A Tempest (1969 Play) Essay Questions

Caliban and Ariel react very differently to their enslavement. Describe them.

Ariel is very compliant; although he does not like being enslaved, especially when he lived a free life before Prospero took control of the island, he believes strongly that Prospero will eventually keep his promise and emancipate him, and so he is compliant and obeys every order Prospero gives him. This obedience and faith in Prospero's word is eventually rewarded, but when it is, Ariel has lost his sense of self.

Caliban, on the other hand, is mutinous, a revolutionary who wants to anchor himself in the injustice of his situation. He is openly defiant towards Prospero, which does not bring him closer to emancipation, and brings him more work. However, by the end of the play, he manages to enact his vengeance on Prospero, haunting the island and creating chaos there.

What is the purpose of adding Eshu to Prospero's performance?

When Prospero stages a bit of entertainment for his guests, he assembles a pantheon of Roman gods to perform. However, Eshu, a Yoruba trickster god from West Africa, shows up uninvited and drives the other gods away. By making this change to Shakespeare's play, Césaire injects the story with an image of African culture, a figure that seeks to remind the European characters of the culture they have plundered.

What elements of the play are postcolonial?

Césaire, a postcolonial theorist and writer, made some key changes to Shakespeare's work, to turn it into an explicit indictment of colonialism. For one thing, Ariel and Caliban, magical creatures in Shakespeare's version, are half-black and black respectively. Their imprisonment by Prospero becomes one of subjugation along racial lines, an explicit colonization of their island, their culture, their language, and everything that constitutes their sense of national identity. In this way, some of the themes present in Shakespeare's original play—the notion that Prospero stole Caliban's island, forbade him from speaking in his native language, and relegated him to a life of servitude—become explicitly racialized issues, depicting the violence of colonialism.

How does the play end?

The play ends with Prospero and Caliban, slave-master and slave, left alone on the island together. Prospero comes onstage in a state of dismay, and his body language and movements are jerky and almost inhuman. He complains about the fact that opossums have overrun the island and the climate has changed. "I shall protect civilization!" he yells, looking for Caliban, but Caliban is elsewhere singing a freedom song. In this way, we see that, while Prospero has not explicitly freed Caliban, he is haunted by Caliban's desire for freedom, and has been forced into his own kind of enslavement.

How does Caliban use language to resist?

Early in the play, Caliban talks about the fact that Prospero has stolen his native language and made him learn his European one, forbidding him from speaking in the language he grew up speaking. This is just one of the ways that Prospero has enacted violence against his charge. Throughout the play, Caliban resists this in key ways, by greeting Prospero with the Swahili exclamation "Uhuru" which means freedom, and suggesting that his name is "X." The "X" signifies that he has been robbed of his identity, forced into a system that has taken his sense of self away from him. Thus, it is a linguistic tribute to his own subjugation, a reminder to his master of the violence he has inflicted.