Hey, hey, hey now, put down your torches, I’m not the one that said it. This guy did.
I’ve had a challenging relationship with The Tempest for almost 20 years. It’s how I introduced my children to Shakespeare. I told it to them as a bedtime fairy tale. Once upon a time, a girl lived on a faraway island with her father, a powerful wizard. She learns from him that she is a long-lost princess who was banished here, with her father, by his enemies. One day, a ship runs ashore on their island, full of pirates set on seizing control of their island, but her father is far too powerful for them. Among the pirates, however, is a good man, a handsome prince, who marries her and takes her away to live happily ever after.
Did I skip a few steps? Sure. But we’re talking about a 5-year-old and her 3-year-old sister, and I had to make adjustments. My youngest was still a baby when we started this, and it’d be a few years before he asked for Hamlet. He tried King Lear once, but it made him sad. I’m not kidding.
The Big White Elephant In The Room
“But what about the whole colonialism thing?” I was asked right around the time Julie Taymor’s movie version came out. At the time, I answered honestly – I never really thought about it. To me, The Tempest can be read as the story of a father’s readiness to do anything for his daughter, including overcoming his desire for revenge.
But no one’s letting the colonialism thing go, and it’s only gotten more intense over the years. I don’t disagree that this is also the story of a powerful white man who showed up on land that wasn’t his, took one look at the creatures already living there, and said, “Mine. You’re all my slaves now.” That is also all true.
And, much like when a celebrity that’s been doing good things in the spotlight for decades suddenly has a clip surface of something they said once twenty years ago, Prospero is basically canceled. It wasn’t long before I saw articles arguing that he’s one of the worst fathers in Shakespeare. Sigh.
For years, I would answer the question, “What’s your favorite play?” with The Tempest because of the connection with my children. I stopped doing that. My children, now college-age, even stopped doing that. Because nobody wants to be attacked over it. You like that one? Therefore, you must agree with all historical instances of colonialism! That’s the only possible answer!
Where Does Hamlet Come Into This?
I still regularly skim my headlines and news stories for Shakespeare content. When I (rarely) see a Tempest story, I always check it out to see if there’s anything we can talk about. This is a good one. The author, Joseph Bissex, wants to talk about forgiveness. The Tempest makes sense, but Hamlet? I don’t think I’ve ever, to this moment, thought of Hamlet as a play with any forgiveness to be found or deserved. Claudius killed his father. We’ll assume for the sake of argument that this is a proven point and not still up for debate. There’s an audience that wants Hamlet to forgive him for that?
Prospero’s enemies actually didn’t kill anybody. I realize that was their intent, and it was only through Gonzago’s aid that they survived. But they did survive.
Here, the author focuses on Hamlet’s line to Ophelia, “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.” In that moment he sees her as a fair creature and asks her to pray for him. To Bissex, this is the crucial moment. Hamlet should have stopped right there. He hasn’t killed anybody yet. He should (my words) leave them all to heaven. We could have ended up in a comedy with a marriage at the end (his words).
I don’t really think The Tempest is better than Hamlet. Much of that is because of the magic element. The most interesting thing about Shakespeare to me is the depiction of human nature. Despite the royalty, swordfight and fine, ghost, it’s a more accurate and in-depth depiction of human relationships than one about magic spirits, even if I do like the father/daughter dynamic more for obvious reasons.
But this angle is an interesting comparison that you don’t typically see.
Rejecting The Tempest because it can be seen as accepting colonialism is a stretch.
Have you chatted with many liberal college students lately? 🙂 It comes up somewhat regularly on the Shakespeare reddit, unfortunately.
Hi Duane, hoping that things are looking better on the job front?
Some observations/comments on these plays, based on experience of teaching them in the UK as well as watching each several times.
TEMPEST: personally, I can’t dissociate from the idea that this was Shakespeare’s swansong, at least as sole/main playwright. I think tastes were changing towards the masque – not his forté at all – and he did the wedding scene with IO and Juno through clenched teeth.
Teaching it in the UK in the 2020s, I find it sad that I still have to throw the colonialism/race themes in myself, or they don’t get discussed. Students very easily get the notion of an attempted violation and, I hate to say it but here we go, are much quicker to condemn Caliban than they do, say, Larry LaSalle in Heroes …
HAMLET: if – big IF – I can get past the reputation, this can be quite easy to sell (with trigger warnings) as a modern tale where an adored dad moves out and is quickly replaced by a sleazy second-hand car salesman.
But – and I think you refer to it in your post – your personal ‘baggage’ is what influences your reaction to a text. And that can vary over time. Example: once I begin talking to insecure, image-obsessed teenagers about Caliban as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, rejected because of his physical appearance, you can see change, even if that’s only evidenced in the privacy of their essays rather than the classroom discussion.
… which, taking a sideways leap, is why Lear is a hard teach to students who haven’t experienced an aging relative, or who live in decent families where relatives aren’t squabbling about inheritance before an elder dies ..,
Which play is better? As pointless as asking which is your ‘favourite’! I suspect that like me, your answer might vary day-to-day: again it’s all down to the ‘baggage’ we bring to the text.
> it’s all down to the ‘baggage’ we bring to the text.
I’m glad I’m not crazy on that one. It’s ok to have opinions on what the plays mean to you, and for those opinions to change with time and context. A lot of people love Romeo and Juliet early on in their experience with Shakespeare when they have little to compare it against. But after years of looking more deeply at Hamlet and Lear and the other greats, Romeo and Juliet typically takes a back seat. The play didn’t change, the person did.