Assignment - 11 The Postcolonial Literature

Main themes of A Tempest and The Tempest : 

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Assignment 11

Name : Vipul C Dabhi
Semester - 3
Roll no : 35
Enrollment no : 2069108420180009
Email ID : dabhivc04@gmail.com
Paper - 11 The Postcolonial Literature
Topic : Main themes of A Tempest and The Tempest
Batch : 2017- 2019
Submitted to : Department of English, MKBU.





Introduction :
           As we all knows that Shakespeare was a genius person. And his talent seems in his works. Here we will mainly discuss about his play " The Tempest". When we read at first time it seems a story of a king and who has magical powers. But after reading the criticism of it then we finds how he shows the dominance of power over small identity, or we can say over voiceless. Mainly Caliban remains voiceless. Caliban has not given voice against Power. Thus, in this play we finds colonialism. We can study this play from various angle like Postcolonial, feminism and etc. So first let us see the main theme of the play.
          Where's " A Tempest " by Aime Cesaire mostly deals with the Postcolonial elements. Somehow he becomes successful in showing the elements by making the change from The Tempest. Here Caliban remains in the center. Who has given voice. He raises his voice against Power. So here we can see the importance of re- writing in literature. Here we will discuss the main theme of the play.

The Tempest : Shakespeare

Quest for Knowledge :
As The Tempest is a Renaissance drama, the quest for knowledge as a theme pertains in the play. Prospero is the king of Milan, he has a lot of responsibility towards the people and the kingdom but he fails to accomplish his duty. He remains quite busy in studying book of magic. He is concerned in his hunger of knowledge that he wants perfection in his learning and forgets everything about the kingdom. Antonio, his brother, gets right chance to dethrone him with the assistance of the king of Naples and his brother, Alonso and Sebastian respectively.  Prospero loses the right to be the king of Milan, only because of his unquenchable thirst for the knowledge. In a sense, he is ready to lose everything for the sake of learning. He is the right example of Renaissance man. Whereas on the other hand, there is Caliban, a deformed being on the island who does not have any interest in learning, to be knowledgeable. Prospero teaches him the language to make him civilized and learned one, but he never learns it well. He learns few words, with which he curses Prospero for his ruthless treatment.

Power :
The pursuit of power and the exercise of power is one of the leading themes of William Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest. The theme is all-pervasive in this well-knit play. Before the play starts, Antonio, Prospero's brother who was put in charge of administration by Prospero, usurped power and conspired to banish Prospero from Milan. Here, he incites Alonso's brother, Sebastian, to kill the sleeping king and become the ruler of Naples. In the same manner, Prospero wants to be powerful with the help of magic and he seizes all the power of the island from the witch, Sycorax. The main political theme of the play is gaining power and control over others.


The difficulty of distinguishing Man from Monster :
The identity of Caliban remains ambiguous in this play. Sometime he is addressed as monster and in some places he is called man. In the play when Miranda first sees Ferdinand she says that he is the third man she has ever seen. On that basis, we can say that the two other men must be her father and Caliban. Here she regards Caliban as a man. Prospero refers to him as a born devil, a thing most brutish, a vile race, which significantly rejects him being a man and takes him as a monster. The views of Miranda and Prospero contradict in terms of Caliban’s identity. They think that if they provide him with the western education along with the language, he can be uplifted and his status can be improved. But at the same time, they seem to see him inherently devil and monster to whom no education can reform. Caliban himself says he was generous to Prospero but when he starts dehumanizing him and oppressing him, he starts disliking him. It is vague to generalize that Caliban is born brutish or he is made brutish by the oppression of Prospero.
The Charm of Colonialism :
The Tempest is interpreted as a play about colonialism primarily because Prospero comes to Sycorax’s island, subdues her, rules the land and imposes his own culture on the people of the land. Pushing the native to the side, he places himself at the helm of affairs. He displaces Caliban’s mother and treats her as a beast. He has full control over everything on the island. He makes Caliban work as his servant and calls him a thing of darkness. Caliban is being dehumanized or treated as subhuman. This shows the colonizer’s attitude of looking down on the colonized people. Caliban is seen as a despicable entity. The whites looked down on the people of other color. Some are born to dominate while others are born to be dominated. Caliban is treated as inferior. The colonizer used words like light, knowledge and wisdom to refer himself while he used terms like darkness, ignorance and elemental to describe the colonized. This binary opposition shows how Prospero as a colonizer creates essences about the colonized people. Prospero sees himself as a ruler carrying out the project of civilization mission. The way light dispels darkness and knowledge dispels ignorance Prospero as a colonizer educates and civilizes Caliban but without much success. The civilizing mission is always accompanied by the politics of domination over the colonized. These elements confirms the theme of colonialism in The Tempest.

A Tempest : Aime Cesaire

Here we will find the theme of Postcolonialism, Cultural Conflict, Master Slave relationship, Rebellious qualities in Caliban and etc.

     Aime Cesaire Cesaire transforms the characters and transposes the scenes to reveal Shakespeare’s Prospero as the exploitative European power and Caliban and Ariel as the exploited natives. Cesaire’s A Tempest is an effective response to Shakespeare’s The Tempest because he interprets it from the perspective of the colonized and raises a conflict with Shakespeare as an icon of the literary canon. Besides that in In The Tempest by William Shakespeare one might argue that colonialism is a reoccurring theme throughout the play because of the slave-master relationship between Ariel and Caliban and Prospero.

      A Tempest as a proclamation of resistance to European cultural dominance a project to “de-mythify” Shakespeare’s canonical text. In A Tempest, Caliban attempts to authorize his own freedom by speaking it, positioning speech as a tool to empower the colonized. By placing Caliban, the speaking slave, in the pages of a new play with a specific historical trajectory, Cesaire’s message of colonial empowerment forces a second critique of Shakespeare while also inhabiting a space of its own. To connect speech with power, Cesaire’s text focuses on the role of dialogue within the colonial system, emphasizing its unique ability to move between the disparate subjective spaces of the colonizer and the colonized.
     The canonical text and its postcolonial revision. Although older criticisms of Cesaire’s A Tempest often simply compare his revision to Shakespeare’s original text in an effort to understand its value as either a commentary upon or update of it, Timothy Scheie represents a new mode of critique that resists a simple analysis of the referential relationship between Shakespeare and Cesaire to understand the meaning of Cesaire’s text on its own. In this way, Scheie moves beyond questioning the legitimacy of Cesaire’s project, instead focusing on the ability of Cesaire’s text to represent colonial systems. Scheie argues that despite Cesaire’s project to critique racist colonial power structures.
Prospero has been exiled and lives on a secluded island, and he drums up a violent storm to drive his daughter’s ship ashore. The island, however, is somewhere in the Caribbean, Ariel is a mulatto slave rather than a sprite, and Caliban is a black slave. A Tempest focuses on the plight of Ariel and Caliban the never-ending quest to gain freedom from Prospero and his rule over the island. Ariel, dutiful to Prospero, follows all orders given to him and sincerely believes that Prospero will honor his promise of emancipation. Caliban, on the other hand, slights Prospero at every opportunity: upon entering the first act, Caliban greets Prospero by saying “Uhuru!”, the Swahili word for “freedom.” Prospero complains that Caliban often speaks in his native language which Prospero has forbidden. This prompts Caliban to attempt to claim birthrights to the island, angering Prospero who threatens to whip Caliban.
During their argument, Caliban tells Prospero that he no longer wants to be called Caliban, “Call me X. That would be best. Like a man without a name. Or, to be more precise, a man whose name has been stolen.” The allusion to Malcolm X cements the aura of cultural reclamation that serves as the foundational element of A Tempest. Cesaire has also included the character Eshu who in the play is cast as a black devil-god. Calling on the Yoruba mythological traditions of West Africa, Eshu assumes the archetypal role of the trickster and thwarts Prospero’s power and authority during assemblies. Near the end of the play, Prospero sends all the lieutenants off the island to procure a place in Naples for his daughter Miranda and her husband Ferdinand. When the fleet begs him to leave, Prospero refuses and claims that the island cannot stand without him; in the end, only he and Caliban remain. As Prospero continues to assert his hold on the island, Caliban’s freedom song can be heard in the background. Thus, Cesaire leaves his audience to consider the lasting effects of colonialism.
Conclusion :
     Thus we can say that somehow this play gives an tremendous amount of value of Postcolonialism. However, this play is substance of discussion. And Aime Cesaire give impact on the play and as flourishing the play he explaining with expanding his idea or realism too. After all by looking all the perspective and give nutshell views my attempt of this paper is justifies. 

Work cited :
https://www.bachelorandmaster.com/globaldrama/themes-in-the-tempest.html#.W96BNRnhU0M
http://desaikaushal1315.blogspot.com/2014/10/analysis-of-tempest-by-aime-cesaire.html?m=1