by Ambereen Dadabhoy (Original)
Critical consensus about William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) locates the play’s anxieties and investments within an imperial and colonial milieu.1 Indeed, Shakespeare’s terminal play invites these readings with its topical references to both the new and old worlds and its plot of European colonization and native subjugation. My investigation into The Tempest, however, is not so much interested in the particular geography of its imperial designs or in identifying the colonial motives and cultural superiority that undergird the master-slave dialectic of colonizer and colonized limned by the play or in servile condition of the island’s indigenous inhabitants. Rather, my inquiry is stimulated by the sinister technology of empire that Shakespeare, through Prospero, obfuscates under the guise of art, magic, and play. As Prospero tells his lovely, young daughter, Miranda, his assiduous pursuit of knowledge and the occult instigated the coup d’état that unseated him from the dukedom of Milan. Nonetheless, that same knowledge allowed him to settle and—forgive me—prosper on the island. Shakespeare’s ambivalent presentation of knowledge and its attendant power to subjugate, oppress, and control complicates the moral, political, and fantastical registers of his play. Indeed, The Tempest seems to be an extended meditation on the spectacular ways in which power reveals and conceals itself through its mobilization of theatricality. In other words, the play relies on games and spectacles that emerge from Prospero’s magic, to create an event—the entire action of the play—that reinforces Prospero’s power and re-inscribes power relations on the island by obscuring the violence inherent in the imperial enterprise.
