The Tempest and Colonialism

George Lamming

 

George Lamming is one of the writers that really discovered and explored the idea that The Tempest is based on Colonialism and that this was a theme in the play. He is a writer coming from Barbados born June 6, 1927, in 1950 he emigrated to England and spent his time working in factory’s and even broadcasted for the BBC. Lamming became a leader in a Caribbean renaissance in England, and travelled around the world giving lectures at Universities.

Lamming's writing career has encompassed several genres, gaining acclaim not simply for fiction but also poetry and critical work. His fiction has taken up the familiar Caribbean search for identity, as Lamming uses details from his own autobiography to get at the root of the West Indian soul. However, in these explorations of identity and the effects of history, Lamming comes not only to writing of the West Indian psyche, but of humans in general. Despite critics' accusations of using his novels as soapboxes from which he preaches his Marxist ideology, Lamming's efforts to tie together collective history through the shared humanity of his characters ensure that his novels remain skilfully crafted and multifaceted.

George Lamming looked at The Tempest in a new way. His 1960 collection of essays, The Pleasure of Exile, is a piece work that attempts to define the place of the West Indian in the post-colonial world, re-interpreting Shakespeare's The Tempest and the characters of Prospero and Caliban in terms of personal identity and the history of the Caribbean.


Evidence

“The Tempest has often been 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 to 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 allow us to study the play in the light of colonialism. Moreover there are bases that enable us to make a post colonial interpretation of the play. The hatred towards the colonizer is very great and strong among the colonized. Prospero manipulates everybody and every action in the play. Everybody on the island is manipulated by Prospero the way a puppet master controls his puppets. Caliban as a colonized wants to strike back on the colonizer. Caliban is disobedient and creates problems for the colonizer. He attempts to rape Miranda and it is a treat posed to the safety of the colonizer. He tells Prospero that the land that prospero rules was forcefully taken away from his mother. These attempts by Caliban to protest and resist the colonizer can support our post-colonial interpretation of the play.”

 

http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/globaldrama/the-tempest-as-a-play-about-colonialism.html


I personally feel that I it is really important to look into the evidence that there is to support our concept as it is a way of bringing it to life and making it sure that we fully understand what is our take on the play so that we can understand how our characters fit into the concept, what it is saying to the audience and how we can say this message and connect with the audience through the facts presented to us in the play. It is also really interesting to see how there is truth in the concept of what we are researching and looking into and how such a theme could be seen distant from the play and from what Shakespeare intended but when you look at the evidence of what is presented to us and what Shakespeare create it shows us how real and truthful our concept is to the play.
When I was first reading The Tempest the slavery theme struck out to me and it was quite a clear, strong element of the play, Caliban and Ariel are the most obvious characters that represent slavery as they are being kept against their will under the rule of Prospero. However when you look deeper into the play I thought that Miranda's role also shows a sense of control as she is put under spells by Prospero and feel that this shows how she is manipulated as well and the could be linked back to slavery.