The Tempest: A Colonial Interpretation
This post is coming at a weird time, considering the GCSE Shakespeare paper was on Monday.
But it is for Izzy from the gym. She is sitting her A level on Wednesday and asked for some help with this topic on The Tempest.
I’m not so big time that I get recognised a lot, so I don’t get overwhelmed with requests. Also, Izzy outlifts me on one of the weights machines, so respect.
Quotes from the Play, Organised by Theme
1. Dispossession and Land Theft
“This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me”
Caliban explicitly frames Prospero’s rule as colonial theft
Challenges the legality of Prospero’s sovereignty
Link to Paul Brown: Prospero’s authority is used “to legitimate the seizure of power by civility”
This prompts Caliban’s reaction when he urges Stephano and Trinculo to murder Prospero:
Having first seized his books; or with a log
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake
2. Indigenous Knowledge Exploited Then Betrayed
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
The native’s initial hospitality is weaponised against him
Mirrors the historical reality of European settlers relying on Indigenous knowledge before enslaving those who provided it
Tragic irony: generosity becomes the mechanism of subjugation
3. Forced Labour and Economic Extraction
“We cannot miss him: he does make our fire, / Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices / That profit us”
Prospero admits Caliban’s enslavement is economic necessity, not moral duty
Mirrors colonial extraction of Indigenous labour
The language of utility reduces Caliban to a function rather than a person
4. The Paternalistic Mask of Tyranny
“I have used thee, / (Filth as thou art) with human care, and lodg’d thee / In mine own cell”
Prospero frames oppression as benevolence — the ‘white man’s burden’
The parenthetical “Filth as thou art” immediately undercuts the claim of care
The contradiction between the two halves of the statement exposes the self-deception of the ‘civilising mission’
5. The Civilising Mission and Its Justification
“I pitied thee, / Took pains to make thee speak... but thy vile race, / Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with”
Miranda uses the language of racial essentialism — Caliban’s failure is innate, not circumstantial
The ‘civilising mission’ is revealed as circular logic: we civilised him; he failed; therefore he deserves enslavement
Link to Ania Loomba: colonial powers claimed superior morality to legitimise takeover
6. Linguistic Colonialism and Resistance
“You taught me language; and my profit on ‘t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!”
Caliban recognises language as a mechanism of control and subverts it as resistance
He weaponises the coloniser’s tongue to articulate his rage
Link to George Lamming: the Prospero–Caliban relationship is “prophetic of a political future which is our present” — Shakespeare anticipated the linguistic traumas of the British Empire
7. Dehumanisation and the “Othering” of Caliban
“A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick”
Caliban is reduced to subhuman status to justify his enslavement
The language of essentialism — his nature is fixed, ineducable — mirrors colonial racial ideology
Contrast with Caliban’s iambic pentameter verse elsewhere: Shakespeare’s formal choice humanises what Prospero’s words dehumanise
8. Native Resistance and Lost Sovereignty
“For I am all the subjects that you have, / Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me / In this hard rock”
Caliban articulates prior sovereignty and political legitimacy
The verb “sty” is significant — it is Caliban using animal language about himself, but in accusation, not in acceptance
He has absorbed the coloniser’s language and turned it into indictment
9. Commodification of Indigenous Bodies
“Were I in England now... there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian”
Direct historical reference to the exhibition of captured Native Americans in London
Trinculo’s instinct is immediately mercenary — Caliban is a product, not a person
Shakespeare satirises the financial incentives driving colonial expeditions
The contrast between charity denied to a “lame beggar” and money spent on spectacle indicts English society’s values
10. The Attempted Rape of Miranda — The Ideological Crux
“Would’t had been done! / ... I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans”
Caliban does not deny the attempted rape — he is unrepentant
Reading 1 (colonial justification): Prospero uses the ‘threat to white women’ to claim moral superiority and legitimise enslavement — a tactic Ania Loomba identifies as a recurring feature of colonial history, where patriarchal powers weaponised the protection of white femininity to justify violent suppression of Indigenous peoples
Reading 2 (postcolonial reading): Caliban’s desire to “people” the island with his own kind can be read as a colonised subject’s attempt to reclaim demographic sovereignty — to repopulate what has been taken
Reading 3 (the trap): It simultaneously confirms the coloniser’s stereotype of the native as hyper-sexualised and unruly, giving Prospero exactly the justification he needs — whether or not that framing is fair
The attempted rape cannot exonerate Prospero’s broader tyranny, but it complicates any straightforwardly sympathetic reading of Caliban and forces the audience into genuine moral difficulty — which may be precisely Shakespeare’s intention
11. Colonial Possession — “This thing of darkness”
“This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine”
Three possible readings — all analytically valuable:
Colonial reading: The ultimate language of possession; Caliban is chattel, claimed as property
Psychological reading: Prospero acknowledges his own culpability — the “darkness” in Caliban is darkness he created through exploitation and betrayal. Link to George Lamming: Prospero experiences a “shattering kind of self-knowledge” that he has deserved Caliban’s ingratitude
Jungian reading: Caliban is Prospero’s shadow-self — the repressed darker aspects of his own psyche (cruelty, tyrannical will to power) that he has projected outward. By acknowledging the shadow, Prospero achieves psychological integration. The shadow can only be managed when owned, not suppressed. Having renounced his “rough magic,” he is finally accepting his own human imperfection
12. Miranda’s Irony — The “Brave New World”
“O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!”
Miranda says this upon seeing the Europeans — the very people the audience knows to be treacherous, drunken, and murderous
Shakespeare deliberately destabilises the “civilised” / “savage” binary
The supposedly barbarous Caliban appreciates the island’s natural beauty in some of the play’s most beautiful verse; the supposedly civilised Europeans plot assassination and theft
The dramatic irony invites the audience to question the entire framework of civilisation versus savagery
Critics to Deploy
Paul Brown — the play is “imbricated within the discourse of colonialism”; Prospero uses authority “to legitimate the seizure of power by civility.” Use when discussing dispossession and Prospero’s justifications.
George Lamming — Prospero and Caliban is “a shorthand for the relation of colonizer to colonized”; the play is “prophetic of a political future which is our present”; Prospero’s encounter with Caliban is “largely his encounter with himself.” Use for linguistic colonialism and the “This thing of darkness” quote.
Ania Loomba — colonial powers weaponised the “threat” to white women to “claim a superior morality” and “legitimize the takeover”; the rape accusation functions ideologically, not just morally. Use when discussing Miranda, the attempted rape, and the justification of enslavement.
Meredith Anne Skura — viewing the play solely as colonial allegory “flattens the text into the mold of colonialist discourse”; Shakespeare was “crossing it with other discourses, changing, enlarging, skewing, and questioning” colonial ideology rather than simply reproducing it. Use in the counterargument section to show critical nuance and avoid a monolithic reading.
Counter-Argument to Include
The island is geographically Mediterranean — between Tunis and Naples — not in the Americas, and therefore not obviously colonial
Prospero arrived by accident, has no plantation ambitions, appropriates nothing for the English Crown, and ultimately abandons the island, restoring it entirely to Caliban
Caliban’s mother Sycorax was herself an Algerian exile — Caliban is not strictly indigenous
Skura’s warning: reducing the play to colonial allegory ignores its psychological and aesthetic complexity
Shakespeare was likely not writing a manifesto — he was working within and across multiple discourses simultaneously
Conclusion
Shakespeare neither straightforwardly endorses nor straightforwardly condemns the colonial project. He stages its contradictions honestly: Caliban’s dispossession is real and his resistance is given poetic force, but his attempted rape complicates easy sympathy.
Prospero’s tyranny is exposed, but his psychological complexity prevents simple villainy.
By granting the colonised subject an unsilenced voice, mocking the mercenary greed of English exploiters, and inverting the civilised/savage binary through dramatic irony, Shakespeare crafts something more unsettling than a polemic — a play that forces its audience to sit with moral discomfort and draw their own conclusions.
That discomfort is itself the critique.