is probably Ferdinand’s balanced outlook that makes him such a sympathetic character, even though we actually see or hear very little of him on-stage.
“Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds be thought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again”
This speech is Caliban’s explanation to Stephan and Trinculo of mysterious music that they hear by magic. Though he claims that the chief virtue of his newly learned language is that it allows him to curse, Caliban here shows himself capable of using speech in a most sensitive and beautiful fashion. This speech is generally considered to be one of the most poetic in the play, and it is remarkable that Shakespeare chose to put it in the mouth of the drunken man-monster. Just when Caliban seems to have debased himself completely and to have become a purely ridiculous figure, Shakespeare gives him this speech and reminds the audience that Caliban has something within himself that Prospero, Stephan, Trinculo, and the audience itself generally cannot, or refuse to, see. It is unclear whether the “noises” Caliban discusses are the noises of the island itself or noises, like the music of the invisible Ariel, that are a result of Prospero’s magic. Caliban himself does not seem to know where these noises come from. Thus his speech conveys the wondrous beauty of the island and the depth of his attachment to it, as well as a certain amount of respect and love for Prospero’s magic, and for the possibility that he creates the “ sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”
☆ Conclusion:
Prospero’s speech in Act IV, scene i emphasizes both the beauty of the world he has created for himself and the sadness of the fact that this world is in many ways meaningless because it is a kind of dream completely removed from anything substantial. When Prospero gives up his magic, the play will end, and the audience, like Prospero, will return to real life. No trace of the magical island will be left behind, not even of the shipwreck, for even the shipwreck was only an illusion.
☆Work citation:
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. The Tempest. Cambridge :Harvard University Press, 1958.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Howard H. Furness, 6th ed., vol. 9, Classic Books Company, 2001, Google Books.
Shakespeare, William, Virginia M. Vaughan, and Alden T. Vaughan. The Tempest. , 2000.
Shakespeare, William, Barbara A Mowat, and Paul Werstine. The Tempest. Simon & Schuster Paperback ed. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009.
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