CEA Critic

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.

The meta-theatricality of The Tempest manifests in Shakespeare’s interrogation and perpetuation of the power of illusion, event, and spectacle. The power that I ascribe to Shakespeare’s theatre was hotly contested in Elizabethan London. While “of all the arts, drama is the most social, indeed the most metropolitan: it is political in the finer sense of the word, intimately related to the life of the polis it at once depends upon and recreates in one form or another,” Shakespeare’s “London regarded plays with (at best) suspicion, players as ‘doble-dealing ambodexters,’ and their audience as an imminent and unruly threat to the health of the body politic” (Mullaney 7; 8). The apparent paradox between drama’s reliance on its cultural milieu and the suspicion of the illusion that it creates exposes the ideological function [End Page 71] of representation, the theater, and playing. The location of early modern playhouses (in the Liberties of the city) and the vehement objections marshaled against playing disclose the anxiety generated by imitation, improvisation, and simulation: “It was a plague in its own right, contaminating morals and manners when it did not, in its pathological alliance, contaminate the flesh itself. It infected the body politic” (Mullaney 50). Like a pathogen, the theatrical spectacle had the power to disease and pollute its audience with its allegedly raunchy and licentious display.² Moreover, early modern anti-theatricals constructed playing and its attendant accoutrement, such as players and playhouses, as totally “corrupting,” because they were able to “impress vicious images upon the minds of the most susceptible and dangerous groups in the general population” (Montrose 49). This fear of embodied representation, that it can stamp ideas on and in its audience, simultaneously demonstrates its agency and the vulnerability of the malleable populace. The theatrical event is powerful because it communicates on rhetorical and affective registers and can operate as a vehicle for ideology. Shakespeare mobilizes the potential and capacity of the spectacle in The Tempest to expose the theatrical mechanisms upon which power relies.