As I have learned from reading Foster's book (it always goes back to him, doesn't it?), Shakespeare is everywhere. His quotes and themes are immersed in our culture and can be seen almost daily. His most famous works are also being retold several times in highly different forms. Sometimes they are movies based on his plays such as “O” or “Romeo and Juliet”. Yet the plays are also transformed into novels that, while not exactly acting as a direct copy of the work, contain the same key elements and themes.
In Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix’s “The Tempest” she notes that the famous play may have come from real events that occurred in the early 1609s. This is not to say that on some island in the Mediterranean there lives a magical man, his virginal daughter, their deformed slave and band of spirits. No, the “The Tempest” was taken from the storm that blew a ship off course and into an island. Shakespeare borrowed the basic plot from history and then added his own elements to make it interesting.
As with any literary work, “The Tempest” has come under academic scrutiny about its inner themes and symbols. Is it feminist? Anti-feminist? Political? David Dabydeen examines these interpretations and other reworkings of the play. There have been several authors that have taken “The Tempest” and made it their own, adding a different slant to the story such as a class conflict, feminist view, and racial theme. It is truly interesting to see how one play, hundreds of years ago, has influenced authors to rewrite their own versions.
Paul A. Cantor’s article “Shakespeare- for All Time” introduced other interpretations and views on “The Tempest” as well. I found it interesting that he did not exactly agree with the view of ‘New Historicism’ and instead found other ways of looking at the play. He says that those learning the New Historicism viewpoint sees “The Tempest” as showing the prejudices of the time such as Elizabethan ideology and the limitations placed on women.
Cantor also notes that “The Tempest” can be seen as a “complicit in the evils of European colonialism” and “the racial biases of the European against the non-European”. Caliban is the non-European and is seen as a threatening figure because he is not like everyone else (European).
Another argument against New Historicism that Cantor makes is that “students are made to feel superior to Shakespeare…”. They are delving so far into the text that they feel they can criticize him freely. They are, in a sense, demeaning his work.