One of a dramaturg’s most important tasks is to provide interpretive terrain for the production—to survey the script’s production history and to bring a sense of context (past and present) to the table. Shakespeare as The Bard was for a long time seen as a museum piece to be carefully conserved. A dramaturg can help dispel the sense of paralysis (or even torpor) that this perception might induce by bringing to bear the variety of a play’s stage history; by inviting consideration of various contextual elements; and by identifying opportunities for relevance and social commentary. These components all help in addressing the questions: Why perform this play? In this time, and in this place? A dramaturg aims to free a production team to engage dialogically with a play—in this case The Tempest—invigorating and extending its field of allusion and connection, and catching all the shades and nuances of the text as foundational possibilities for the stage.
A course that brings together The Tempest, dramaturgy, and postcolonial theory involves critical reading, analytical writing, and a variety of research skills—all of which are utilized as ways of understanding dramaturgy as an integral part of performance vocabulary and practice. Dramaturgy is informed, at all levels, by postcolonial arguments, insights, and challenges; students will be expected to draw on production history to stimulate debate in the service of production potentials.
Postcolonial theory examines the legacies of colonialism—the cultural subordination of conquered peoples as well as the forms of resistance that emerge out of conditions of oppression. Because postcolonial theory is not an excavation but a way of reading, seeing, and thinking, it is wonderfully suited to a course that considers the framing of productions for the stage: both postcoloniality and dramaturgy are about testing and enriching perspective. Least interesting to me is the concept of “the postcolonial” as a leash one ties to a play so as to hitch it to contemporary “relevance”: rather, I look to postcolonial studies to provide responses to history, hierarchy, and perception. For this course I prefer a workshop format, open to about eighteen to twenty students at the second- or third-year college level. By this point in their academic careers, they have had some experience with drama and literature courses, and they may or may not be interested in making a career in the theatre.
COURSE OBJECTIVES: By the end of the course, students will have addressed the following objectives:
Objective 1: Propose the field of dramaturgy as a theoretical metaframe forThe Tempest:
• Move from the wider thematics of pedagogy to specific readings of exemplary verse structure and spectacle.
Objective 2: Explore dramaturgical practice by focusing on a problematic, or ambivalent, textual feature (my paper draws on the specifics of the masque to demonstrate this purpose). Focusing on this particular textual features:
• Students will develop skills in cutting and restoring text.
• Students will develop skills in curating storylines and testing for plausibility. There is not one “story” of The Tempest. There are as many stories as there are directors, and a dramaturg’s job is to make this variety visible and to check that choices are plausible in the context of the production as a whole.
Objective 3: Understand the importance of context to the shaping of dramaturgical perspectives:
• In geographical terms, the use of the New World and the Mediterranean, as well as the locations that have been illuminated via interpretive models for The Tempest. Students will also gain an understanding of ways in which The Tempest has been used to map contemporary cultural perspectives.
Objective 4: Address the postcolonial implications ofThe Tempest’s sexual politics:
• Students will use close-reading skills to test a range of feminist approaches to gender politics in the text.
Objective 5: Apply the writing process to a dramaturgy packet:
• Students will plan, draft, and revise a research packet for The Tempest. Students will create a dramaturgy packet that shows a vital knowledge of the history of postcolonial thinking and of the value of postcolonial approaches to a particular dramaturgical context. Specifically, they will:
• Present an ideal text, together with cuts and restorations
• Present a fully annotated Act of their own choice
• Write a dramaturgy essay (twenty pages) that shows an awareness of postcolonial staging possibilities for The Tempest, bringing to bear research into the play’s production history
Objective 6: Notes:
• Students will practice skills in making dramaturgical observations, critiques, and suggestions (loosely termed “Notes”).
Some of the objectives and/or elements listed—the sensitivities and nuances involved in giving notes; making annotations; presenting an ideal text; and, to a large extent, production histories—can’t be addressed in this essay because of the word limit. All of them, however, can be informed by a postcolonial approach that challenges received and acceptable knowledge with textually plausible questions and arguments.
1. “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse”: pedagogy as a meta-frame inThe Tempest
(This section bears particular reference to Objective One.)
It’s difficult to think about pedagogy without acknowledging The Tempest as itself being, in a metadramatic sense, about pedagogy. A postcolonial view of The Tempest calls attention to pedagogy as a colonizing impulse, and through dramaturgy we can read the play as offering its own critique of different modes of teaching practice.Footnote 1
Prospero’s impulse is to colonize. His identity hinges in large part on his capacity to imprint himself upon those in his authority or thrall. Early in the play, Miranda tells her father, “You have often/Begun to tell me what I am” (I.ii.34–35)Footnote 2, to which he adjudges, “The hour’s now come” (I.ii.37). For twelve years he has been her sole teacher, and now he introduces an extension of his teachings—a history lesson, timed to the very second: “The very minute bids thee ope thine ear;/Obey and be attentive” (I.ii.38–39). Miranda tells us that this is indeed the first lesson she has received—her father has often begun to teach her about her history but has repeatedly broken off. Her journey through the play—from the “back story” told by her father in the second scene (in which he prompts, and fills in, her memory in “the dark backward and abysm of time” [I.ii.50]), to the wide-eyed auditor who confirms the nature of the story, to the part she plays in Prospero’s achievement of revenge—articulates and confirms her father’s views about himself as teacher and about Miranda as the student whose learning is in his charge.
In I.ii Prospero repeatedly checks that Miranda is attending to his history lesson: “I pray thee mark me” (I.ii.67 and again in line 89); “Dost thou attend me?”(I.ii.78); “Thou attend’st not?” (I.ii.87); “Dost thou hear?” (I.ii.106). He also clearly defines both his skills at teaching and hers at learning: “Well demanded, wench: / My tale provokes that question” (I.ii.139–140). He tells us that he was, and is, the finest scholar in the liberal arts (“without a parallel” [I.ii.74]). The transparent hierarchy implicit in his views (“The government I cast upon my brother,/And to my state grew stranger, being transported/And rapt in secret studies” [I.ii.75–77]) is disputed neither by himself nor by his daughter. If pedagogy’s aim is to imprint knowledge on its subjects, Miranda could be seen as a resoundingly successful student: he teaches her who she is; he confirms, through her journey; who he is; and he plans for his pupil who she can be. Postcolonial theory has, over recent decades, however, taught us to question the very nature and structure of Prospero’s teaching. From the abused and righteous revenger, he has been translated to a character who “attempt[s] to appropriate responses,”Footnote 3 “the complete totalitarian,”Footnote 4 and a “sovereign and imperialist.”Footnote 5 Postcolonial theory has opened out ways of understanding his vulnerability, as well as his preposterous vanity, cloistered and groomed as it is on the island.Footnote 6 And it’s not simply vanity—it is a blindness, exercised at the cost of his students. Critic Bill Ashcroft notes the success of language in “trapping the colonial subject in a particular cultural discourse, a particular view of the world.”Footnote 7
Near the play’s conclusion Prospero still accounts himself “Prospero, and that very Duke/Which was thrust forth of Milan; who most strangely,/Upon this shore, where you were wrecked, was landed,/To be the lord on’t” (V.i.161–164). From being “absolute Milan” (I.ii.109), his avocation has “naturally” been to assume himself “absolute” island (“To be the lord on’t” [V.i.164]). Having introduced his daughter to a history lesson and manifested one of its parts in the person of Ferdinand, however, in effect causes him to lose control of his pupil. (Hence his words, “I/Have lost my daughter” [V.i.148–149]). Prospero can control what Miranda sees and reads—this is a barren island, after all, and he has power over what happens—but he can’t control how she sees and reads.
So what does a dramaturg do with these insights? How are they communicated as a lesson in dramaturgy? A dramaturg’s task is to read a script in a variety of ways—researching productions that accept Prospero’s high-handed view of himself and his relationships, and bringing postcolonial points of view to effectively read against such transparent notions of authority. Research into the subject of pedagogy as metadrama might involve the following: What words concerning teaching, learning, and education appear in the text? What forms of language reinforce Prospero’s view of his own role as teacher? Lines such as “I have done nothing but in care of thee” (I.ii.16) have inspired many sympathetic readings of his role as loving father, buoyed by the positioning and thematic content of phrases such as “I have used thee,/Filth as thou art, with human care (I.ii.348–349—to Caliban)—so that views of Prospero’s protective authority and Miranda’s fearful delicacy prevailed for a very long time.
When we attend to the text with a dramaturgical awareness of structure (where words are placed, how expressions might break the rhythm of a line, where a caesura creates a point of attention), we can begin to listen to the familiar “music” of the text and to hear a different score. It is this new score (an underscore, perhaps) that a dramaturg will bring to the attention of the director and production team, suggesting new and challenging ways in which the text can be made active for the stage. With Prospero, there may be simple visual questions to be considered: What does Prospero invest in his staff, book, and cloak? Are they the source or the symbols of his power? The director may well address such questions in the way she or he has Prospero handle his materials as he uses them in the course of the play, and as he prepares, at the end, to cast them away. It is not for the dramaturg to advise on stagecraft—but the dramaturg’s reading of the shades and nuances of the text can till the ground for the director’s physical embodiments.
We might think about Miranda’s blank slate being colored in as her memory and senses are awakened; and, if we look at her not as Prospero’s imprint but as his pedagogical creation, postcolonial theory enables an identification of ways in which she goes beyond his teachings. Where delicacy was once assumed, the text might now support a different emotional tenor for Miranda. Consider, for example, her response to the very thought of Caliban: “Tis a villain, sir,/I do not love to look on (I.ii.311–312)”, and the words she flings at him: “Abhorred slave!” (I.ii.354–355). Just because Prospero can’t or hasn’t taught Miranda certain perceptions and insights, doesn’t mean she can’t learn. Cosseted by her father for the past twelve years, she has, it seems, absorbed his language and opinions (while his experience, we find in I.ii., has largely remained his own). Learning occurs for Miranda via exposure and forming her own judgment about an experience that is new to both herself and her father, we witness Miranda making an “unauthorized” progress. “There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple,” she counters to her father’s waspish reception of Ferdinand (I.ii.463–468), allowing herself (perhaps for the first time?) to depart from her father’s point of view. Learning also entails, for Miranda, a very important discovery: that there is strength and vision in recognizing what one doesn’t know. Thus she freely admits to Ferdinand her cloistered ignorance:
I do not know
One of my sex; no woman’s face remember,
Save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seen
More that I may call men than you, good friend,
And my dear father: how features are abroad,
I am skilless of. (III.i.48–53)
A dramaturg might ask the director whether there is anything that could be activated in these lines: the predominance of negatives in Miranda’s speech, for example, connoting her dawning awareness of herself as having been “voiced-upon” rather than “finding a voice.” The frequency of caesuras in the lines also invites the interpretation that she undergoes, in the play, a process of thinking/awakening.
Caliban further complicates and deepens the play’s pedagogical framework. Students may be surprised to learn that many editions of The Tempest have reassigned the “Abhorred slave” speech (beginning I.ii.354) to Prospero instead of Miranda because the words have seemed “out of character” for Prospero’s gentle daughter.Footnote 8 In following this reassignment, such scholars have, in a sense, joined Prospero in reifying his daughter, believing her too delicate to fling insults at Caliban. Yet why should she not, given the opinion she has learned from her father? She continues in this speech to Caliban, “I pitied thee,/Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour/One thing or other” (I.ii.356–358). If these words are indeed spoken by the daughter and not the father, their import turns from reprimand to reproach, and failed pedagogy “translates” to a betrayal of childhood affection. Even more important, Caliban is in this sense defiant to their conjoined superiority: he faces the disgusted one-time sister and the (albeit reluctant) stepfather, both of whom once attempted to adopt him into their little stranded family and who now reject him absolutely. He contravened the guidelines of their family unit, insisting on being lover and not brother, and now they reaffirm the structures of this unit by enslaving him. In his defiant response, Caliban confirms the capacity of the strongest pupil to learn from his teacher while outstripping any (and perhaps all) original pedagogical purposes. “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is I know how to curse” (I.ii.366–367). Once the student of a new language, Caliban is now its truant hybrid—language has become an instrument to voice his grievance. For Caliban, as well as for Miranda, the very failure of pedagogy bears testimony to an unintended success. In their very different ways, both pupils put aside what they have learned, and the pupils claim their unique grips on knowledge. Thus have colonial peoples “transformed, for their own purposes, the discourses that have oppressed them,” notes critic Bill Ashcroft. “One of the most ironic aspects of that appropriation is the mockery of the institution of language learning itself.”Footnote 9
In paying close attention to such textual variations and the points of view they support, dramaturgy can open up important conceptual choices for the director. Does the director want to retain Miranda as a delicate flower, unspoiled by invective? If so, the “Abhorred slave” speech will be donated to Prospero, and the heavy strictures of his pedagogy will be more clearly defined. If the speech is to be given to Miranda, pedagogy provides a more complicated metadramatic frame: it is about shared imperialist assumptions and the weight of these upon a nonbeliever—about two against one. Does a spectacle of shared revulsion increase the audience’s distance from Caliban, or does it weigh against the father/daughter unit? These will be questions for the dramaturg to put to the director and the actors, as he or she lays out the terrain of textual choices and determinations. And by asking such questions about pedagogy as a conceptual frame, dramaturgy also allows students to reflect, with some irony, on the very structures of erudition that are built and assumed in their own learning practices.
2. What to do with the masque?
(This section bears particular reference to Objective Two.)
Any dramaturg, when given The Tempest to prepare, faces the question of what to do with the masque. Many dramaturgs advise cutting it, using the justification that it was probably a late addition anyway, most likely inserted to mark the wedding of King James’s daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V in 1613. In a production I dramaturged for the California Shakespeare Theater in 2012, we cut the masque as a device to save both on time and on elaborate stage machinery, and, thematically, as a way of “deformalizing” the play text. The director felt that the masque was an antiquated device that would add an unwanted decorum to the production. This directorial concept was supported thematically by the fact that the masque has important implications for understandings of power and hierarchy. For example, the masque gestures toward an alternate ending to the revenge motif that predominates in Prospero’s early story: it reframes revenge to provide renewal, while its mythological proportions gesture to the generative (and regenerative) principles of the universe that reshape and rename Prospero’s revenge motive, transforming his revenge against his “sinner” brother into an alternative form of justice. In this sense, given that the masque thus makes Prospero less vengeful and more likeable, by cutting the masque we remove this amelioration, leaving him more clearly highlighted as a figure of questionable ethical authority. By making this cut, what do we gain—in clarity, in richness, in the array of visual and aural associations? And what do we potentially lose?Footnote 10
What we found in the 2012 rehearsal period was that something was very much lost when the masque was cut. The cut has a big effect on Shakespeare’s own metadramatic “cut”—that is, on the manner in which Prospero breaks into the masque to effectively “cut” his own staged dream-sequenced idyllic ending. When he interrupts the masque, Prospero displays the unresolved objectives of the revenge he has planned both for Caliban and for the king’s party. In postcolonial terms, the masque, and Prospero’s interruption of it, can function as an important self-censoring watershed in the “journey” made by a character steeped in the assumed hierarchical entitlements of his role.
The Eurocentric features of the masque are also worth commenting on here. It has an entirely European quality. The characters in the masque are all from classical Greco-Roman mythology, nostalgic and appropriative, completely inappropriate to the island. From the perspective of postcolonial dramaturgy, the masque might be retained and, indeed, highlighted, in order to reveal Prospero’s ingrained cultural imperialism.
3. The geography of The Tempest
(This section bears particular reference to Objective Three.)
My exploration of the play’s geography begins with an observation by sixteenth-century travel writer, Sir Thomas Elyot:
[T]o know the sundry manners and conditions of people, and the variety of their natures, and that in a warm study or parlour, without peril of the sea or danger of long and painful journeys: I cannot tell what more pleasure should happen to a gentle wit, than to behold in his own home everything that within all the world is contained.Footnote 11
When we consider travel writers such as Elyot, Richard Hakluyt,Footnote 12 and Sir Walter Raleigh, all of whom who lived more or less contemporaneously with Shakespeare, it is clear that travel literature is documentary and political, in most cases advocating colonization for the purposes of religion, trade, and rule. Drama, in contrast, is in a distinct category. It is multivocal, opening up different and contradictory perspectives. A production can reflect a choice to highlight any one of them as “theme.” “How lush and lusty the grass looks!/ How green!” says Gonzalo (II.i.53–54), to which Antonio applies the stern corrective: “The ground, indeed, is tawny” [and not green] (55). And when Miranda exclaims, “O brave new world,/That has such people in’t!” (V.i.186–187), her father reminds her that hers is just one perspective: “’Tis new to thee” (184). The world, in other words, is subject to “the world of the play,” and a dramaturg observes that world, understands its boundaries, curates its storyline.
Although the play’s physical geography is nonspecific (somewhere off the Mediterranean coast and referring back to Milan), the geography of its connotations has been thoroughly and specifically mapped by postcolonial theorists who have considered its relationship to the colonizing of the New World, as well as its predictive correlation to more recent acts of colonization. Allen Carey Webb says, for example:
Shakespeare creates an indigenous New World figure who initially welcomes the Europeans and later finds himself cheated of his birthright…. Scripted by Shakespeare, Caliban springs from a European imagination at the very moment that European powers were invading the Americas.Footnote 13
Leslie Fiedler goes so far as to propose that via The Tempest, “the whole history of imperialist America has been prophetically revealed to us.”Footnote 14 Elizabeth Schafer cites the inception of Australia’s early colonization (1788) to suggest that because Shakespeare had, by this time, been thoroughly anointed as the Swan of Avon, The Tempest may have affected “how the white colonizers of Australia—or at least those colonizers who aspired to the high culture status then associated with Shakespeare—responded to the Australian indigenous populations.”Footnote 15 In using The Tempest as a model for “writing back,” critics have reclaimed indigenous histories in places as diverse as America, Australia, the Caribbean, Africa,Footnote 16 Romania,Footnote 17 and India. In loosening the grip of authorized histories, postcolonial theory has encouraged the rethinking of political histories in terms of the abuse, relinquishment, and aftermath of power.Footnote 18 It has thereby opened The Tempest to stagings that highlight alternate identities and subversive stories.
Janice Honeyman’s 2009 production in Capetown brilliantly displayed a form of such subversion. In Honeyman’s production, Prospero’s emotional journey “translated” the threat of miscegenation into the theme of renuciative reconciliation. Using aspects of Zulu mythology to “ground” the staging and the psychology of the production, she focused the play’s climactic point at its very end: Antony Sher, playing Prospero, faced his enemies with a rifle. He then laid it aside with the words, “As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.” Prospero turned directly to Caliban and quit the island, leaving his despised slave in supreme charge. Did the production thus become a plea for reconciliation and forgiveness? Or was it a testimony to the suggestion that once the master has no longer any use for the island, even a derelict such as Caliban can rule it? (That is, does Prospero simply no longer care?)
One of the most devastatingly “real” postcolonial Tempests was staged in my own country, Australia, in 1995, when Neil Armfield reprised for the Queensland Theatre Company his production originally done in 1990. This production, which had an Aboriginal assistant director, made a big shift in the demographic for whom Shakespeare was meant to be “representative,” staging the (now deceased) Aboriginal actor Kevin Smith in loin cloth and leather jacket. As Stewart Hawkins notes in a Telegraph Mirror article (June 2, 1995), Smith was “beaten, berated, and plied with alcohol…. To feel the power of his impotent anger at his dispossession; and to listen to him explain the music of his island to the drunken imperial clowns he has taken up with, is profoundly affecting.” In Melbourne’s Federation Festival production of 2001, director Simon Phillips rewrote the ending of the play, having Prospero go down on his knees as a gesture of supplication that begged for a measure of reconciliation.
In dramaturging postcolonial themes for The Tempest, it is important to refuse “simple oppositions between utopian nature and corrupt nurture,” that is, “sentimentalization of the natural life.”Footnote 19 John Gillies observes: “The dream of renewal, once entertained within history—that of Prospero’s island or Caliban’s nature or the New World—is irreversible. The haunted utopia is still utopia. The ground once having been cleared will never revert to forest. The New World, once having been conjured forth, will never collapse back into the Old.”Footnote 20 How might this perspective of the New World relate to conceptions of what Shakespeare meant to the New World and what, indeed, it meant to him? Is Utopia less a place than a dreamed-of self, perfect until abused by an intractable other? The dramaturg will notice the reciprocal views of kindness and rejection voiced by Prospero and Caliban. Prospero says, “I have used thee,/ Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodged thee/In mine own cell” (I.ii.—348–350), for which he has been paid with wretched ingratitude and, worse, the attempted abuse of his child. Caliban, for his part, feels the same—that his self has been subject to misprision and abuse:
When thou cam’st first,
Thou strok’st me and madest much of me; wouldst give me
Water with berries in’t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee,
And show’ed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle … (I.ii.355–360)
For each of them, kindness has made him vulnerable, generosity has been repaid by abuse, and any Utopian dream of harmony has been rendered, by the other, a dystopian dream of brutality.
What if we write the dramatist into this struggle?, a dramaturg may ask. Perhaps Utopia, for Shakespeare, is an aging artist’s dream of self-renewal—which the playwright knows to be impossible, though it is somehow created within the vessel of his play. Is the play’s lack of closure (What Rob Nixon designates as the omission of “a sixth act”Footnote 21) a gesture of permission to append a Utopian conclusion, if we wish to? It’s of dramaturgical interest that the word free occurs multiple times in the play text: from all of Prospero’s promises to free Ariel, to Caliban’s calls to freedom, to the wonderfully comic and subversive claim by the drunken Sebastian that “thought is free” (III.ii.118). Sebastian’s words resonate all the more starkly in view of Shakespeare’s previous writings, where characters repeatedly suggest (with dramatic irony, as with Duke Senior at the beginning of II.i in As You Like It) that freedom of thought is more truly “liberating” in the imagination than in practice. Against the backdrop of these plays, freedom in The Tempest can be considered in all its shades of contradiction and irony, including the special irony in Prospero’s several references in the epilogue to being caught in bondage and his appeal to the audience: “Let your indulgence set me free” (Epilogue, 20). Prospero has been the prince of power—graves at his command “have waked their sleepers, op’d, and let ’em forth” (V.i.49), signaling the playwright himself whose pen has opened graves of long-dead historical figures—Caesar, Brutus, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry V, Richard II, Richard III—and disgorged them onto the stage. Is the magician’s art—like the artist’s command of his audience, the imperial command of authority—in the end a form of bondage from which he, like those he has controlled, seeks release?
4. Calling It rape
(This section bears particular reference to Objective Four.)
Donna Hamilton asks an important question of The Tempest. How does postcolonial thinking extrapolate the workings of a playwright who thinks it is okay to reward Prospero for his enduring commitment to his own colonial values, thereby endorsing the “narrative of a great destiny to be fulfilled by … a paradigm for the expansion and transmission of culture and ideology from one place to another?”Footnote 22 In The Tempest Shakespeare has in a sense opened the door for Prospero’s position of authorized ethical judgment: because Caliban’s intended rape of Miranda goes so far off the charts of ethical plausibility that Prospero is automatically “approved of” for sanctioning Caliban as harshly as he does. As Nicoleta Cinpoeş suggests, “The legitimation for Prospero’s assertion of authority is provided by the enormity of the crime Caliban is here charged with: the attempted rape of Miranda.”Footnote 23 This is, indeed, the argument for “civilization”—that no matter what Caliban’s rights to the island may be, he should not be allowed to exercise his basic animal impulse at will. Theo D’haen adds: “If we turn things around, we can read Prospero’s accusation of Caliban not as the description of something that actually happened within the imaginative realm of the play’s prehistory, but rather as the projection of a basic fear gnawing at the root of modernity: miscegenation as a threat that risks halting and even reversing the direction of history as perceived by modernity, in which the racial superiority of the white man was the safeguard of as well as the corollary to modernity.”Footnote 24
If we view Caliban’s “rape-wish” through a postcolonial lens, however, we can suggest something else about the images of sexuality and power in this play. It’s the very fact that we call Caliban’s act an attempted rape that is part of a colonialist objective—Caliban himself certainly doesn’t call it that. Now consider the first meeting between Miranda and Ferdinand, at which the young prince asks her: “My prime request … is … if you be maid or no?” (I.ii.428–430) How much more specific can we get than that? Granted, Ferdinand does not pounce on Miranda—but how truly distinct are his words from Caliban’s carnal dreams? Both characters view Miranda in terms of sexual availability—one simply in terms of his capacity to “have peopled else/This isle with Calibans” (I.ii.353–354), and the other to harness her for reproduction so long as she satisfies the virginal prerequisites befitting a maiden and a future princess. In regard to Caliban’s “attempted” rape, we have only the word of a highly defensive father to “prove” it so. (We know, too, what difficulty Prospero has in accepting even a prince as a mate for his precious daughter.) The story of “attempted rape” (which provides a useful talking-point in class) may well reflect the paternal possessiveness that became Shakespeare’s thematic hallmark over the years; or what Patricia Seed has referred to as a specifically English self-mirror;Footnote 25 or, alternatively, a specifically English revulsion at an unfamiliar physiognomy, ironically illuminated by Ferdinand’s apparently “acceptable” initial foray into quite explicit sexuality.Footnote 26
How do these viewpoints connect to Theo D’haen’s suggestion that although Prospero is entitled to his opinion, his view of the attempted rape should not be accepted as the play’s undisputed “prehistory”? All of these questions will feed into the way that a dramaturg picks up on textual nuances—for example, when Miranda is justifying Caliban’s incarceration, she refers to “a thing most brutish” (I.ii.360) and “thy vile race” (I.ii.360). Dramaturgically, however, it is fascinating that Ariel enters on the back of the exchange with Caliban between Miranda and her father, singing “And sweet sprites bear/The burden” (I.ii.383–384). In the midst of our considerations of whether or not “justice” lies with Prospero’s view of the “rape” (which of course has become his daughter’s view also) or with Caliban’s view of his drive as simply natural, the positioning of Ariel’s vulnerable song may lead a dramaturg to suggest that perhaps Ariel is the one who is really baring the burden of injustice? It was Caliban’s mother, the witch Sycorax, who imprisoned Ariel—is Ariel not then the real inheritor of the island, rendering the justice or injustice of the rape something of a carefully crafted red herring?
Conclusion
From 1970 when Jonathan Miller drew on his reading of Octavio Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956) to stage the first “postcolonial” Tempest, this postcolonial Tempest was named and given voice. Miller portrayed Caliban as an uneducated native, taken from his tribe and strangered from his natural habitat.Footnote 27 Soon afterward, Stephen Greenblatt’s essay, “Learning to Curse,” emerged to change the terrain of thinking about this play.Footnote 28 As we view the history of The Tempest as postcolonial terrain, it may be tempting to see theatre as a “native” Caliban, growing weedlike before the arrival of scholars (Prosperos with our magic books) to explain and express the meaning of its natural “magic.” “Dramaturging The Tempest: A Pedagogical Forum” seeks to remind students that this is not what actually happened. The relationship between postcolonial theatre and critical vocabularies has been mutually expressive and expansive because its field is always that vibrant, changing medium, the stage. The stage gives us a reason for revisiting what is visible and audible in view of what might, for an audience, have been previously unseen and unheard.
Many thanks to Ato Quayson, Clio McConnell, R. S. White, and Lynne Soffer for their excellent feedback on drafts of this piece.
