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ENGL 348: The Tempest (Full Notes)
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Unit 6: The TempestMarch 31st –
Introduction
The effect of The Tempest is enchanting and unreal – yet, it also gestures towards its own status
as a play meant to be performed at the Globe Theatre.
● You’ll see yourself in The Tempest?
● Part of the challenge of the play is to see it distinctly and to see through it beyond the
mirror effect.
● Experiential laboratory for the characters brought there by magical art and also for the
audience in the theatre.
One of the main sources for this play: the Virginia Colony voyage (a search for the “new world”)
● The New World may be new to invading colonizers, but it might not be new to the people
that have been living there for years, with their own forms of knowledge.
● Part of what this play does is to strip down the imagined encounter between
accidental and deliberate colonizers, and their perception of the indigenous
inhabitant(s) of the island.
○ We never see Caliban for who he is, but through European eyes. It is part of our
task as responsible beings to get around that mediation.
● The idea that Shakespeare might be seen as dramatizing that colonization can never be a
beginning but an oppression of unwilling subjects is very compelling.
○ Shakespeare tries to deconstruct European society’s constructs.
● This play draws a lot on the Bermuda pamphlets
Caliban identifies Prospero’s books as the biggest weapon – instruments of oppression in the
wrong hands with the wrong intent.
● Is Shakespeare using that drama to counteract the oppression through the book?
When the characters first arrive at the island, each one sees it according to their capacity.
● The play ends in apology (Prospero asks for forgiveness from the audience)
April 5th, 2023
Ariel and Prospero
It is only when Ariel is an extension of Prospero that Prospero loves him.
Memory
“Let me remember thee what thou hast promised, / Which is not yet performed me” (1.2.243-4)
● History is what we might think of as the broken fragments of what is left over when the
wholeness has been lost.
● Ariel wants Prospero to remember that he promised to free him.
● Prospero wants Ariel to remember that Ariel saved him?
Both Ariel and Caliban are servants and, to some degree, slaves to Prospero.
● Prospero promised to give Ariel his liberty at a certain point. He doesn’t appear to have
made such promises to Caliban.
○ Memory is compromised by the overwriting of what remnants they had in their
minds of the past by Prospero’s memories of the past.
○ Ariel and Caliban are robbed of their memory by superior figures.
, History isn’t true, it’s propaganda (but we need it because there are fragments of authentic
knowledge there) – we need to have history but cannot trust history.
● Need to continually seek more knowledge in order to make your way through propaganda
and silencing by the powerful.
Prospero’s anger collapses the differences between Ariel and Caliban – anger is his default mode
when somebody questions him.
● How does Prospero know about Sycorax? He only knows Sycorax through Ariel.
○ Prospero has appropriated this knowledge and recycled it on his own terms to
make Ariel feel redeemed and indebted.
“I must / Once in a month recount what thou hast been” (1.2.262-3) as if Prospero knows Ariel
better than Ariel knows Ariel – deauthorization.
● A lot of confusion about Caliban – is he human? Is he deformed, or is Prospero referring
to the fact that he’s post-prepubescent? Is it his skin colour? We cannot trust the
information that we get about Caliban because it’s so inconsistent – subject to POV.
● Caliban speaks in verse, but Ariel speaks in prose (lower-class)
○ Caliban’s speech establishes him of a higher rank than the servants who come
with the Italian party.
○ He also seems to be a lot more intelligent!
Once Prospero gets compliance from Ariel, he loves him (but this isn’t the case with Caliban!)
● Prospero can treat Ariel as badly as Caliban, but Ariel doesn’t have a body to be pricked
or bruised – therefore, he cannot suffer in the same way.
○ Prospero gets what he wants from coercion and intimidation.
● Every colonizer’s language: needing to control the wild spirits.
Caliban
Miranda doesn’t like being in Caliban’s presence because he attempted to force her sexually.
● Did this happen before the hierarchy on the island was established? At the end of
Caliban’s education of European values or before? Chronology is unclear.
● Has to transform the mechanical labour into something romantic without losing rank and
status as a man and as a prince.
○ Mechanical labour generates artificial hierarchy and maintains it.
Prospero feels that Caliban is an embodiment of human nature’s more lustful and hellbound
elements – he employs all his magical arts to beat Caliban into shape.
● What comes from this abuse? He wants obedience, his power to be reinforced (but at the
same time, wants to be seen as benevolent…)
○ Violence is good within this framework (and so is abuse)
○ Those who disobey are offending God – implicit in this is that those who seek to
be obeyed are deputized by God as his agents.
Caliban is openly defiant – it’s not easy to intimidate someone like Caliban.
● Caliban knows that he has rights and that they’re being violated: “I must eat my dinner. /
This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother” (1.2.330-1)
● Caliban is being put into a tiny place after the whole country has been taking away –
Prospero’s narrative crashing against the rock of Caliban’s truth.
○ Caliban will not surrender his memory and rights, which is why Prospero must
use more violence with him (as opposed to Ariel)
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