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The Tempest and the Discontents of Humanism

2006; University of Iowa; Volume: 85; Linguagem: Inglês

0031-7977

Goran Stanivuković,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Which play / Were we in? Ted Hughes, Setebos (1) Since peak of postcolonial approaches to Shakespeare's work decade between 1980s and 1990s, The Tempest has been read as a drama of colonial expansion and a play about subordination of natives of New World. (2) Yet Ariel's allusion to the still-vexed (3) which expresses play's concern with Jacobean colonial projects New World, also captures ambiguities of Shakespeare's geography because island located Mediterranean, somewhere between Tunis and Naples. Despite allusions to New World, location of Bermudas Mediterranean makes The Tempest also a play about Old World. The play's geographical setting Europe, not colonial space of New World, connects The Tempest to world of humanism. Or, as Neil Rhodes has put it recently, in The Tempest there no centre, nor indeed any firm sense of geographical location at all. (4) Scholars have already detached The Tempest from its firm place postcolonial criticism by reading it as a Mediterranean play. (5) The ambiguous location of Bermudas, between worlds, makes us wonder what play's historical concerns really were. I propose to displace postcolonial approach to The Tempest criticism with a revisioning of this a play as allegorizing humanism's positive and negative characteristics. I will argue that The Tempest a humanist play sense that it engages with humanist world and politics at a number of levels. In arguing for play's strong humanist orientation, however, I am not merely endorsing humanism as a practice of learning and reading as refashioned play. I also claim that some writers, including Shakespeare, showed humanism's negative effects, and call this self-reflective critique humanism's dark side. From outset of play, Shakespeare announces that humanism under pressure, not merely upheld. The shipwreck opening scene, for example, could be read as a kind of over-literal satire of Petrarchan image of galley sinking under weight of sighs and tears that an early humanist cliche, an emblem of government's pinnace overfraught. When David Scott Kastan argues that The Tempest is much more obviously a play about European dynastic concerns than European colonial activities and calls for other and more obvious contexts of play to be uncovered, he articulates recent critical turn away from postcolonial readings of play. (6) Other contexts, especially multilayered and complex web of humanism, permeate this play more systematically, more apparently, and yet no less problematically than issues of imperialism and colonialism. The dominant discourse this play humanism, embodied Prospero as a teacher and narrator. Yet play also a critique of humanist practice of education and government, with Prospero playing a failed governor who valued humanist principles but fell short of applying them to practice of governing. While Jonathan Bate has argued that master discourse The Tempest not that of territorial possessions New World but humanist arguments about just or unjust forms of government, Andrew Fitzmaurice has proposed that the atmosphere of The Tempest echoes court debates presented Tacitus, a popular philosopher humanist debates sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about civic government and worldly corruption. (7) Neil Rhodes has also argued for humanist foundations of master discourse The Tempest, seeing poetry as a civilizing agent this play, and for art of eloquence as determining its aesthetics and ideology. (8) While these critics focus on specific humanist topics--philosophy, ethics of government, poetic eloquence--I want to explore a variety of topics that connect some of philosophical, rhetorical, and aesthetic features of play as a composite humanist structure, and how such topics overlap producing one of most complex of Shakespeare's late plays. …