Written Task 2 Thesis Statements - The Tempest

Reader, culture and context

How could the text be read and interpreted differently by two different readers?

            The Tempest takes place in an isolated island, in which Prospero is perceived as the ruler. However, from Caliban’s dialogues we learn that he was the one who was originally entitled to be the ruler of the island, but Prospero took the right away from him by taking Sycorax’s powers. For this reason, Prospero could be viewed as the “colonizer” of the island. Because of the way Caliban is represented as a creature that is lower in status than a human, one may infer that Shakespeare intended to make a positive criticism in the colonizing agenda of the European nations of that time, when England was starting to make colonies in the New World. Despite this, a few lines spoken by Gonzalo, who is perceived as a righteous character, while describing the island in Act 2 Scene 1 may lead to believe that Shakespeare may have actually been trying to criticize the colonies in a more negative way. Gonzalo says that the island should be left untouched and the fact that everyone leaves the island at the end might also mean that Shakespeare intended to support this view more in this text, and that the negative perception of Caliban was actually just intended to make people reflect whether or not we should treat the natives in such a way. It is for these reasons that there have been different interpretations of the text regarding this topic.

Power and privilege

How and why is a social group represented in a particular way?

            In Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, the character Caliban can be interpreted as a representation of the native inhabitant of a colonized land, which in this case is the island which was colonized by Prospero. Caliban is often ridiculed in the play and is mostly represented as a character that is much less of a human being than the nobles in the rest of the play. Shakespeare most likely made this choice in order to appeal to the nobility, which also attended his plays.

Text and genre

How does the text conform to, or deviate from, the conventions of a particular genre, and for what purpose?

            The Tempest by William Shakespeare is a play that follows many of the typical conventions of Elizabethan theater. The play might be taken as an appeal to the audience by using all of the popular genres of the Elizabethan theater and mixing them all into a single play. The play has the dramatic plot of a tragedy, the stock characters and clichés of Elizabethan slapstick comedy, and a small romantic story to make it an all-inclusive play that would have for sure pleased the audiences of that time.