Thus, post-colonial criticism of a play like Othello not only draws our attention to Renaissance attitudes toward Moors, Africans, and Turks, among others, but it also examines how the play may have been interpreted and performed in countries involved in recent colonial and post-colonial struggles, for example in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. This process was, of course, a complex one. On the one hand, Shakespeare was an export to the colonies of European literature and language as a part of their policy of cultural domination. On the other hand, it also enabled the colonized groups to revise and remake Shakespeare's works in ways which related to their own social conditions. 

Early post-colonial responses to The Tempest 

Until the advent of post-colonial criticism, Anglo-American critics frequently read The Tempest as an allegory about artistic creation. Since this was once considered to be Shakespeare's final play, Prospero has been defined as a surrogate playwright, shaping the main action through his magic. Starting with the artificial tempest of the opening scene, Prospero directs, rewards, and punishes the main characters according to his master plan, which is to marry his daughter, Miranda, to Ferdinand, the son and heir to the Duke of Naples, his former enemy. This plan is considered his revenge for his forcible exile from his own kingdom. In leading to this desired union of Naples and Milan, Prospero obstructs the advances of Caliban, the native of the island where he and Miranda are exiled. Furthermore, Prospero's magical power not only ensures the enslavement of Caliban, but also demands the servitude of a sprite named Ariel to put his magical designs into action. Overall, in this commonly accepted reading of The Tempest, Prospero emerges as an all-knowing, benevolent patriarch and artistic creator whose motives are beyond reproach. Since the play is a romance in terms of its genre, its plot was generally approached as a fanciful tale with little connection to the history of the period or its aftermath. 

For instance, Aimé Césaire, a black writer and activist from Martinique, re-wrote Shakespeare's play in 1969 in French. Une Tempête (translated into the English A Tempest in 1985) celebrates Caliban's verbal attacks on Prospero and questions the latter's claims to the island. Set in a colony – a prototype of a Caribbean or African setting – in the throes of resistance and unrest, Césaire's play focusses initially on Caliban's resistance to Prospero's control over language. Here, Césaire is clearly sensitive to the way in which the name Caliban/Cannibal appears in Shakespeare's play and in colonial history as a cultural stereotype for the natives of the New World. Accompanying Caliban's challenge to language are references to an actual guerrilla movement and an impending black independence. And Ariel, who is labelled a 'mulatto' in this play, represents the mixed races more able to accept their limited oppression. Overall, this play characterises the changes undergone by the figure of Caliban in productions of the play: in 18th- and 19th-century European productions he was represented as a primitive or 'missing link' from Darwin's theory (i.e. a being in between apes and humans in the evolutionary process). However, with the advent of national liberation of the non-European races, as in Césaire's play, Caliban was widely depicted as a defiant subject under European rule, or simply an embodiment of any oppressed group. 

Overall, whether one considers The Tempest as an allegory of Caliban's liberation or of Prospero's colonial paternalism, post-colonial readings of the play's reception in the developing world clearly establish that we can no longer recuperate The Tempest as a historically 'innocent' text, uncorrupted by later historical readings. 

The Tempest as an allegory of European discovery and colonisation 

Given these changing responses to Shakespeare's The Tempest in the former 'Third World', it is not surprising that by the 1980s, Anglo-American readings of the play began to join in such interrogations of Prospero's rule and in empathy for Caliban. In doing so, post-colonial criticism in the West was somewhat belated in acknowledging the significance of the play's historical background. 

This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child, 
And here was left by th' sailors. Thou, my slave, 
As thou [Ariel] report's thyself, was then her servant; 
And for thou wastaspirit too delicate 
To act her earthy and abhorred commands, 
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee 
By help of her more potent ministers, 
And in her most unmitigable rage, 
Into a cloven pine; within which rift 
Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain 
A dozen years ... 
(1.2.269–79) 

Once he establishes Sycorax's supposedly evil nature, Prospero then labels her son, Caliban, as less than human – 'freckled whelp, hag-born – not honoured with / A human shape' (1.2.283–84). However, even as he derides Caliban, Prospero claims to have treated him with kindness in attempts to humanize him. 

I have used thee, 
Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodged thee 
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate 
The honour of my child. 
(1.2.348–48) 

Once Prospero defines Caliban as a potential rapist of his daughter Miranda, he easily justifies taking him into forced servitude, as he explains in this exchange: 

MIRANDA 'Tis a villain, sir, 
I do not love to look on. 

PROSPERO But as 'tis, 
... He does make our fire, 
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices 
That profit us.-What ho! Slave! Caliban! 
(1.2.311–13) 

Miranda also justifies their enslavement of Caliban with the assertion that they tried to civilise him but to no avail: 

Abhorrèd slave, 
Which any print of goodness wilt not take, 
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, 
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour 
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, 
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like 
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes 
With words that made them known. 
(1.2.351–58) 

Miranda and Prospero's justifications of their enslavement of the 'savage' Caliban, whose ‘vile race' (1.2.358) lacks natural goodness, are strongly challenged by post-colonial criticism. Unlike generations of earlier readers, post-colonial critics view Prospero's and Miranda's relations with Caliban as an allegory of European colonialism – one that reveals Shakespeare's own ambivalence toward Prospero's power. Europeans' colonising activities among non-European natives they encountered in the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean were based on the premise of the 'civilising mission'. This mission assumed that the natives lacked any culture or formal language until the Europeans brought them the 'gifts' of Western language and culture. If the natives resisted European paternal rule, then they were labelled as 'savages', beyond redemption. It is ironic that Shakespeare makes Caliban articulate this dilemma when he exclaims to Miranda and Prospero: 'You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is I know how to curse' (1.2.363–64). 

This island 's mine, by Sycorax my mother, 
Which thou tak'st from me. When thou cam'st first, 
Thou strok'st me and made 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 showed thee all the qualities o' th' isle, 
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile – 
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms 
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you; 
For I am all the subjects that you have, 
Which first was mine own king, and here you sty me 
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me 
The rest o' th' island. 
(1.2.331–43) 

It is this rendition of history that became the battle cry for the anti-colonial movements in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America – a rendition that became the staple of many revisions and appropriations of Shakespeare's play in these regions. While the play was written in 17th-century England, post-colonial criticism takes the play outwards towards its complicated transactions between European and African and Caribbean cultures in the succeeding centuries. Post-colonial criticism in the West has mined this new archive of the reception history of Shakespeare's The Tempest, questioning, once again, all normative ideas of a 'common humanity', while articulating, as Shakespeare did, the voices of the seemingly marginal characters in Prospero's grand designs. 

By permission of Oxford University Press. The article is view only and does not come under a Creative Commons license, or any other open access licence, that would allow reuse without requiring permission from OUP. For permissions, please contact academic.permissions@oup.com 

Extract (2,049w) from pp.492–501 Ch.33 'Post-Colonial Criticism' by Jyotsna Singh from Reading: The Tempest from “Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide” edited by Wells, Stanley & Orlin, Lena Cowen Singh (2003) 

Free permission Author's own material.